Project Introduction

2026 . Jun . 14

What the project is

Midingo is a piano game that takes inspiration from rhythm games and falling note piano visualizers.

All charts will be user-created, and a few possibly bundled with the game. Each chart will consist of little more than an audio file, MIDI file, and JSON for general chart metadata. The hope is to make it easy for people to make charts using the tools they’re already comfortable working with.

Why?

More than anything else, I thought it was fun to play along to songs with the original audio as “backing”. I figured it’d be pretty neat to merge that idea with the commonplace falling note piano tutorial for the visuals.

I also wanted to create something like the various existing piano visualizers in a game engine for potentially adding hit effects, note particles, among other things. This is primarily in hopes to create something more game like and have an “addictive” feeling to play.

Minimum Viable Product Requirements

At the very least, the game must have these. At the time of writing, which is release 0.1.0, core features have been implemented.

Gameplay

Falling notes on a note highway
Highlighting played notes
MIDI keyboard inputs
Computer → Piano keyboard input

Scoring features

Basic accuracy-based scoring system
Store and display scoring data

UI Features

Chart selector
Read charts from the disk
Settings GUI

Full release feature requirements

Before a full release, the game must have:

Bonus Features

These are features that would be nice to have, but I won’t consider necesarry for a 1.0.0 release.

BPM adjustment (preferably without changing pitch)
Built-in instrument sounds
Score visualizations (preferably interactive)

Prior Implementations

I have attempted to create a game like Midingo twice before the current implementation.

Dingo Hero: Early 2025

The first attempt to create a game like this. It was purely written in GDScript using Godot’s 2D engine.

In its abandoned state, these features have been implemented

Parse MIDI files into falling notes
Sync falling notes to audio playback
Highlight pressed keys from MIDI inputs
Visual metronome count
Audible metronome click

Why it was abandoned

My main motive for moving away from this implementation was that I wanted to create a 3D version and that I didn’t particularly like using GDScript. I found that I also had a hard time understanding the MIDI library used in this implementation.

The real challenge with this version was registering player inputs. This codebase was set aside for a different implementation.

Midingo (Unity): Late 2025

This is the second attempt at creating a falling note piano game. This was implemented in Unity using DryWetMIDI and C#.

In its abandoned state, these features have been implemented

Parse MIDI into falling notes
Color coded falling notes
Synced notes to playback

Why it was abandoned

I have a preference towards Godot, and I learned that Godot has a version with C# support. I have grown quite accustomed to C# at the time.

Additionally, I hit some challenges with the implementation.

Firstly, notes gradually decelerating in speed, a bug I wasn’t able to locate and fix by the time I made the decision to rewrite the code.

Secondly, Unity doesn’t natively support MIDI inputs in the engine, whilst Godot does.

Finally, from some experience in my CS class, I decided that I wasn’t particularly fond of the architecture and organization of this implementation. This became more apparent as I wanted to scale the project further.

So it was decided to rewrite from scratch in Godot, which gave me a chance to apply everything I’ve learned from these two failed prototypes.

The name

Midingo’s name comes from merging two words, “MIDI” and “Dingo”. MIDI is the technology that drives the game, used as the file format for charts and inputs from hardware keyboards. Dingo refers to a canine native to Australia.

The intended mascot for Midingo is supposed to be a dingo, however, at the time of writing it’s just the character that represents me (snoutibur).