Synth Hero: Where Synth Legends Are Made

Creating a Retro Game Using a Raspberry Pi RP2040 MCU

- By Chukwuemeka Adebi and Sergio Diaz

FIGURE 1 The physical apparatus of the game. This includes the laser-cut frame, solder board, and breadboard with wire connections. See also Figure 5.

A novel rhythm game—a cross between Piano Tiles and Guitar Hero—created by two Cornell University undergraduates, combines interests in gamified music and electronics prototyping with a project that has lessons for many makers.

We started this project with the intention of making a game that could teach people to play an instrument using songs and a button system. The project was inspired by rhythm games such as Piano Tiles and Guitar Hero. Our interface looks like a simplified version of these games, with tiles (called “NoteBars”) that progress down the screen. When you press one of the buttons, it plays a corresponding note. The goal is to press the notes of each song correctly at the right time, until the song ends. Correctly pressing a note increases your score, and the goal is to get the highest score possible. A player knows when the button needs to be pressed because the tile overlaps with the score line on the Video Graphic Array (VGA) screen, and the button illuminates.

USER EXPERIENCE

The user plays the game with the physical apparatus shown in Figure 1, which is composed of five LED pushbuttons. When the game begins, a menu screen appears. The user navigates through this menu with the middle green and red buttons on a physical game board (Figure 1). The green button cycles through each option, and the red button selects the option highlighted.

From the main menu, the user can access the difficulty, song selected, or leave the game. When the user eventually selects “Start Game,” the song starts and NoteBars begin to flow down the screen, until either the user presses the red button—which pauses the game—or the song ends.