Deep Bass 9

Inspiration

Originally, Tegan and I wanted to do something "simple, yet with a creative twist on it". For me when I think of games that are fairly simple in design, I usually tend to think of the many variants on top-down 2D games. It officially began with the idea of a classic arcade space shooter, but with an added puzzle element. However, once the full team had been assembled, we decided that stopping to do a puzzle in a game all about shooting fast moving enemies would be too jarring. So instead we decided on a more "sound" course of action...

What it does

The basic rundown:

Classic arcade shooter
Rhythm based shooting system; the player should be rewarded for accuracy, not spamming the button.
If the player shoots on beat (which can be both heard clearly in the music, and is shown in the pulsating light over the player's ship), the player can destroy enemies with ease.
Shooting off beat however will result in much lower damage output, which could mean life or death. ## How we built it We took to unity to create the game; Tegan, Kyle, and I all had previous experience working together in unity and thought it would be the best bet. They took care of most of the programming with the assistance of Nick; I took to writing the soundtrack/sound effects while Garrett volunteered to create the art. ## Challenges we ran into Turns out, rhythm adds a lot more elements to the code than we expected. We had a lot of issues keeping the beat synced in game, but found a better method later in development. There were also a lot of issues within the spawning and pathing of enemies, but we managed to solve most of them. ## Accomplishments that we're proud of We made a beat based shooting system work! This was the main point of taking this path, and thus completing the shooting system was our ultimate goal. The boss is also fairly challenging, which makes up for the waves of enemies prior being a bit easy. ## What we learned Even with out best efforts of scope, is isn't wise to attempt a genre that we hadn't developed before for such a short time constraint. We ran into a lot of very obscure problems that we did not initially predict. However, we also learned that it is worth the sweat and tears to focus on an idea we fell in love with. ## What's next for Deep Bass 9 We actually plan on continuing development after the Hackathon. Our goal is to pool a few other resources (and possibly rebuild the game in GameMaker) in order to take a cool concept and turn it into something the world can enjoy.