About the game
Beat Beat Shooter is a 2D sidescrolling rhythm shooter... yes rhythm! The game combines the classic controls and objectives of a regular 2D shooter where you move your ship and shoot the enemies while traversing the level, but it comes with a twist: In order to get more powerful you need to keep the beat of the music!
While you move and shoot you will also have the option to keep up with the beat of the level song, the more you can keep your rhythm the best results you will get asyou will experience a colorful evolution to the levels, the raw power of the ship will increase and powerups will become available to use so you can get out of those messy situations shooters are known for!
Game mechanics
First, let's take a look at how the game looks like:
Nothing too unusual right? Well, let's take a deeper look:
1. This bar will group your current level, number of lives and available slots. (More about slots below)
2. Your current points and a multiplier, the higher your multiplier is, the higher the points you collect by destroying enemies.
3. You! This is the main ship, can collide with the different objects on a level but do not go touching bullets!
4. This are your bullets, this depends on your current level and you get more every time you level up.
5. Enemy bullets, these are bad news for you, one touch and you are a goner.
6. Enemies! There can be plenty enemies on the screen at the same time but as long as you don't touch their bullets everything will be fine.
7. Shards, collect these and you won't regret later.
8. Beat indicator, this area will be explained in details in the next section. It's the core system for Beat Beat Shooter.
9. Pause button (only on mobile).
2. Your current points and a multiplier, the higher your multiplier is, the higher the points you collect by destroying enemies.
3. You! This is the main ship, can collide with the different objects on a level but do not go touching bullets!
4. This are your bullets, this depends on your current level and you get more every time you level up.
5. Enemy bullets, these are bad news for you, one touch and you are a goner.
6. Enemies! There can be plenty enemies on the screen at the same time but as long as you don't touch their bullets everything will be fine.
7. Shards, collect these and you won't regret later.
8. Beat indicator, this area will be explained in details in the next section. It's the core system for Beat Beat Shooter.
9. Pause button (only on mobile).
Most of the points are self-explaining, number 1 and 8 are tightly linked together, these two will be informing so you don't get lost while playing through a level. Let's get to the rhythm part already!
The Beat System
The Beat System works by rewarding you for being in sync with the music of the game, what this means is that by making several successful beats consecutively, the game will reward you with several things such as: more raw power for the ship to level up in order to fire more bullets, the ability to use different types of power-ups and you will be able to see and hear the evolution of the world both visually and aurally respectively. Let's see the detail of each element in the Beat System in order to understand it well.
- What's a Beat?
Remember the Beat Indicator we saw before? A Beat is the action that occurs when you tap on the Beat Indicator (or press the designated key if you are playing on desktop), of course just tapping the indicator by itself won't yield any result, you need to make a beat the moment the music itself plays that beat... confused? Let me go at it again: The music of the game plays an important role on this, at first the music will only be composed by the beat of the song, and the beat will sound each certain time.
Still not clear? see the GIF bellow, at first the indicator will help you catch the right timing using rings that disappear inside the big blue circle on the right! Tapping on time will count as a successful beat.
- Successful Beats, wrong Beats, what's their function?
Performing a successful Beat will bring instant results! your ship will shoot extra bullets so you can take on enemies easily, that's not all, if you perform several successful Beats consecutively you will earn slots and increment your multiplier!
- Leveling up
Each successful beat will increment your level bar on top. New level means more bullets to shoot every time you do a beat.
Successful Beats (Notice as you gain Exp and Slots)
Wrong Beats (Level will go down but you keep the current slots)
- Using Slots
When you have enough slots to use a power up the powerup icon will enable so you can activate on the next beat!
Disabled powerup, the number on the left shows how many slots you need
Once you have enough slots the powerup icon will be enabled
- What does the ship level work for?
The level of your ship is both relative to the raw power of it (Damage and amount of bullets shot) it also affects the way you see the world around you! Every time you level up a new color scheme might show up depending on the area you are visiting, this can make them look very different depending how good you are doing.
Development
For this project the team consits only of two people: Luis Boscan and Viktor Briceno.
Viktor came up with the initial design of the game, which has been iterated and improved several times after its initial conception. He has been in charge of creating the different user interfaces, the core gameplay mechanics as well as creating the in game level editor, which allows to create new levels and edit existing ones.
Luis has been in charge of developing the colisions system, refining the gameplay UI and also creating all of the visual assets for the game.
The music for this game has been outsourced.
Media
For more screenshots of the game please check this imgur album.
