Icicle Music

Best played with headphones.

Prototype game: setup only includes landscape and music playing for level one.

When the game starts, music will start playing. Listen carefully to determine if the music is being played entirely or mostly in one ear. As the levels progress, listen carefully and determine if just one instrument is being played in one ear. Once you determine the music is left or right, move to and select that icicle by left clicking. This will prompt the next level.

Alternative version I could explore: the audio will alternate in a pattern (left - right - left - left - right) and the player must remember the pattern and repeat it correctly to move to the next level.

Playtest feedback:

It could be a bit of a challenge to identity which direction the sound was coming from but he could figure it out pretty quickly intuitively so it was pretty easy to identify the direction quickly. Having just one instrument be left or right made it more challenging. The general layout is good, and it's an interesting connection to associate the audio with the space and move around in it. The music definitely adds a good ambient indie layer to the game though.

A variation that would make the game more interesting would be to have the sound coming from a specific icicle rather than ambient sound just exclusively left/right. That way the character can identify the direction the sound is coming from live as it changes direction and they move around the space. In this case there would be more icicles and the sound would change randomly from place to place, getting louder as the player gets closer. Wrong answers would reset the location of the audio icicle. An extra challenge layer could be that the music plays ambiently to distract, but just one instrument plays from a certain icicle.