This was too long to tweet, so here’s a quick ramble…
The following idea popped into my head after thinking about the Ludum Dare competition. If I had the funding I would love to set up a week long competition with an org (Full Sail or similar establishment) where teams compete by prototyping their video game idea. The catch is that we would require the teams to build their idea around a song from a list of licensed songs that have already been paid for. The question that the designers and devs would be answering is “How do you incorporate music directly into the gameplay of an FPS, side scroller, RTS, etc. without just being background noise?” Of course, music games like Rock Band, Lumines, and Rez already exist, but music seems to be underutilized in the gameplay of many other genres. It could be as simple as Mario getting more points if he jumps on Goombas in beat with the background music, but I expect that there are much larger ideas out there.
A week for something like this isn’t a long time, but it’s enough to prototype ideas. At the end of the week a set of judges would vote for the best idea. Winners would win funding to expand on their idea and hopefully make a polished experience. It would be really cool if the competition required each dev to fully document their progress to put in a mini documentary to show students their creative process. If planned well enough I could see some pretty big partners from both the music and game industry pitching in to help such as offering tech/tools to the teams.
I’ll admit that this sounds like a massive amount of work and a lot of technicalities would need to be ironed out, but frankly it never hurts to help drive creativity.
Just another idea to throw in the notebook.
Zilla
+1 if licensed songs are from struggling bands!