Hi everyone!

Ok, where should I begin!? I am a developer from Germany and this started as my little workation project! In order to get new inspirations and get some time off this whole Covid-shizzle I chose to stay the whole February in Sweden. A bit of work, a lot of nature and this little side-project.

Inspired by the awesome user experiences of the Teenage Engineering products (eg. OP-1 and Pocket Operators) I decided to build a simple but fun (to be proven yet) drum sequencer. But I wanted to add my own little twist! It should be optimized for game controller usage and easily operatable from-your-couch. Given that current iterations of the XBox-Controllers can be used as dedicated audio device pushed the "couch mode" idea even further.

In my mind:
 "How cool is that! I can plug my headphones into my gamepad and make some beats while hanging out in front of the big screen! Or even running in circles while making some loops!"

Though I am not an experienced UI/UX designer I like the challenge of tackling these aspects as well. In order to make this a manageable task I am trying to achieve this within the realms of an "1-bit-pixel-art" style. So I started with a couple of typical audio app elements for inspiration:

I liked the simplicity of the black and white 1-bit style and chose to not use any colors at all. (Which was kind of a relief since I am a little color blind. ;)) Then I made a mockup for the main UI and imported it as a background sprite in Unity.

I set the UI-part aside for a bit in order to code a super-simple sequencer functionality which I based on the Unity built-in AudioSource component. Then I only recreated those UI-Parts that are user interactable - note markers and knobs. Since the knobs required the use of dynamic texts I created a simple bitmap font. And I added a cursor (a vertical line) that indicates the current play position. All other elements are baked (background sprite). I did this intentionally to reduce complexity. This is a crucial step for me since I really tend to overengineer things from the get-go. ;)

In my mind:
 "Mhh!? What if I want to have more than one bar!? Maybe I should implement multi-bar scrolling first!"

After things worked out well using the mouse I implemented game controller support. I am using the new Input System which can be added with Unity's Package Manager. This input method deserves a lot more love but it works for now. It was the last day of my workation and I wanted to setup an itch.io page to set a successful first project milestone.

Done!

I am really enjoying my little project so far and there are so many things I like to add in the future. I'd really love to hear what you think! Leave a comment or share your ideas on my community page.

Cheers
- Nils