Silver - the Musical

Hey everybody, I just finished up helping a buddy put together a site for his upcoming project.

It's called Silver, a musical based on Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Check it out!

Bing!

Large version here.

This little guy started out life as a simple sorting experiment. Originally, the falling discs would pass through the flashing white "sensor" and be sent to a different column based on their color and type. Once that was out of the way, I decided to add a few more things. For one thing, why not give the user some feedback when a disc leaves the stage? The version just prior to this one had no user interactivity; you just watched the discs falling and they'd "bing" as they left the stage. Due to the random nature of their spawning, it produced some nifty little melodies. Never anything TOO intricate (we are just dealing with 4 notes here...), but enough to be amusing.

Though I was rather pleased with the non-interactive version, I wanted to let the user feel like they were having an effect on the little Bing World. So, I slapped in an Breakout-style paddle that let the user keep a disc from being instantly removed. Next came some wrestling in my mind. Do I want the user to just influence what happens? OR do I want the user to CREATE what happens? In other words, should sounds come only if a user does something, or should the sound ALWAYS happen - the user just redirects it? In the end, I decided to let the user create the sounds, so a disc won't bing unless it has been first been hit by the user's paddle.

What do you think? Would you like to see sound happen even without user input? Or is it a better feeling knowing that, in a way, you created a quasi-composition?

And another thing...are the sounds too annoying? If anybody has any ideas on different sounds, let me know (or better yet, send them to me in .mp3 format - if it's nifty enough, I'll put it up here!).

Anywho, take care everybody. And enjoy.