With the Fall school semester now looming, I come to the realization that my Bachelor's degree is coming to an end. With that in mind, the behemoth that is ECSE 495 - Software Engineering Project is at hand. This class has an equivalent in all engineering departments at McGill, though Soft. Eng. retains a unique twist that these other disciplines simply don't offer.

Rather than being forcefully teamed up with random students from your graduating year, you are free to pick your team of 2-4 member. DONE (we'll be 4). Also, instead of the course being split over 2 semesters (1 credit - prep, 2 credits - execution), this puppy's got a full 3 credit workload (prep and exec.), so that's why I am tackling it early. Lastly, instead of having a subject forced upon us, we are free to come up with something of our own to design, build and demo.

Here is where the video game stuff comes in. My intent upon graduation is to land a job with one of several gaming studios in the area (EA, Ubisoft, or Eidos are the major players) and so I figure that having as many games in my portfolio would help boost my credentials. With that in mind, I've come up with a sort of preliminary concept for a fun experience and I wanna know if it'll fly with gamers.



The plan is to use the XNA platform (with the new XBL and Vision camera support) in order to build a game focused around music. Now I know what you're thinking, this is not some clone to cash in on the Rock Band/GH craze of late. No, this would be more of an extension to that building off one of the features of GH4. In essence it's a sort of virtual recording studio, where for example, playing guitar or base buttons translates to pre-defined chords. Same goes for drums of course, and voice is a no-brainer. The vision camera comes in with a 4-player XBL mode, wherein users can see themselves as they play their own instrument (kitschy I know, but whatever). You can then of course recording audio and even hopefully output the true chords to be printed out for use by real musicians ;).

Although it might seem at first like a clone of the recording studio in GH4, from what I've seen of this feature it seems to be insanely complicated and just not catered to the casual music/game crowd.