ISE Custom Music Game

International School Eindhoven came to Enversed with a loose idea: their music students should be able to compose a soundtrack and then actually hear it inside a game. No spec, no reference project, just the question of whether it could be done. We said yes and figured out the how. Later in the project the idea grew: if students could replace the music, why not the artwork too? So the arts lessons joined in, and students could reskin the entire game with their own designs.

Rather than building a game from scratch, I reused the core of a wave shooter we had made earlier for another client and turned it into a template that rebuilds itself around each student's work. The game itself stays fixed: four waves of enemies, a boss, a plant that grows as your score climbs. Everything you see and hear is swappable.

The customization layer was all new, and I built both ends of it. On one side, a WordPress portal where students upload their files: a full soundtrack of around 17 pieces (intro music, background music, hit sounds per enemy, boss sounds, win and lose stings) plus their sprite artwork. On the other side, the PlayCanvas game itself, where a student enters their student number on the login screen and the game fetches their uploads and swaps them in at runtime. Their music replaces the entire sound design, and their artwork replaces the textures and animation frames, so even the enemy death animations play in their own drawings.

To make that work without writing new code per student, everything runs on naming conventions: as long as a file is named and laid out correctly, the game knows which enemy it belongs to, which sound slot it fills, and which animation frames it drives. The login screen reports exactly which files loaded and which failed, so a student with a wrongly named upload can see what to fix themselves.

A browser-based wave shooter, live on an Enversed-hosted ISE platform, that every student in the class experiences with their own soundtrack and their own artwork. Enter your student number, and the game you play is the one you designed. It works on desktop and mobile, and supports gamepads, including a two-player mode.

We presented the game in class and showed the students how it worked, and the reaction was exactly what you'd hope for: kids genuinely excited to see and hear their own work running in a real game. ISE was happy too. The game is still live and gets used every school year by the new students in the music and arts class, which is probably the best endorsement it could get.

For me, this was the first time I loaded external assets into PlayCanvas at runtime instead of shipping everything inside the build. It turned out to be simpler than expected, but knowing how to do it opened the door to this whole category of user-customizable projects.