Bath Sax Jazz Battle

Playing
Jazzy cat (Player 1)
Jazzy duck (Player 2)
Title screen
Select music sequence
Defeat
Game over

Inspiration

Our team had members with strong skills in music composition, programming, animation, and art. We wanted to utilise everyone's skillset to the fullest, so we decided to make a streetfighter and guitar hero fusion game where the music you play damages your opponent.

Overview

Choose your avatar and fight to the end by firing jazz licks at each other. The harder the lick you pick, the more damage you can do, but pick a lick that's too hard to stick, and you may end up wasting your turn!

How we built it

We used Unreal Engine to build our game and Perforce to collaborate. We split tasks using an online Agile board, with Matt composing the music, Jodie creating the UI, Sam coding, Min drawing the character animations and occasionally helping Sam out on Unreal. Min used FireAlpaca, which has in-built animation features, to draw the animations frame by frame. Matt brought his digital keyboard and used several music softwares to make the music. Jodie used an app on her iPad to draw the UI.

Challenges we ran into

Compiling code in Unreal takes a really long time on Sam's laptop, so he had to do everything in Blueprint. Structuring (literal) spaghetti code quickly becomes a nightmare, with bugs being especially subtle. One of our tablets weren't working with Jodie's laptop and after spending hours troubleshooting (and failing), she ended up just using her iPad. I (Min) was very sleep deprived and couldn't think for a long while.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Matt managed to make 12 complete licks, an awesome backing track, a home screen soundtrack, as well as an intro and outro tune! He's pretty amazing. Sam is quite convinced that this is the best game he's ever made. I (Min) am very proud of my cute character animations, and Jodie did a great job on making the UI look jazzy.

What we learned

In Unreal, compiling in Blueprint is a lot quicker than code. I also learned a thing or two about particle effects and how to manipulate them.

What's next for Jazz Battle

Game of the Year 2023? Potential avenues could be exploring different avatars, different instruments, or even different styles of music. Alternatively, added bonuses could be added for scoring particularly highly on a lick. We could also have special attacks! The possibilities are endless.