Oscine
Because this game was developed in C# rather than Flash, like my other prototypes, a playable copy of it is not embedded in this page. If you’d like to try it out, there’s a link to a downloadable copy at the bottom of the page.
Oscine is a simple shooter game. You move your bird up and down as enemy birds and (evil) clouds move at you from the right side of the screen. The enemy birds can be defeated with your sonic yell attack, but clouds must be avoided.
But wait! There’s a gimmick!
The keyboard is not used to control the character — only the player’s voice is. When the game begins, the player sings a note for calibration; from this, the game detects an average frequency and volume. When the player sings a note higher than this threshold frequency, the bird moves up; when the player sings a lower note, the bird moves down; and when the player makes a noise significantly louder than the average volume, the bird attacks.
The end result is a game that, though rather simple in the gameplay department, is a unique challenge to play (and hilarious to watch). It turns out many of us don’t have quite as precise control over our voices as we’d like to think (especially when it comes to altering volume while keeping a steady pitch), so it was an interesting experiment to use such a control scheme in a type of game that demands precision. Playing the game now, I realize that this might not have been the best type of game to control with one’s voice — the careful timing needed to be successful can be difficult to apply to raising and lowering the pitch and volume of an untrained singer’s voice — but I’m very interested in experimenting with this type of control scheme more in the future. Watching somebody play this type of game is amusing, of course, which would make it a great control mechanism for party games — but it could also be used to develop games accessible to those with disabilities which make traditional control schemes unusable. Oscine technically sits midway between these two control schemes, using keyboard input for menu navigation (to allow proper calibration even in noisy environments), but implementing a sound-controlled menu system is another thing I’d like to investigate further.
If you’d like to try Oscine for yourself, you can download it here. Note that this was made in XNA, so you’ll need Microsoft’s XNA Redistributable 3.1 installed to run it. A microphone is also necessary, of course.
Note that this was developed over the course of two days as a rapid prototype, so I didn’t have the chance to do as much testing as I’d like. If it doesn’t run on your machine, feel free to email me about your issue.