Inspiration and Postmortem

What I Wanted to Accomplish

I was inspired by the sound toy sequencer Titonic Fisherman, and it's wonderful hand drawn aesthetic and cute characters. 

Having a bunch of little characters again felt like the right way to go after my last sound toy with the ghosts, except this time, I wanted the characters to be more 'active' and less of an environmental prop piece in the toy. 

A big inspiration for the use of frogs as the main motif was inspired by the Animal Crossing: New Horizons town tune toy, and the tiny little note 'frog' mouths that are present on the toy. 

This is also what inspired a 'note' rather than a 'frog' sound for each little creature when I was creating this small toy. 

This brought me to the concept I wanted to explore:

1. A small set of characters, ideally frogs, that the player could manipulate in some way to make a tune on beat.
2. Have a small animation to go along with the beat
3. Allow for some varied notes, which are not present in the Animal Crossing sequencer
4. Add some fun surprises for the player!

Where I Succeeded

The most difficult portion of this was ensuring that the frog animation lined up with the frog that was currently singing. Since this was the player's indicator for where along on the sequence they are, it was imperative that it did not get out of sync as the tune went along. I spent most of my time trying to line this up, and ended up doing it all in code to only trigger when the audio source in question was playing. This got it much closer than trying to 'Invoke' the animation at a certain time, which introduced lag (as the invoke did not use a double like the schedule audio function). 

As I went on to add the tones for each of the three frog types, I leaned more and more into an uncanny vibe. It plays off of the current popular trope of cute things being a little unsettling and creepy underneath, like Sucker for Love, and Doki Doki Literature Club. I emphasized this dissonance with the exceptionally cute faces on all of the characters. Rather than only leaving one note per character, I took inspiration from Blob Opera and allowed the player to slide the pitch of each note - in keeping with the frog theming, I used flies over the head of each character as an indicator. 

One choice I made that worked well is to allow the player to entirely remove a frog from their lily-pad, introducing a beat of silence. Since the player cannot adjust the speed of the frogs, this silence gives them a way to affect the rhythm of the tune to alternate between regular and irregular rhythms. 

What I Can Improve

I did not have much of a chance to add in any surprises for the player. I did make it so that clicking on the sun/moon changes the time of day - which is the volume control (night time makes for quieter audio,  to be courteous of those sleeping in the pond!), but this is the only one I was able to implement for the current version. 

I especially wished I could have leaned further into the uncanny to give more support to my audio choices, either through subtle animation of uncanny things (both in the water and in the sky), or by having the toy occasionally adjust itself. 

One quality of life adjustment I'd like to have made as well is to clamp the scale of each tone to specific notes to make it sound more consonant, but in a scale of my choice. While this  tone slider worked for this initial version, it might be nice to give the player an option of a few scales (changed through environmental factors, like cloud cover, and how still the water is. 

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Here's a brief video of the sound toy in action!