Why Bugel?

Bugel is a tool for marking timings in a song, then turning those timings into something meaningful.

I wrote Bugel because I was making a game that is closely tied to music. I couldn't find a tool that did what I wanted (although I didn't look very hard). I am making it publicly available because I think this workflow it might work for other peoples' projects.

If you're making a "real" rhythm game like DDR or Guitar Hero, you are probably better off with a specialized editor. There are only 4-5 possible "events" in those games, so an editor doesn't have to be very complicated.

But what if you have many types of events? What if those each of those events can have several parameters?

You may be able to easily find the timing you want, but you'll probably need to do a lot of iterations to turn it into fun gameplay. Events in one "layer" commonly depend on one another; one tweak might require changing 20 events. With Bugel's post-processing, you just tweak one line of your script and instantly update 20 events.

How It Works

• A timeline holds information like backing track, BPM of backing track, and multiple timeline layers.

• A layer has a name, post-processing script, and list of events.

• Use Bugel's GUI to add placeholder events to a layer in time with music.

  • This is done by pressing the 1-9 keys on your keyboard with a layer selected as the song plays.
  • You can also add actual events directly into the timeline. (NOT DONE YET)

• Write a post-processing script in Lua to convert placeholder events into actual events for your application.

  • This allows you to easily keep event timing, but change what your events do.
  • You can also create additional events, as well as adjust timing. For example, you might want to add a "start windup animation" event 0.5 seconds before your attack event.

• Export your post-processed timeline as JSON. XML possibly coming later.

TODO

• Make TimelineEvent::typeName return a fucking QString
• Add preview of exported timeline
• Add event properties display to TimelineEventsWidget
• A way to pass arguments from GUI to script
• Undo/redo