Transhumance

Transhumance is a ENJMIN’s first year project I was programming for. You play as Hin, the sherperd assigned to the task of doing a transhumance through the mountain with the mystic Khoris who listen to your whistling. The controls actually requires a microphone to control the Khoris. You have to whistle a series of notes to ask the Khoris to follow you, to stop or to help you moving faster.

Managing the whistling was an interesting problem. We didn’t have the time to search or develop something that used voice recognition and it has been decided on using the whistling by luck: I noted that the Fourier Transformation of a whislting sample had a well-defined peak. Said peak is what’s used to determine the pitch of the player’s notes.

Another interesting part of my work was the Khori’s AI. It’s a state machine with a few states, like “follow the player”, “graze around the player”, “catch up the player” or “graze in the wild”. A small trick I had to learn during its development was not having a determined distance limit between the “idling around the player” and the “catchup the player” as it would have made the Khoris visually jitter on the limit. Overlapping distance triggers solved this quite elegantly.

The game selected among the finalists of Hits Playtime’s 2016 edition.