Week 12: Show Cleared!

Hello everyone, and welcome to my final blog post! It’s been so much fun working with one of my all-time favorite games, Project Sekai: Colorful Stage (PJSK), and sharing it all with everyone at BASIS Independent Brooklyn! Although I did stutter and blank out at times, I am still happy with how my final presentation came out. 

After collecting and analyzing all gameplay and keyboard session data, I was able to work on my final deliverable: a prototype design for a piano-like controller (you can see the design in my final presentation). I believe it was a great step into introducing rhythm games as an alternative way to help teenagers learn the piano and possibly other musical instruments. 

Instead of the controller looking exactly like a keyboard piano, it only has 10 different keys. Each key is assigned its own color, which was inspired by the different color keys on the guitar-like controller for the rhythm game Guitar Hero. The purpose of this was to simplify learning the piano so that players can focus on learning things one at a time. What do I mean by this? To clarify, typically when learning to play the piano (or any musical instrument), beginners tend to get overwhelmed as they’re forced to build their finger and hand coordination, learn proper piano hand posture, learn to read sheet music, and understand rhythm and timing all at once.

Instead, this controller will allow the player to first hone their finger and hand coordination skills while getting comfortable with proper piano posture in a more engaging way. The controller combines the challenging yet rewarding nature of rhythm games (and games in general) while also forcing the player to play with proper piano hand posture. 

After finishing my final product or deliverable, I also worked on my final presentation. It is pretty long and has so much information. However, thankfully, I didn’t go too over the time-limit in both the rehearsal and final presentation (at least I think I didn’t). 

Honestly, I did have fun with my senior project, and this has become quite the bittersweet moment for me. Yes, I did get struck with challenges left and right every single week of my senior project, but I was happy that I got so many people to try out PJSK. Plus, I learned a lot from this experience, like how not to conduct a study during/near exam session and how to use Google Sheets (you can read all about my fight with Google Sheets in my week 7 blog). 

With that all said and done, I guess it’s safe to say that I have finally cleared this show!