Beatboss

What are you playing? This game is a prototype for a rhythm + top-down shooter hybrid which I would like to fully develop in the future, and focuses on combining the genres to create a satisfying action packed experience.

Game Play Goal: The game play goal is to deliver an action heavy, satisfying, challenging, and fun (obviously) experience for the player. To achieve this, the game mixes the genres of rhythm and top-down shooter by tying/timing the game play mechanics around the music. Enemies shoot with the music, each according to their own part based on color (green enemies shoot with the melody, blue with the harmony, etc..). The player will also shoot with the music, but has the added ability to switch between different parts that are playing (percussion, bass, harmony, melody), and must use this ability if they wish to more effectively dispose of enemies as they take more damage if you match their part. To add some more reward and challenge there is also a scoring system, where eliminating multiple enemies in a row without getting hit will boos your score multiplier. Killing enemies with less shots also awards higher points. There is also an extra test feature which can be toggled on/off by hitting the [T] key when in-game, which I have not been able to fully develop yet. In short, it changes it so that instead of holding to fire you will have to actually time your shooting with the music, and missing will penalize you for a short time while still letting you shoot, let me know what you think if you try it out!

Game World/Story: I decided to make the art-style for the game arcade like, both because I like the aesthetic, but more so to keep things simple and allow me to focus on the complex systems involved. With that in mind, the game doesn't have a focus on narrative story, and the game world design is very simple. This is because my focus was on the unique mechanics described above, which were very difficult and time consuming to develop. On another note, due to the hectic nature of the game with multiple projectiles and enemies to avoid, having a complex game world/arena could easily overwhelm the player and take away from the focus.

Workload: This is a solo project.

Contribution: My personal goal in developing this game was to create something unique and combine two of my favorite genres together.

Resources: The only class resources directly utilized were the shooting and movement scripts from the top-down shooter game, which were also heavily modified to support the project's use cases. All other assets including art/music/scripting  were created from scratch.

Controls:

• Movement - [W][A][S][D]
• Switch tracks - [Q] and [E], or [1][2][3][4]
• Aim - Mouse
• Fire - HOLD left/right mouse (unless in test mode as mentioned above, then click with the music)
• Toggle test mode - [T]
• Pause - [ESC] or [P]

Known Issues and Solutions: The WebGL version of the game currently has a timing related issue (not present in any other build) where pausing and un-pausing the game repeatedly will de-synchronize the in-game music and break the level progression. Alt-tabbing out of the page also causes a similar issue where the game can lead to a level complete almost instantly. To avoid running into these issues if you are playing the web version, simply do not pause the game unless you plan on quitting back to the main menu. I highly recommend downloading and playing the windows/mac versions of the game as they should be bug free and slightly more visually appealing.

Demo video: