Harmonyasset
A downloadable game for Windows and macOS
What is this game?
Harmonyasset is an open-ended game where you make music! You can't win or lose; just make a song that appeals to you. You can record the audio of what you do to a .wav file to listen back to later.
The design aims to maximize happy accidents and promotes randomization and automation. Play around, randomize things, automate things, and have fun!
In the future, I plan to roll this gameplay into a larger adventure game. But we aren't there yet!
Controls:
These aren't yet described within the game anywhere, so take note of them here!
- Left-click for most stuff (drag up and down to change dials, click to press buttons, etc.)
- Space + left-click to record your changes (for automation). Most things can be automated.
- Hover + c to clear out automation on a control.
- Hover + r to randomize a control.
- Shift is a modifier key.
- While dragging knob and sliders:
- Cancel out of a change by holding shift and then releasing drag. In this way, you can back out of a change you don't like.
- Queue up a change by holding shift and then continuing to drag. You'll see a blue preview of the destination value. Release shift to jump to it. This makes it easier to jump to specific values.
- On sequencer displays (both instruments and drums):
- Click while holding shift to perform one-offs / fills.
- While dragging knob and sliders:
- Right-click has some instrument-specific uses: on the top-most instrument it will repeat notes every beat instead of sustaining them like left-click does, and on the bottom instruments it will toggle notes on/off.
Unsure of where to start?
Find the "Randomize Everything" button and click it until you hear something you like. Then turn to the other stations and play with the controls to see what effect they have on the sound!
Remember that you can:
- audition nearly everything without committing to it (drag, and then if you don't like what you hear, hold shift and then let go of drag),
- automate nearly everything (hold space while dragging),
- clear automation (hover and press C),
- and randomize nearly everything (hover and press R)!
Mac users:
Download and unzip the game. When you try to run it, your computer will block you from doing so because it's from an unknown developer (rude...). To launch it, you'll need to go to System Settings.app > Privacy & Security and click "Open Anyway" toward the bottom of the screen.
Windows users:
I think it should run just fine as is?
Resources used:
Download
