Compilation of all our dev logs so far

Dev Blog Week 3

Hey, everyone! Welcome to week 3 of our dev blog! My name is Jacob Koonce. I've been doing design work as well as composing the soundtrack for Beat Breakers. I'm very excited to share what we've been working on with you.

In terms of design, our project manager Jon Brown and I have been working on a rock-paper-scissors system to add more depth to the game's combat. This is actually a return to one of our earliest paper prototypes and we believe it will really spice things up on the dance floor. Basically, this system allows players to change forms between Flare (Red), Flow (Blue), and Foundation (Yellow). Each form has its own unique ability that adds variety to gameplay. While in Flare form attacks cause damage over time, Flow form allows players to stun/freeze their opponent, and Foundation form causes knock back making it easier to bump your opponent off the edges of the stage. Thanks to our programming team, we were able to implement this new combat design in our last sprint and got some valuable feedback from playtesting.

In regards to sound, I've been hard at work composing a 12+ track EDM album using Logic Pro 9. The Beat Breakers Main Theme will be teased on our twitter @BeatBreakersDev in the near future. I hope you'll give it a listen! I recently finished writing the song for our second character. Since this character is themed around the desert I decided to use middle eastern instruments such as the oud and sitar. I drew inspiration from the desert worlds in Super Mario games as well as the Shantae game series. Currently, I'm working on creating a handful of sound effects. I've decided to move forward using mostly 8-bit SFX since this fits with the Voxel art of our game. I plan on experimenting with some hybrid effects as well by layering more dynamic real world sounds with the 8-bit ones.

The team is on track with all of our tasks and our second character should be in the game very soon. We have plenty of work left to do in terms of polish like implementing art and sound assets but we are as motivated as ever to see Beat Breakers to its completion. Thanks for reading! See you next week!

Dev Blog Week 2

Hi! I'm Nick LaPlante, and this is the second weekly dev blog from SendPie Studios. For a long time, I was Beat Breakers only dedicated artist. I am happy to announce Adam Christie is our newest team member and artist. At the beginning of this sprint we hired Adam to help us during the final push to release. With our art team doubling in size we are now able to accomplish some of our stretch goals. Today I am going to talk about what those goals are and when you can expect to see some more art previews.

Over the past year all our screenshots have had a large expanse of space in the background of the battle stage. We always felt this space would have been better filled with some more voxels to match our stage and dancers. We also wanted to make use of this space to help tell the story of Beat Breakers. I was never able to get around to working on the background unfortunately. Thankfully, with Adam on board the background is finally getting the love it deserves.

Being an intergalactic game show we will needs camera's, lights, arena seating for the audience, and much more. This past week we tweeted (#BeatBreakersDev) a few teaser images of the models for the background. Including a stage add on and a shiny new stage light. Adam is sitting right next to me as I type this working on the audience seating.

We plan on releasing another round of screen shots this week showing more of the models for the background. Looking a little into the future we will release full screen shots and gifs of our second character in a few weeks' time. That's all from the art team for now, Thanks for reading!

First post: Current Progress!

Hello! I'm Indiana Reed, and this is the very first dev blog from the SendPie Studios team. We have been working on Beat Breakers, a rhythm fighter game, for a little over a year now. We just finished planning our first sprint coming back from winter break. So, I'll talk about a big change we made from last sprint.

Before the break, we set out to make our rhythm system much more robust. In short, the rhythm system checks whether the player performed an action on beat or not (or how far off they were from the beat). This is something we originally wrote ourselves. However, our needs increased and we eventually decided we would be better off just finding/buying a solution.

After some research, we settled on using Koreographer from the Unity asset store. I gotta say this asset is a must have for a rhythm game. The default version comes at a $40 price tag and does pretty much everything we need it to. It's not the most intuitive asset, but it does have decent documentation so you can get the hang of it.

In the end, this gives us a lot more freedom with our soundtrack. It also increases the possibility for visual effects tied into the music. In terms of this next sprint, there's another character in the works! Additionally, we're working to add some environmental effects to sell our gameshow theme a little more. And of course more gameplay tweaks. That's all I have for now. Thanks for reading! I hope you'll join us again for our second step into devblogs.