Design Work: Sax Savvy

This site was a series of games I designed {and programmed!} to teach kids the basics of music for saxophone. I also recorded all of the sound effects myself, so it's full of pretty adorable saxophone noises. After an intro animation that followed the red string of music down into the bell of a saxophone, the user found themselves in this happy little world in there that was, of course, wind powered. Each little house {constructed with sax parts} was a button, and had a super cute little animated rollover so you knew what part of the world each led to. There were three wind-related scenes accessible from the village: sailboats, kites, and hot air balloons.

The first was a drag and drop labeling game. Each sailboat you were given had the name of part of the saxophone on it {keys, bow, reed, etc} and you had to drag the boat to the appropriate destination on the map of the sax.

This one took the wind theme to the sky for a matching game. When you clicked a kite, it flipped over to reveal either a note on the clef, or a letter name of one of those notes, the goal being to match the two that referred to the same note. Another level of learning was added with the sound effects; each kite when clicked played the tone of the note it displayed. The clouds in the background also moved lazily across the screen as you played.

The most dynamic of the games was this last one, a shooter. It had three levels, and the objective of each was different—level 1: hit balloons that have sound marks, level 2: volume marks, and level 3: rest marks. The bow, that moves back and forth based on keyboard input, is a tenor clef, and the user hits the spacebar to shoot little quarter rest spears to pop the balloons.