Some thoughts on producing a music-themed voice game

The theme for February 2018 on the ‘One game a month’ #1GAM challenge by Christer McFunkypants Kaitila is Music. Here’s a brainstorming on coming up with an enjoyable game whose concept is centered around music.

While controlling music is by far the biggest use cases for voice assistants (and smart speakers often used as a synonym for voice assistants), there are not many successful voice games about music out there — Maybe they are difficult to get right, both technically and in terms of user experience?

Before we get to the sketchboard, let’s take a look at some of the music-themed voice games out there:

• Song Quiz by Volley
  This is probably the most well-known music quiz, as it is on ‘featured’ position #5 of the US Skill store. It has rounds of seven songs from a decade of your choice, whose title or artist you have to name. It’s a simple concept, but brilliantly executed, but this is no what I would enjoy producing.
• Was singt Dave? Das Musik Quiz by David Karich
  This one has a deserved ‘featured’ position #8 in the German Skill store’s Games subcategory. It’s a very entertaining music guessing game, in which ‘Dave’ (my guess it that it’s master Karich himself) half-mumbles, half-hums a popular song, and the player’s must guess which song it was.
  This is a great idea, and wonderfully implemented, but is obviously taken now, and also requires a lot of content to produce, which is not my forte.
• Freeze Dancers by Pretzel Labs
  You can find this one on position #41 in the US Skill store’s Kids Games subcategory, and for me it’s the most enjoyable of those mentioned here! The Skill does exactly what the name promises: It plays some music, and then stops, demanding everyone to freeze in their respective position. Each round comes with its own song and challenge, like ‘dance like a banana!’. Great fun to play with children!
• Music trivia quizes galore

Now knowing what’s in the field, let’s dream up some game concepts of our own:

Idea 1: Music note game

The game consists of a number of levels with rising difficulty. Each ‘level’ is a melody (of increasing complexity), whose notes you have to earn by answering questions about notes and intervals, such as

• Easy: Which note comes after G? → A
• Medium: How do you call the following interval (playing C and E)? → Third
• Difficult: What’s the complementary interval of the third: Sixth

If you answered a question wrong, you get the right answer and can try again with a different question.

What I like about this idea is that it teaches kids about notes and some basic music theory, and that it has such a strong auditive, non-text part.
On the other hand… I can’t help but feel that this is lame. Thinking about this game, I don’t actually feel like playing it. Let’s put this one back into the drawer.

Idea 2: Musical chairs

You already know what this one is about: A number n of kids dance/walk/run around a number n-1 of chairs while the music plays, and when the music stops, they have to sit down quick enough to not be the one left without a chair.
I liked the idea of this voice game a lot before trying out Freeze Dancers (FD), but now I see that FD is superior in about every way: It requires no chairs, excludes no kinds from the game, and is more focused on having fun instead of winning.

I’m totally not interested on making a copy of FD, so I’m abandoning this idea, too.

Idea 3: Interactive music composition

This idea is least sketched out in my mind… This game could be about composing a song together with Alexa. It starts with either a note or a 5-second episode, and from there, the user can iteratively grow their song. The mechanism is like this: Alexa ‘suggests’ an extension of the current episode, and if the user rejects it, randomly suggests another one. Once the user selects an extension, it gets fixed, and the next extension is generated.

I’m not sure about how to implement such a game… if it was based on notes, it could have simple rules like “suggest a note at a random harmonic interval with random length”, and if based on episodes, it could be based on an API-based composer software like Amper.

Idea 4: Raise a music band

This is the idea that I currently like best: You have a music band that you give a name, and then you must help your band rising from ‘Hobby’ level to ‘Newcomer’ and finally ‘Superstar’. You do that by raising the band’s points in the categories Wealth, Talent and Fame, using three mechanisms:

• There’s an event with a given probability (~25%) every time you open the Skill. Events just happen, have no options, and can either increase or decrease your points (example: ‘Your band’s Patreon page becomes viral! You get +10 on fame and +5 on wealth.’)
• There’s a choice once a day: This is a polar question, with both options being attractive, and neither option being too beneficial or detrimental. (example: ‘An insurance company wants to use one of your songs for their commercial. Do you agree?’)
• There’s a filler activity you can select every time you use the game. There are several filler activities to choose from (like giving concerts, rehearsing, promoting or fundraising), and each increases either one stat a lot or all a bit. The magnitude of the effect depends linearily on the amount of time the filler activity has been conducted (i.e. the time between two sessions).

This one also requires quite a bit of content to produce, but I think the amount of effort would be doable… And I would need to do some research on how the music industry works, to make the Skill more realistic.

What are your thoughts on this? Are there other compelling music-themed games that I missed? Which idea do you like best? Or do you have an idea for a music-themed #VoiceFirst game that you would like to see implemented?
I look forward to your comments!