Swinging with the beat

 Ahoy all you sky-bound buccaneers!


    A big target of ours is variety in our games and making more than one way to play and be good at any task. While games like hydronautics, carpentry, and sailing have enough room for a variety of styles, ones like gunnery and sword-fighting are harder to reimagine. Sword-fighting is particularly difficult as it involves multi-player. 

We had a bit of a brainstorming session back at PAX and we're putting together a new Sword-fighting variation- this one will be a rhythm game! Rhythm games are a great break from regular puzzling and should be an excellent match for sword-fighting. They can be exhausting to play for a long period of time, but sword-fighting has a shorter play and it can increase in speed for increasing challenges. 

Right now we are looking at using some key parts of the rhythm game WACCA. The circular zone makes for an excellent play area that should be great for a mouse, touch, or controller. The combo counter will be a great way to create big strikes. 

    

A short WACCA arcade game video to see what we saw at PAX:

https://youtu.be/yaEAGAvWsSc?si=OTVGR852yhmFsfyy


We just completed a POWER-WEEKEND. This weekend was the Global Game Jam event- an excellent event that happens each year for game devs of any experience level. We considered joining a local event but decided to keep our focus on the game. So we had a power weekend! Our goal was to see if we could make a reasonable rhythm game, something neither of us had done before, but between our experience and a few tricks we`d been researching we had an idea of what we could do. 


POWER WEEKEND REPORT:


Day one was rough for me, something I ate the night before was brutal on my stomach and I was up and down most of the day. I was able to make some assets for Russ to work with though. Despite my gastro-issues, we (Russ really) were able to create an excellent pathing system for pieces to move along. Even more exciting it moved, wiggled, and allowed us to manipulate it during run time! This was something we thought could be theoretically possible, but we couldn`t find any examples of it being done our way. Something of a first! After a long day and night, we were on track and my body had stopped being nearly as mad at me. The sword stabbing was all me. 




Day two became a catch up day for myself, but Russ kept at it. We shot for making our design into a game. I focused on creating target zones, effects, sounds, and connecting the dots for all of those. Thankfully the time I spent on the new Hydro was very adaptable to this project and sped me up immensely. We`ll probably reuse it for all puzzles to help simplify and streamline the process of getting the mini-games done.





While the core functionality of the game, what I`ve been calling Fencing, is now set, there is much yet to do. We have some ideas of how to build up combos and unleash attacks, however, we’ve yet to implement them and test how they would work. Next to that would be adding multiplayer against an opponent. Then once we have both the standard Sword-fighting and the Fencing working to our standards, it`ll be about balancing the two so neither has a built-in advantage over the other. 


I`ll be working to finalize a version of Hydro to put into people’s hands soon, but there is still much to do. It’s taking longer than I`d like for that, but each step forward clears the way for other puzzles. 

Next week we`ll be starting the main game build in Unity6, so expect a lot more visuals and videos to come from that!


Come chat with us on the discord about this step into rhythm games, ask questions, and of course, tell us your favorite rhythm games! Mine is DJ Hero, the lesser well-known cousin of guitar hero.


Checkout the full video of the prototype here:

https://youtu.be/ma9n99BJEyE?si=F2VGQhbKpNzKOHV2


Discord link:

https://discord.gg/da6JQrWDVd

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shards and Ships

Image
Shards and Ships      Below are a few snippets of information about the very critical functionality of how ships fly. I encourage a warm drink for it's a longer read: Excerpt from archivist Lloyding’s shard research and notes:      “While the nature of the shards is entirely unnatural, their influence on the natural world cannot be denied and their effect on transportation, namely Shard Ships (S.S. in short hand), has been revolutionary.  Even the most pre-cataclysm educated have struggled with adapting prior technology and designs to current conditions. Lighter than air dirigibles seems like a natural fit, but history has shown that the massive fabric and tiny capacity make for a poor investment. Combined with hostile creatures, falling stones and stronger winds than previously designed for, it becomes a terrible solution.    Heavier-than-air vehicles seem also to be unusable outside of short and specific roles. Gliders and chutes must be la...
Read more

Match 3's and Multiplayer

Image
  Ahoy, all you sky raiders! New logo!  We are officially a full-time game company! It took a little longer than we wanted, but for this year we'll just be working for ourselves, and trying to keep ourselves from going insane. I've been full-time for a few weeks now and have already been working on re-hashing the bilge game, and Russ' last day at his old job was last week- so now we're both full-time game developers! Honestly, we're both excited and anxious, but trying to focus on the excitement. I'll be trying to keep you all as up-to-date as possible, though if the choice is between finishing some game programming or posting an update or video, I'll land on the game programming. Speaking of programming- over the holidays I started building the bilge from scratch. The original had some good points, but there were some deep-rooted bugs and design issues that I wanted to address. I'm already two thousand lines of code deep and have addressed multiple ...
Read more