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 actually hear it in a game. There was no spec or reference, just the question of whether it could be done. Along the way the idea grew. If students could replace the music, why not the artwork too? So the art lessons joined in as well.

I reused the core of an earlier wave shooter and turned it into a template. The game itself stays the same, but everything you see and hear can be swapped. Students upload around 17 sounds, from background music to boss sounds, plus their artwork, through a WordPress portal I built. When they log in with their student number, the game loads their files and swaps them in, down to the enemy death animations. It all runs on file naming, so no student needs new code, and the login screen shows exactly which files loaded, so students can fix a wrongly named file themselves.

Every student in the class now plays a wave shooter they designed themselves. It runs on desktop and mobile, and supports gamepads, including two-player.

When we showed it in class, the students were thrilled to see and hear their own work in a real game, and ISE still uses it every school year with each new class. It was also my first time loading outside files into PlayCanvas at runtime, which opened up a whole category of customizable projects.