Project Guitar Hero

Screenshot of our game
Our player character sprite

Inspiration

We have always felt that the guitar hero controller is underutilized, especially with the lack of guitar hero games, thus we wanted to make a game that pushes the use of the controller in a different direction.

The game's story

The Devil went down to Durhack and he was looking for a soul to steal, and young musical hacker Johnny fight's back against his infinite hoards of monsters and traps.

What it does

This is an infinitely scrolling game where you move the character up and down lanes using the strum bar on the Guitar Hero controller, and popping the note enemies in from of him by using the coloured frets at the right time, and avoiding bombs!

How we built it

We decided to use a new game engine we have not used before called GameMaker, which was used to build incredibly popular games such as Undertale, Hyper Light Drifter and Hotline Maiami. We had custom music developed by our friend outside of Durham, made and edited sprites with Photoshop. Importing all of these into game maker and using GML (a Javascript-like language) to program waves of enemies, attack patters, player responses, music and more!

Challenges we ran into

Our problems started with the game engine itself, while similar to Unity, it was also different enough to be foreign to us, this subsequently gave us issues with figuring out how to integrate our sprites and animations into the game. In addition to the engine, the logic behind getting note patterns to spawn infinitely was a big challenge, alongside understanding how to integrate the controller into the game engine to actually be able to play the game! Finally, the large majority of the assets and code was made ourselves, which was a challenge to do as inexperienced developers, the only assets that were borrowed from the internet, was the background and sound effects!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our artist is very proud of his work on the art and animation, due to the lack of previous experience in the field, to make animated walking sprites from scratch is something to be proud of. And our main programmer is most proud of getting the game to be an infinite scroller, particularly with the infinitely spawning, randomized note patterns!

What we learned

We have learned how to use a brand new game engine, understand the deeper complications of custom controllers, and have stepped into the world of animation!