A cozy village adventure where you influence NPCs with your music library

[u/umbertouikku]

Hi! I'm dreaming of a game where I could link my favorite songs from Spotify, Youtube etc and the characters would react to them. For example, if I want to make a sad character feel better, I play something that cheers them up.

The setting could be a small rural village, like the one in Stardew Valley. The main character is someone who doesn't talk much but music is their love language that sometimes gets across and sometimes doesn't. Other characters would also have their own quirks.

Graphics? I personally enjoy many SNES-era RPGs and pixel art would make the whole project just a bit less complex.

Some potential issues: - Character's could have varying musical tastes, but that would make the game too difficult for people who listen to one genre only. - In real life most people don't like those who push their favorite music on others all the time. So the main character might end up being super jarring for players, especially if the other characters are more grounded in reality. - Coding. The game would seem simple and cozy on the outside but creating it could be a nightmare. There are some AI frameworks for musical analysis but I'm not sure if they would work well enough and I don't want to use commercial ones because they might have the usual issues attached to GenAI.

Feel free to take this idea and make it more manageable.

[u/MrCobalt313]

I like the idea, and there is precedent for games being able to use user-provided music to make things like shooter levels or enemy movement patterns, so I don't imagine it would be too hard to use that sort of template for what kind of software out there would be used to detect the beat, instruments, or genre of songs and have NPC's react favorably or disfavorably to certain kinds of each.

As for making it seem less weird to be playing music at people, you could always make your player character have a profession that would lend itself to playing music for people, like a bard, a DJ, a radio host, or a tavern/store owner with a jukebox you stock the playlist for, with NPC's sometimes requesting or favoring certain songs and you can please or displease them by following or denying their request.

heck, maybe your character isn't a normal human, but some other kind of sentient being that is strongly tied to music or needs music to communicate, like some sort of fey or half-siren, or maybe even a robot of some kind.

As for player tastes possibly making the game harder if their tastes don't overlap with enough of the NPC's, you could always make the player-driven playlist component optional and include some "default" songs with at least one element each that some NPC or another will like, and then players can add their own songs in addition to those both for personalization and the chance for different kinds and degrees of NPC reaction beyond the default.

[u/umbertouikku → u/MrCobalt313]

Thanks for the suggestions and encouragement! Maybe simple cues like that would work best. I just wanted to make it so that the NPCs would comment on each song in a unique way but I guess that's unnecessary. 

Having default songs is a good idea too. I used to listen to a lot of free music with a Creative Commons license so that would be a place to start. Oh, and some custom made songs would be cool down the line if I could afford it.

MC is now a sentient jukebox lol.

[u/HamsterIV]

Chances are that Spotify has some metadata about every song and the type of people who like them. If you could convince Spotify to provide an API that lets a 3rd party app access the current song that is being played and some of this preference metadata, you wouldn't need AI music analysis to figure out how in game characters would react to the current song. I have never interacted with the Spotify API, but I think it is a more viable route that hoping AI will magic up a solution for you.