Game presentation and objectives

The main goal of the game is to survive for as long as possible while doing a maximum number of points. To do that you can: take risks by bringing beers to the singer as a real roadie, or do you “emo” and just stay in the corner of the pit doing nothing. The rhythm is given by the music and the public “bounces” regularly so you can (more or less) predict when you have a chance to get hit.

We tried to combine a physic based/Rhythm game with a survival aspect (so yeah this is more or less 3 genres… or you can choose the two you prefers :p)

Link to the game : HELLFEST SIMULATOR

Game ideas and main atmosphere

We decided to get a real mosh pit experience, as we all do listen to “metal music” (I put this between quotes as it is only to simplify :p) and this is something typical from this kind of scene. To do this we proposed that everything should be based on physic to create a chaotic aspect as it is on real life but it must also be based on the music. I will describe the way we did that a little later.

Rhythm system and events

The rhythm system is quite simple, every music sample does have attributes that will qualify the sample: - Delay - Light Blink Rhythm - Light Move Rhythm - Light Color - Bounce Rhythm

For each rhythm, we will check if the counter is set to 0 and trigger an event. Every Entity that is not “busy” will come to solve it’s own logic (example: if the light movement finished it will move in another direction). This permits us to bring differents ambiances between each event and every behavior will be solved independently so we can extend it at will.

Music and events

The music can be listened directly on soundcloud

As we just said, we wanted it to be a “structured chaos” ,so we defined 4 mains events that we called “Idle”, “Pogo”, “CirclePit”, “WallOfDeath” (and the two more with “Intro” and “Outro”).

For each one, we wanted a specific behavior and we needed to test if it worked with the ambiance we wanted. We finally decided to define them as: - “Idle”: The main verse, a little slow, the Bounce Rhythm is set to 1 - “Pogo”: The chorus, everything is faster and it bounces much more, the Bounce Rhythm is set to 0.5 - “CirclePit”: An event that will generate up to four Circle pit(s) into the “Pit area”, Bounce Rythm is set to 0.5. - “WallOfDeath”: An event creating one to four Wall of death(s), defined as a “break” into the music.

* Some gifs of our events *

Idle:

Wall of Death:

Circle pit (on gfycat)

Pogo (on gfycat)

* Game play video * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghiCHhZHFQw Yes I sucked but at least the time is less than 3mn :p

Why we did a small update in the next morning

Some of the first feedback was that the main character was too slow, this was due to a performance issue based on a bug due to lightnings that we did not experienced as we were on our main development computers. Fortunately, we all own smaller Notebook so we were able to fix it pretty quickly. To fix this we just disabled half of the lights and increased a little their halo to keep the main ambiance but drastically increase the framerate on middle-end computers. (Our Original LD post is still available if you want to compare :) )

What we wanted to add but couldn't:

• Originally you had to be able to drink beer to recover your health but get drunk, your movements would be randomly altered and your vision would be blurry
• Small random events
  • A guy puking on the crowd
  • A guy that go on a border to pee
• Easter eggs and bonus points : the aim was to find the developers and bring them beers
• More graphic elements and animations
  • Ourselves
  • The guy that was going to pee
  • The guy who pukes
  • More events and riffs and a better sound management.

Link to the game