Do you like music? Do you like games? Do you like music games? Boy, is today’s post for you!

Music Game Jam was hosted by Xavier Ekkel, running from the 22nd to the 25th of September. In this weekend, Ekkel dared participants to make a game related to music. This didn’t necessarily mean that it had to be a rhythm game, though a lot of them ended up being crosses of rhythm games with other genres, which is still creative.

I haven’t played any rhythm games for this blog yet, so I decided to take a look at some of them. The following games I mention are ones that stood out to me and that I liked.

Moog Memories

Moog Memories is a sort of tribute game to the late musician, Jean-Jacques Perrey, made by Itooh. It’s an interactive song that you can change, adding sound effects to it and the like.

Moog Memories kinda reminded me of stuff like MyNoise, those background music things that you can adjust to create your own relaxing tune while you do stuff. While the game stopped playing in the browser if I went to another tab, I could spend time in another program while Moog Memories ran in Chrome. I did some work on my Twine on the “Orbit” segment with the third and fourth effects running and the diamond effect on at its lowest setting. Felt very ethereal and relaxing. Can definitely see this as a tool to work to like MyNoise.

On a sidenote, I want to thank Itooh for introducing me to Jean-Jacques Perrey, his stuff is pretty dope.

Heck-o-Sphere

Heck-o-Sphere is brought to you by WVUGame Developers, a simple game where you rotate shields around a pulsating rainbow orb to protect it from rainbow projectiles. As everything is flashy and colorful, it’s hard to miss the projectiles against the black space. The projectiles initially fly straight toward you, but then the song starts going hard and they start to take spiraling paths toward the orb, which is harder to predict. Then the song loops and everything’s normal, you continually trying to protect this sphere to build up as much points as possible before the inevitable failure.

It’s just sort of an okay game. I kinda wish that there was more to it. That said, the song used for the game is kinda lit, so I dig that.

Jambox

hankboozle gives us a music space to play around in with Jambox. For whatever reason, you’re trapped in a room. I guess whatever put you in there doesn’t want you to get bored, because there’s a bunch of musical stuff you can play around with. You can click on the piano keys that make up some of the walls, turn on background tracks and change their key depending on what part of the room you’re standing in. Make the most out of your confinement and jam out. It’s simple, but it may be fun to play around in if you’re musically inclined.

Pixel Jam Band Defense

This game, by Chase of Bass, is a music based tower defense game, where you attract passerbys to your band’s sweet gig. You place down instruments on your musical track, dictating when your band plays and release their musical bullets to entice fans, buying amps to give more reach to your non-drummer members.

Leveling up a member of your band allows you to place a different variant of their instrument down on the track, which makes a different sound and different bullet. You can thus get more creative with your song as you get stronger. I mean, you could always just cheap the game out and have all instruments playing for every single beat, but where’s the fun in that?

I guess my biggest issue is that your band’s groove is too strong for these people, as they’re too easily swayed by your beats to make this an effective tower defense game. As a music game though, it’s pretty neat and a musical tower defense game is honestly a sweet idea that’s rad to see, even if it’s not exactly perfect. I’d really like to see a refined version of this game in the future!

Open Source

Open Source is a hacking-themed game from plasmastarfish, where you write code and input it to the beat of the music. Oh, don’t worry about having to write actual code. Code gets typed in when you press any keyboard key, so you just have to worry about having a complete line of code is done to enter in when the circle lines up.

It just sounds like button mashing and pressing enter, which it is, but it’s actually harder than it sounds. Especially if your only experience with code is your spaghetti GameMaker Studio mess and you can’t tell if a line of code is actually complete to be input. It’s a good time and the music is pretty groovy.

Juke Synesthesia

Juke Synesthesia is a sweet bullet hell game made by @Deaymon and @pengwndude. I guess you’re a sort of speck on a speaker, dodging the sound emitted by it. The bullet patterns are very in-sync with the music. You start out dodging simple purple beams played out by the bass, but then more instruments start getting added to the song, adding their own bullets to the mix. The game’s initially kinda easy, but as the song starts going hard, so too does the amount of bullets sprayed at you.

The art is nice and clean, music’s damn sweet and it feels nice to play. I can honestly say that this is my favorite game out of the bunch.

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So, that’s a few games that I liked from the jam. There are 61 total entries and there are likely some gems that I missed out on. I would like to check out all of the games, but the last time I checked out a game jam, I got kinda fatigued. At the very least, I invite you to go check out these games and all the rest that was made for the jam. Prizes are apparently on the line too, so it’d be neat if you left the creators ratings!