Don't Fear the Reaper

Another week in the world of Bandology, another blog post. We're still working on design and pre-production tasks at the moment, as well as preparing for our quarter-semester presentation today. Here's a recap on what we've been working on this week:

1. Prototype 3: Bejeweled++
   
   After the first prototype that Carlos made that tried to create connections between the band and the audience using a pipe-game mechanic, we took another look at what we were trying to do, and decided to focus on creating a game that was closer to the aspects of playing music i.e. notes, rhythm, dynamics, tone, and a number of other things. What Carlos ended up creating was this:
   
   
   
   
   Carlos took the game of Bejeweled that we'd created last semester and added a number of features on top of it. First, he added a Magic: The Gathering-esque color circle to the side. Each of these colors loosely represented a certain tone or color in music. Throughout the gameplay, one color would be chosen as the main color, and all jewels of that type that are destroyed are worth 4 times the normal score. This color can be interpreted as the melody. Jewels that are adjacent to the melody color on the color wheel are considered harmony jewels, and would then be worth twice the normal score. Carlos then added the song "Don't Fear the Reaper" to the prototype. The melody color would change at various points throughout the song.
   
   Another feature that was added was a timer function, where players had to keep playing in order to keep the timer from dropping below a certain level. This created a much more urgent and pressuring gameplay experience than the traditionally casual Bejeweled.
   
   This prototype didn't really work, mainly because the players rarely felt like they were actually affecting the music. At the very least, players felt like the gameplay was driven by the music. The gameplay itself also didn't feel very much like performing either; it was still a match three game. Most of the dev team also didn't like the constant time pressure of having to play as quickly as possible, as it was more in line with the slightly more hardcore old-school puzzle games like Tetris and Dr. Mario as opposed to the more laid-back casual games of the current era. That's not to say that those games are bad, but we wanted to focus on hitting the most casual of casual. So on to the next prototype!
   
   
2. Prototype 4: Rez + Puzzle Fighter
   
   
   
   
   It was probably kismet that as we were having our meeting discussing the previous prototype, Rez HD had just been released on the XBOX360 that day. We got everyone to play Rez, to see what it was like to play this cult-favorite rail-shooter/sex-toy/music game. What we picked up from Rez was the feature that, even though the player isn't necessarily playing the game to the rhythm, the game gives rhythmic feedback. So as the player shoots 4 enemies down, the enemies are destroyed at a rhythm that synchronizes with the techno soundtrack, either adding additional notes on top of the melody, or filling in the soundtrack with additional eighth or sixteenth notes.
   
   
   
   
   
   In thinking about music and song structures, we thought that there was a common phenomenon of building up musically, and then having a high point where all of the build up is released, either in a chorus or a insane solo or something or other. The first game that we thought of that might be close to this was Super Puzzle Fighter. In this classic arcade puzzle game, players build up a large number of colored tiles and then breaks them, sending a nasty gift to the players on the other side. We thought that this gameplay mechanic fit nicely, in that players could build up musically, and then break their tiles and send the music to the audience on the other side.
   
   We're currently paper-prototyping out how this might feel, but we're making positive steps, and will update you all as soon as we have more to share.
   
   
   
   
   
3. Pipeline and web framework
   
   Edmundo and Lisa have both been working hard to addressing a lot of the pipeline issues that we had from last semester. We've been going through all of the avatar customization system, optimizing how all of the Flash and Actionscript 3 foojaz operate so that we won't run into the same framerate issues we had last Spring. Additionally, Edmundo's been working hard at setting up the server that we'll be using. We're switching the web framework from PHP to Pylons, for a number of reasons.
   
   
4. Project Art
   
   Joe's been working hard at getting a lot of the project art finished up so that he can dive into the production art full-on. Here are some pretty pictures!