Beatboxers

About the project

We did this project in a team of 6 (2 developers, 3 artists and a designer) for our client, Team Reptile. They instructed us to make a project based on a team member’s hobbies that aren’t necessarily related to video games. After a bit of brainstorming we wen’t with ‘grooving’, as most of us enjoy doing something else to or with music than just listening, like dancing at concerts or using music to concentrate in fighting games like Super Smash Bros. Melee or Guilty Gear: Strive (technically gaming related, but we reasoned it was the doing something else to music than just listening part that counted here). So, for this project we made a rhythm-based fighting game, inspired by progressive rock aesthetics & music.

Functionality

The main mechanic that makes our game unique is therefore that you deal more damage and knockback if you hit your moves on the beat of the song that’s playing. Different moves (attacks) have different stats like damage and hitstun, and the more on-beat you hit them, the higher the multiplier will be, and if you hit them completely off-beat, they’ll do less damage and hitstun than normal. Because your opponent can’t act when their in hitstun, hitting on-beat is essential in performing combos to deal even more damage.

My role in this project

I was the lead developer for this project, and developed most of the functionality, including controlling the characters, health and taking damage, and combos and the mechanic for hitting on- or offbeat. I worked alongside 3 artists, who did the character design, vfx, animations and UI, 1 designer, who designed the moves of each character, how much damage they deal, their frame data, etc, and 1 other developer, who implemented most of the UI.

Challenges / Takeaways

This was the first project where I was working alongside another developer, and I found it really difficult to make sure that we could both do equal parts. Back then we weren’t as experienced with github as we are now, so trying to merge often resulted in conflicts that I would rather avoid by just writing all the code for a mechanic myself. The main mechanic here is ofcourse the character’s actions, which I ended up doing pretty much by myself, because explaining how it worked, then merging it to github and having the other developer also work on it would take longer (or that’s atleast how I saw it back then).

When we were discussing this project after we brought this up, and going forward we always made sure to set the projects up in such a way (different folders for different contributors, everyone on their own github branch, announcing when you’re working on what, etc.) so that it would be easier to work on with more developers, and not harder. The group projects (with multiple developers) we did after this, like ReLion Us!, worked out a lot better in that regard and the work was a lot more evenly distrubuted as a result.