Syndrome
2
June 2024
Programming
Unity DOTS
Overview
Usually, parties have visuals behind the DJ booth, that react to the music.
I decided to make that, but with a twist for Syndrome: a drum and bass event in rotterdam.
We would also have an audio reactive game on top of the visuals, and pass around a controller in the crowd for people to affect what's being shown.
Unity DOTS
For this project, I decided to have an extra challenge, and use Unity DOTS for gameplay code.
It took a bit of extra time to set it up and learn, especially because some things like sprite rendering and animation were missing. That was expected, however, and the project lent itself well to parallelization and data-oriented structure.
It would have been easier and work just as well with regular Mono Behaviour components, but I'm glad I did this so that I could learn DOTS.
Visual Effects
For this project for the sake of time, we took some shaders from Shadertoy, and modified them to our needs. I have converted one of the 5 total shaders that we have used, after which a friend of mine joined the project and helped convert and tweak 4 more shaders.
The game itself also tracks the beats of the music from the incoming audio signal, animates and moves the enemies on beat, as well as syncing some other elements on beat.
At the event
Getting an audio signal from the DJ equipment to the game proved to be a challenge on it's own, but we were able to do it using an analog to digital converter I had used previously for my mic. However, there were problems with the audio equipment in general, and the signal we were able to get was not as clear as we would have hoped for.
Overall, everything worked out well though, and people really enjoyed the interactive visuals. It's not something anyone has seen at an event like this, and we would like to make something similar, but improved, for the next editions of the event.