Hello!

First LD! I’m going to be making something along the lines of a Guitar Hero/Rock Band drum part, moving horizontally, all 10 second segments. 10 seconds could be 4 bars of 4/4 at 96BPM (or 8 bars at 192), 5 bars of 3/4 at 90BPM, 4 bars of 7/8 at 168BPM, more… I’m hoping to have a Sandbox mode and a short Campaign built on the back of the Sandbox.

Controls will something along the lines of Enter for ride, Space for bass, A for snare, and Y/T, H/G, and N/B for those tom runs. I’m not sure if there is an established way to do this so I’m doing it the way that seems the most intuitive. I spent last night trying to make some midi instruments in Musagi that could act as my sounds. I’ve decided to scrap that and go with some open source drum samples. I’ll be using Libgdx.

My timer feels pretty hacky, but I don’t need anything super precise. The precision will already be too high for humans to react in sync with it. I spent over an hour trying to get a Textfield in for player submitted parameters. Guess it’ll just be a “Campaign.” I spent a while trying to find sample suites. Looks like my best bet will be freesound.org. I’ve got time signature displays working, with BPM calculating as well. I’ll be adding both in text to the HUD before I dive into the sounds.

7/8      Full-Screen actually looks okay, even though I’ve hardcoded all the texture sizes. The resolution on my laptop isn’t 1920 X 1080 so it might get hairy there.

Now with two hours to go I have nearly all my systems in place. All I need is to get “pieces” switching and some dialog to go with each one. Here’s how she’s lookin’. Oh I still need a name. I’ve got a car drive coming up to cover that.

It feels really good to have it out there. This is my first “finished” game, for how unpolished Keyboard Slap is.

Unfortunately a lot of features that I had originally coded to be implemented later weren’t able to be used. The big one is the dynamic bars/meter/BPM calculation with automatically adjusting markers. The game ended up taking place in a single time. Next time I ought to get a bit of each core segment finished, then build them up. I know I “skipped” a lot of features of Libgdx, just to keep within my comfort zone and spend more time coding instead of reading. Typically I’ll spend more time learning how to use a feature than actually using it, due to my inexperience. For example, creating little blocks of color to stretch around, I could have generated these assets purely in Libgdx.

I’m somewhat glad the “Sandbox” mode didn’t work out because it would have just cost me more time and the campaign lacks any real punishment, so it can act as a Sandbox if the player ignores the prompts. I’m also fairly happy with how it looks. The font is kinda wonky, but I know this looks WAY better than if I had attempted real art. Freesound.org really came through with me as far as drum and metronome samples.

I really hope some people have fun with this!

Entering the Jam with teammates Eric on sound and Ian on art. This will be a 3D tower defense game about harnessing the energy of a tesla coil found by a magician’s apprentice, deep in the ruins of a long-dead civilization.

Using Unity3D.

Find intermitent builds at velro.github.io/teslacoil.html and streaming at twitch.tv/velro