Francisco Zamorano

THE WEIRDING WAY

The Weirding Way : Voice-controlled shooter game from Francisco Zamorano on Vimeo.
The Weirding Way- demo from Francisco Zamorano on Vimeo.

The Weirding Way is a simple shooter game that uses microphone as a controller. Players control the shooter by making low-pitch and high-pitch sounds to aim and loud and explosive sounds to shoot. Taking inspiration from Frank Herbert’s Dune (and David Lynch’s movie) where warriors learn to control their voice as a powerful sonic weapon (watch a clip) and from shooter games from the 80′s, such as Asteroids and Galaga, I created this game that results in pretty absurd but at the same time very fun interactions.

I started this project by thinking about interesting things that could be done with our computer’s microphone. We usually use it for video-chatting but few times we think of it as game’s controller. An underlying goal of The Weirding Way is to help users enhance their singing skills (yes, seriously). With a little more development, it could become a fun tool for exercising their voice control.

The Weirding Way was developed using openFrameworks and ofxAubio addon.

A prototype for the game can be downloaded HERE. Please have in mind that this is a very initial prototype so it may be unstable. Mac only, tested on OSX Lion. Please read the txt file inside the folder for instructions first.