This slapped my ass and called me Willy. What a goddamn cool game, this is just so much fun and has so much promise.
Rhythm shooters are something that I think has a lot of potential and this is probably something that I've wanted to see, and this nails that core gameplay loop wonderfully. Being able to just put on a song and vibe in a flashing, neon-lit world while blasting off hordes of enemies is potentially a fantastic way to unwind.
If I had to really buckle down and critique something, nothing feels limper than being in the middle of a rockin' part of a song and then your left toe brushes up against a toe and suddenly you're booted out of the experience. I would lean into the fact that the gameplay is a compliment to the music and instead keep track of (and display!) how many times the player would have "died", displaying a final tally at the end. The end result is to enjoy the music with a show, after all, suddenly getting booted out is a bit of a downer.
Outside of that, though, the only thing I really can say is that I want more. More. In fact, I would dare say I want moar. If you imagine me making grabby hands in the general vicinity of this game, that's basically the sum of my feelings. More types of enemies, more ways the environment can change with the song, more background elements flashing in time with the music, send me to synesthesia heaven and fuck me up.
Wow such kind words, my friend! Thank you for this kind and thorough review.
Your complain was the same as everyone, about the instadeath lol. I'm working on some health system and energy system to make longer playsessions, I guess I wanted to be inspired by devil daggers but the most fun in the game is to keep on the level and listen to your song so dying fast is not as cool. Having a scoreboard is also on my mind so that people can keep track on how good they were on each song, though I think the enemy generation based on music is a little too random to make that consistent, but it may not be an issue, idk.
Your comment, and everyone's else too, actually made me get out of the inertia I've been found myself and now I really am willing to keep on with this project. I've been talking to a couple of programmer friends who can help me tackle the biggest technical issues currently happening. I really want to make the most out of the data from the songs and make it interact in a unique way with enemies, levels, and stuff....not just shooting flying dancing skulls lol(which is cool for a 7day jam but, c'mon, it's not enough)
I for sure will have something to show you in the near future, keep following please!
Nice take on a rhythm shooter idea!
I definitely wanted to try playing around with frequencies with my game - but it’s so hard to design around! I think maybe the ideal would be a combo of charting - bpm and signal processing. Really impressive how accurate and consistent the melee AOE attack feels if it is just beat detection from the audio directly!
Thank you! Yeah frequencies are a pain, I mean I couldn't work around on the balancing of how it interacts with enemies and stuff. The melee attack is actually quite buggy now I need to work on it, but it doesn't interact with the audio I think that was just coincidence lol
Very good job. Very thoughtfull of you to make it possible to add custo music to game. I think it could only use some sounds for shooting and hitting enemies. While animations are very very vital, it lacks some sort of a subtle sound indication. But that is only thing I could find to complain about. Nicely done!
Very cool tech, especially when importing something. (I tried ‘Roller Mobster’ from the Hacknet soundtrack and died quickly.) I’d be curious to know how much of a range/variation you’re likely to see in visuals/difficulty right now based on what music you feed it? Anything that it could hear in the music to make the stages stand further apart from each other would be great.
Right now I'm just working with frequency waves, so it's a challenge to make big variation on gameplay. It does affects both spawn rate of enemies and their speed, so calmer songs should be a little easier than faster/louder ones...but that's it. I'm thinking about adding some enemies variations based on the frequency band, but I'm still kind of limited by frequency. If I were workign with midi files than yeah I could do WAY more stuff, using music notes and more, but then people wouldn't be able to just upload their .mp3s to play, so that's my limitation right now. Also maybe I will try to synch the shooting with the beats of the music, but I'm not sure how to do that yet lol
Very nice game! A simple mechanic that was executed well! I really dig the idea of generating levels based on the music being played. I tested out a track of my own as well, and the process was rather smooth!
One thing that bothered me a little was there wasn’t much indication of where enemies were coming from, and, as such, I think I died a couple times because I was being attacked by an enemy from behind, but never realized it. In fact, I believe I had one run where I died without ever getting any score, most likely because an enemy was behind me killing me.
Another thing I noticed was while the procedural generation being based on the song is a great idea, the generated levels, at this point, all have very much felt flat. Not many features were generated. I’m very much impressed by any form of procedural generation, and what’s in the game works well, but it just felt flat over all.
Regardless, the game runs very well, and is enjoyable to play to try and get that high score. I also really liked how easy it was to add my own songs to the game with very little work!
I know I messaged you about this, but I did stream my time with your game. You can watch it here if you’d like.
Yes, I noticed that the levels felt a little flat in the end. I guess with the jam's time constraints I couldn't deliver much variety in time. The generation based on audio and specially the importing musics parts kind of drained almost all of my time, but were stuff I really wanted to do more than anything else.
Hopefully with my spare time I can work on some improvements and have a bit more variety to each level and to the gameplay overall. I plan to add more enemies, environment, and also a simple health and energy system. I think it will be better in the end.
You can upload your own music into the game by creating a folder on \SynthBeat_Data\StreamingAssets\Music and adding any .mp3 files you want. Just play whatever music you want to play.
Comments
This slapped my ass and called me Willy. What a goddamn cool game, this is just so much fun and has so much promise.
Rhythm shooters are something that I think has a lot of potential and this is probably something that I've wanted to see, and this nails that core gameplay loop wonderfully. Being able to just put on a song and vibe in a flashing, neon-lit world while blasting off hordes of enemies is potentially a fantastic way to unwind.
If I had to really buckle down and critique something, nothing feels limper than being in the middle of a rockin' part of a song and then your left toe brushes up against a toe and suddenly you're booted out of the experience. I would lean into the fact that the gameplay is a compliment to the music and instead keep track of (and display!) how many times the player would have "died", displaying a final tally at the end. The end result is to enjoy the music with a show, after all, suddenly getting booted out is a bit of a downer.
Outside of that, though, the only thing I really can say is that I want more. More. In fact, I would dare say I want moar. If you imagine me making grabby hands in the general vicinity of this game, that's basically the sum of my feelings. More types of enemies, more ways the environment can change with the song, more background elements flashing in time with the music, send me to synesthesia heaven and fuck me up.
10/10. 11/10. 13/10. 100/10.
Wow such kind words, my friend! Thank you for this kind and thorough review.
Your complain was the same as everyone, about the instadeath lol. I'm working on some health system and energy system to make longer playsessions, I guess I wanted to be inspired by devil daggers but the most fun in the game is to keep on the level and listen to your song so dying fast is not as cool. Having a scoreboard is also on my mind so that people can keep track on how good they were on each song, though I think the enemy generation based on music is a little too random to make that consistent, but it may not be an issue, idk.
Your comment, and everyone's else too, actually made me get out of the inertia I've been found myself and now I really am willing to keep on with this project. I've been talking to a couple of programmer friends who can help me tackle the biggest technical issues currently happening. I really want to make the most out of the data from the songs and make it interact in a unique way with enemies, levels, and stuff....not just shooting flying dancing skulls lol(which is cool for a 7day jam but, c'mon, it's not enough)
I for sure will have something to show you in the near future, keep following please!
Nice take on a rhythm shooter idea! I definitely wanted to try playing around with frequencies with my game - but it’s so hard to design around! I think maybe the ideal would be a combo of charting - bpm and signal processing. Really impressive how accurate and consistent the melee AOE attack feels if it is just beat detection from the audio directly!
Thank you! Yeah frequencies are a pain, I mean I couldn't work around on the balancing of how it interacts with enemies and stuff. The melee attack is actually quite buggy now I need to work on it, but it doesn't interact with the audio I think that was just coincidence lol
Very good job. Very thoughtfull of you to make it possible to add custo music to game. I think it could only use some sounds for shooting and hitting enemies. While animations are very very vital, it lacks some sort of a subtle sound indication. But that is only thing I could find to complain about. Nicely done!
I will add some sounds in the future I think, I've collected quite a lot of feedback to work on from you guys, thanks a lot
good luck
Very cool tech, especially when importing something. (I tried ‘Roller Mobster’ from the Hacknet soundtrack and died quickly.) I’d be curious to know how much of a range/variation you’re likely to see in visuals/difficulty right now based on what music you feed it? Anything that it could hear in the music to make the stages stand further apart from each other would be great.
Right now I'm just working with frequency waves, so it's a challenge to make big variation on gameplay. It does affects both spawn rate of enemies and their speed, so calmer songs should be a little easier than faster/louder ones...but that's it. I'm thinking about adding some enemies variations based on the frequency band, but I'm still kind of limited by frequency. If I were workign with midi files than yeah I could do WAY more stuff, using music notes and more, but then people wouldn't be able to just upload their .mp3s to play, so that's my limitation right now. Also maybe I will try to synch the shooting with the beats of the music, but I'm not sure how to do that yet lol
My high score was 2760! Very cool audio processing happening here.
I think that's higher than me lol, I should add some highscore screen to the game now
Such a cool concept! And very well executed. It was great being able to test out my own tracks.
Thanks! Yeah I really wanted to allow people to play their own songs
Very nice game! A simple mechanic that was executed well! I really dig the idea of generating levels based on the music being played. I tested out a track of my own as well, and the process was rather smooth!
One thing that bothered me a little was there wasn’t much indication of where enemies were coming from, and, as such, I think I died a couple times because I was being attacked by an enemy from behind, but never realized it. In fact, I believe I had one run where I died without ever getting any score, most likely because an enemy was behind me killing me.
Another thing I noticed was while the procedural generation being based on the song is a great idea, the generated levels, at this point, all have very much felt flat. Not many features were generated. I’m very much impressed by any form of procedural generation, and what’s in the game works well, but it just felt flat over all.
Regardless, the game runs very well, and is enjoyable to play to try and get that high score. I also really liked how easy it was to add my own songs to the game with very little work!
I know I messaged you about this, but I did stream my time with your game. You can watch it here if you’d like.
Thanks for the great feedback!
Yes, I noticed that the levels felt a little flat in the end. I guess with the jam's time constraints I couldn't deliver much variety in time. The generation based on audio and specially the importing musics parts kind of drained almost all of my time, but were stuff I really wanted to do more than anything else.
Hopefully with my spare time I can work on some improvements and have a bit more variety to each level and to the gameplay overall. I plan to add more enemies, environment, and also a simple health and energy system. I think it will be better in the end.
Will make sure to watch your streaming as well!
that was sure fun!
I think the track i made for my game actually fits your game even better than it does mine lmao.
Great job!
You can upload your own music into the game by creating a folder on \SynthBeat_Data\StreamingAssets\Music and adding any .mp3 files you want. Just play whatever music you want to play.