Sorta bland, but it’s all that I could manage.

Click here to play Rhythm Apocalypse

Rhythm Apocalypse is my third ludum dare entry, except it’s a bit different from my previous two. They were singleplayer games, both made with Stencyl. I wanted to make a fun multiplayer game using HTML5 canvas (no back ends, all custom), and when the theme came up, I had the idea of a rhythm game where you collaborate with friends to destroy the earth using the power of harmonies!

Originally I had planned 3 sections with three 4 bar segments which would be played in a random order, and the sections would advance when you did enough damage to the boss. As you can tell – I didn’t quite make it. The final game only has 2 sections with a fixed path that goes 1, 2, 1, and the planet doesn’t even blow up at the end.

There were quite a few things that culminated to cause this:

• I woke up late on the first day, so I lost 3 hours to start.
• Went out for dinner on the first day, though this was really pre-planned and I couldn’t really say no. -4 hours (it was a long dinner)
• On the second day I got really, really bored, so development slowed a ton.
• Most of the reason it got boring was because of the constant onslaught of blocking bugs, since I wasn’t too experienced with javascript + canvas and it was my first multiplayer game using websockets.
• Dropbox is the worst prototyping service ever if you have low internet speed.
• I haven’t made many songs in Pxtone (really, just my ludum dare music) or even made music at all, so I was having trouble finding inspiration or a common style.
• Didn’t actually draw any graphics. At all. And this is meant to be my strong point!

Despite this, I did pretty well on:

• Some effects. I really like the sparks, shiny curved note line, laser and starfield flatten when you start the game. I wasn’t able to create anything like those in Stencyl.
• Works really well for my first multiplayer game. Movement interpolation could be improved.
• The song in the waiting room is pretty cool.
• The game was of really good quality for a javascript app that wasn’t an engine, test or general purpose program.
• It’s fun! That’s probably all that matters, even if it’s really short fun.

Another thing is that at submission time a few horrible bugs popped up,  such as the collision for the beams emitted from the earth being totally broken, and various bugs breaking multiplayer entirely (players not disconnecting, not displaying, names missing). This left the game unplayable over submission night. But all of that is fixed now, so no worries!

So you should totally give it a wee cheeky try, and invite some friends to play with you! It’s sorta way too hard too, so you can see which one of you dies last. 😛