
DATE: NOVEMBER 28TH, 2021
TAGS: WEB, GAME FEEL
CONTRIBUTIONS: ENGINE, UI/UX, SOUND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Thank you to Adam Smith and Adam Sporka, who both provided the lessons that led me to make this experiment.
Orbit was a project I made as an interactive toy. I wanted to play with WebGL and the javascript analog synthesizer emulator tone.js. I was curious about the emergence of shape and sound as collisions, pass-thru, orbital movements happened to Torus shapes. To do this, I made a simple randomizer on Torus (3D location, size, color, lighting, rotation) shapes. I then run this randomizer 15 times, one for each key in a "keyboard". I then used the left side of the keyboard to play synthesizer tones (scale notes 1, 3, 5, 7, 9 to minimize dissonance) at three octaves. This creates a keyboard that you can use to play synthesizer melodies while observing ever-shifting shapes caused by the collision of donuts, light, and color. This exercise also inspired my logo in the top-left corner.
Using a QWERTY layout, use "Q W E R T" keys to play bass notes, "A S D F G" to play tenor, and "Z X C V B" to play soprano. If you don't use QWERTY... I'm thoroughly impressed, but I don't have a simple control scheme for you.