This article is a draft. You can help by editing it or discussing in the comments
Often, a beginner composer's mistake is to come up, without realizing it, with music unplayable for future performers.
Unnecessary struggles can be fun, but if you want players to willingly perform your music game (maybe even enjoy it), you need to control the skills involved.
There is a default game design consideration of shaping the learning curve, especially the skill floor. But what are the relevant and possible involved skills? Let's have a general overview.
Musical and non-musical skills can both come in three categories, giving us six types. Here with examples:
| musical | non-musical | |
| mind | major harmonic scale; what is a samba? |
planning; memory |
| body | 200 bpm in rhythm; consistent strums on the string |
200 bpm however; good reflexes |
| interaction | following the conductor; paraphrasing |
bluffing; explaining |
Games of musical skill and genres.
Games used generally for learning improvisation are interesting to describe separately. There might be no one musical skill that occurs independently of a genre. Phrasing, groove, intonation all happen within specific musical traditions, when this article is finished, we should have an overview of that too.
Rhythm
In abstraction, the ability to keep the steady rhythm might be a mark of every musician, but in some traditions keeping the rhythm doesn't occur in an actual musical performance as it is considered "non-musical", then the actual role of this skill fades. Read more...
Memory
Memory is a skill that is tested quite often in games. For designing, it is worth distinguishing long-term, short-term, and working memory, as well as procedural and explicit. Read more...