The Idea

Beat Boost was conceived for Boing Boing’s “Games Inspired by Music” contest. The contest was a call for games designed around chiptunes — a style of music inspired by the midi tunes of the games of yesteryear. I chose to take this rather literally and immediately began to look into using music tracks to generate the game world.

When I started work on Beat Boost I planned for the game to be a 2D platformer/racing game, not unlike Uniracers on the SNES. The player would run through the level and have the ability to perform various tricks and stunts and chain these together. The ultimate goal was to achieve the highest score possible through a clever combination of stunts. There was also going to be a two player, split-screen race mode where two players would sit at a single computer a race for glory (and highscores).

The levels in the game are directly generated from that level’s music. Doing this was a multistep process that produced a MIDI file that would be used to generate the level. The tool I used to transcribe each track into midi only took WAVs as input so each mp3 was first transcoded to WAV and then transcibed to MIDI. The resulting MIDI file could be charted to look something like this:

The Process

It’s pretty easy to envision a platformer game when looking at the MIDI note chart. From here each MIDI was loaded into the game and parsed into a level, where I quickly ran into two problems with the platformer aspect of the game. The first was that none of the music tracks I was using were explicitly composed for a game so they don’t loop well. Since each level was generated from the music track for that level the player would have to keep pace with the beat to complete the level before the track ended and in order to do this you have to move incredibly fast. So fast, that it was impossible to react to changes in the level at all.

The second problem was that the tracks I was generating the levels from where, again, not designed to be used in a game so there would be clusters of notes that would break the flow, gaps in the notes and just generally crappy levels. A lot of these issues could have been smoothed out but this takes us to another issue I had: time.

Though the contest lasted about a month I didn’t start work on Beat Boost until there was about a week left. This short deadline forced me to cut a lot of features and constantly rework things so I could submit my game on schedule. Being a part-time, hobbyist game developer, this strict deadline was nice in that in forced me to push forward and work through problems rather than leave them for another day. The downside is that I needed to cut features like multiplayer that could have upped the fun factor of Beat Boost quite a bit.

The cutting began with the core of my original idea. The racing and platforming aspects of the game just were not coming together and the entire experience of playing the game could be summed up as “frustration” which is not a good then when you are going for “fun!” So I started looking at what the game was currently doing well and that turned out to be rapidly colliding with lots of blocks while listening to cool chiptunes. This is when I moved the game toward what it ultimately became: a sort of interactive particle generator (with highscores).

At this point Beat Boost was going to be a game where the player piloted a space ship of some sort through a field of blocks that replenished the ship’s fuel and increased the player’s score. Moving the ship around the screen consumed fuel so there would be a strategy to when and where the player should move the ship to maximize their score. Colliding with the bottom of the score would replenish fuel but deplete the player’s score; hitting the top of the screen would just reduce the score. Anytime a block was hit it would shatter into a spray of smaller blocks that would trail the ship. Each of these blocks also gives the player fuel and points when collided with, though less than the larger blocks.

I had also redesigned the multiplayer mode to be a shared-screen racing mode but the race was now to collect the most points before crossing the finish line. This was the inspiration for having the large blocks shatter into smaller ones: there could be a strategy and “fight” between players to be out in front or to draft the leader. The smaller blocks would yield fewer points, but if played right you could achieve a higher score by staying back. The more desirable position would also change given the density of the blocks. With a high density of blocks it would pay to be in front since the front runner could hit more of the big point blocks than the drafter. In a lower density section it would pay to draft since there would be so many more small blocks than large. This positioning strategy based on block density dealt nicely with the fact that the levels would often have clumps of blocks or areas lacking many blocks. Unfortunately the multiplayer mode was axed entirely as I ran into the deadline.

Despite the fact that multiplayer was now out of the picture I had finally settled on the core mechanic of my game and the name “Beat Boost”. The trick now was to really tweak the mechanic until it was as good as it could be. One issue with using the blocks as fuel was that the player had to constantly boost, depleting their fuel. I spent some time tweaking the values for how much fuel each block should give the player but always found that I’d give too little or two much. This was a particular problem because I had ceded control of my level design to an algorithm by generating the level from MIDIs so I couldn’t (well I could, but it would have been time consuming at the least) tweak the design of the levels, which would have been another way to adjust fuel values.

In the end I decided that there needed to be a way the player could get a boost for free. To receive a free boost the player must hit the top half of a block with the bottom of his avatar. Doing this gives the player the tiniest, mini boost that can be sustained by hitting more blocks, with the end effect being similar to surfing a wave.

Aha!

The wave idea really brought things together for me. It was my AHA! moment. It lead me to ditch the space ship as player avatar for a little surfer dude and kick started the game’s sound effects. Up until this point I hadn’t put much thought into the sound effects for Beat Boost since the game was centered around music I didn’t want a cacophony of sound overwhelming the musical aspect of the game. Embracing the surfing idea I created a nice, soft, soothing wave sound effect that plays anytime the player collides with a block. The only other sound effect used in the game is the “trick success” sound, a sound that plays whenever the player pulls of a trick.

Part of my original design for Beat Boost was to have a trick system where tricks could be combined for an ever increasing number of points. Due, again, to time constraints I didn’t have time to create the animations for a bunch of tricks so I settled on a single trick, the front flip. The player is Beat Boost is controlled with the arrow keys, left and right move the player left and right; up boosts the player, using fuel; and down puts the player into a front flip, also using fuel.

While performing a front flip the player does not collide with blocks, thus fuel cannot be replenished. The reward for a successful front flip is 2,000 points, indicated by the “trick success” sound and a quick flash and scale of the player. If the player hit the ground up-side-down, mid flip he would be docked extra points in addition to the usual points that are deducted for riding the floor. Flipping was the last aspect of Beat Boost’s gameplay mechanic. It introduced a nice risk/reward feature to the gameplay: you could use up extra fuel (now referred to as “boost”) when riding through large clumps of blocks (now “beat blocks”) and score more points than you would otherwise, but you couldn’t acquire more boost while flipping and the penalty for mis-timing a flip negates any bonus.

Keeping Score

If you’ve been following along closely (you have right?) you’ll likely have noticed that I’ve mentioned high scores and keeping score a number of times in this post. One of the original parts of Beat Boost’s design was a high scores system meaning I needed some way to store scores and display them back to players.

Since Beat Boost is a browser-based web game it made a lot of sense to keep everything in one central location. This was accomplished with a MySQL database, some PHP and AMF, all of which is a topic for another post the main point being that I had a central, remote location where all scores could be quickly posted and retrieved. There is certainly no shortage of online leaderboards for this sort of thing but I wanted to avoid one thing in particular: yet another account for some web site you may or may not ever visit again.

Beat Boost is a one-off game for a contest and I didn’t want to diminish one of the game’s strengths by putting a sign-up barrier in front of users. I was also running out of time and coding a sign up and login system is never appealing. Fortunately the arcades of my youth offered a precedent here, I could simply take the user’s name and transmit that along with the score and level name to my server to be saved in a high scores database. This method has the benefits of being technically simple and super fast and account free for players.

All that was required of players was that they complete a level, then enter their names old school style by using the keyboard’s arrow keys and cycling through the alphabet (both lowercase and capital letters along with numbers). Once this was done hitting enter submits the score and takes the player to the next level. The name the player entered is also saved so it only has to be entered once.

To see the scores for a level players could click “Scores” on the main menu, then choose the level they were interested in to see the top five scores for that level.

I decided to only show the top five because that is what would fit on a single screen and I didn’t have time to write any scrolling functionality into the scores view.

Finishing Touches

With all the gameplay and scoring complete all that was needed was some finishing touches. This included making a help view to explain the game concept and display the controls, a credits view to give props to everyone involved in the project, the HTML page in which the game SWF was embedded and the game’s user interface (UI).

The help page and credits are super straightforward. Help has a two paragraph explanation of how to play Beat Boost with the control buttons listed below that. Credits is a list of all the roles and the person who filled said role. The credits list was particularly easy because it was just me and Tettix, the musician who wrote all the music used in Beat Boost. The HTML page was simply a black background that had “Beat Boost” across the top, the game in the middle of the page and the controls listed on the bottom of the page.

This leaves me with the UI. Since Beat Boost is meant to recall games of the 80s I felt a visually simple UI suited the game well. That said I wanted the interface to be interesting and lead players along nicely. What I ended up with is a simple list of all the actions a player can take from the main menu: Play, Scores, Help, and Credits. Each item in the main menu changes to a different color when moused over (pink, yellow, green and blue, respectively). When clicked on the item retains the rollover color, scoots across the screen to the upper left corner and fades in the appropriate content. When clicked back, the current content hides itself and the main menu label animates back to it’s main menu position before the rest of the main menu fades in.

These last few touches are, for the most part, simple, simple stuff that really do a lot of improve the appearance of Beat Boost as a finished product. The UI is fairly simple as well, but that is more a case of the aesthetic of Beat Boost being simple 8-bit type stuff and UIs for more ambitious games are certainly anything but simple. Simpleness of the UI aside I feel like it does a great job of what it’s supposed to do: display stuff the player clicks on.

This post ended up being quite a bit longer than I had anticipated but I got everything out that I wanted to. It was a lot of fun to crunch through the evenings after work over the course of a week to bring this game into being and I’m glad to be sharing my process now. In an effort to not drag this post out any longer I’ve left out any postmortem stuff discussing my thoughts on the game once I started getting some responses about it from players — this will end up being another post so stay tuned.

Thanks to everyone who voted, commented and/or emailed me. It was really great to hear everyone’s thoughts about the game. Thanks to Boing Boing for putting on this contest. Finally, thanks to Tettix for donating his music to this competition.

UPDATE: I ended up taking third place!

My submission is a game called Beat Boost that has a little surfer guy flowing through blocks of music that are generated from the game’s soundtrack. In true old school fashion the game is solely about achieving the highest possible score. To do this you boost the surfer into the colored blocks (called “beat blocks”) in each level or perform full, 360 degree front flips. You can check it out on Boing Boing (don’t forget to vote)!

The catch is that boosting and flipping depletes your boost meter and when this runs out you fall to the floor where you hemorrhage points (1000 points for hitting the ground upside-down or otherwise mid flip; 1500 per second afterward), but replenish your boost meter. Hitting boost blocks also refills the boost meter and hitting these blocks just right will give you a boost for free.

Successfully completing a level allows you to enter your name, classic arcade style, where it will be stored in a remote leaderboard. This leaderboard shows only the top five scores and player names and requires no logins, accounts, etc. — it’s just like when you were a kid quickly tapping your initials into that Pac-Man arcade cabinet.

All that tracks in the game are by Tettix, you should definitely check him out as he’s done a ton of great stuff not the least of which was to make his music available for this contest. The full track list in Beat Boost is:

• Earth’s Assault on the Central AI – Technology Crisis
• Infiltration at Dusk – Technology Crisis II
• The Slave Rebellion at Genesis Point – Technology Crisis II
• Carotid Restraint – T.K.O.E.P.
• Scissor Kick – T.K.O.E.P.
• Dragon Punch – T.K.O.E.P.

Follow the project here and check out the first demo vid on Vimeo.

I could do much of what BNH Desktop does on the web, but I’d have to rely on users having Flash and for the users that don’t, well, I have to handle them as well, usually by gracefully degrading the experience.  All of this is a lot of work and testing and, again, in my humble opinion, not usually worth it.  From a design standpoint I think a website should be embraced for what it is and not shoehorned into some Flash app that just happens to run in a web browser.

I’ll now step down off my soapbox and get back to the point of this post: Beer Near Here Desktop is a cool example of an AIR application and I want to cut it open and share all it’s secrets.  When I decided to write this app the first thing I did was check out what else is out there for AIR and something that kept showing up was Kuler for AIR.

Kuler, is an Adobe application for creating color swatches and, from everything I read, the AIR version is something that was written to show off some of the cool things you can do with AIR.  And sure enough it does show these things off.  It has custom skin and some neat effects.  The trouble is that there is no explanation of how to accomplish any of this.  It’s almost a tease, “See, you can do all this cool stuff…but we’re not going to tell you how.”

Undeterred, I went on to do some more Googling and reading with the end result being Beer Near Here Desktop.  You should check it out.  FYI, I’m not paying $300 to sign my code with Verisign so you’ll have to just trust me on the install.

Some of the neat features of BNH Desktop include:

• A custom skin.  In Flex/AIR parlance this is “custom chrome”.
• A loading/waiting animation that integrates with the skin.
• A flip effect.
• Custom roll-over buttons.

So now you know you can do these things and I aim to explain them as well.  But for that you’ll have to stay tuned until next time as I want to give each feature it’s due.

Read Part 2.

When I was about 10 my parents rented Alien and disrupted my sleep for a number of nights thereafter.  This film created a truly unique and horrifying creature, placed it wonderfully dark and claustrophobic environment and let the tension build.  Dead Space does much the same and even pays homage to Alien and other science-fiction stories and authors.  The game is set aboard USG Ishimura — a planet-cracking mining vessal — a direct parallel to Alien‘s mineral refinery ship the Nostromo.  The player takes the role of Isaac Clark a reference to sci-fi greats Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark.  Other references are found in the many logs you will uncover around the Ishimura.

The graphics were the first thing to really pull me into the game.  They aren’t exceptional in any particular way, yet every spacescape is majestic, all the environments feel like working parts to a massive ship and the lighting really gives depth to it all.  From the spinning yellow emergency lights in the engine room to the antiseptic white light of the medical bay the lights set the mood for the game’s varied environs.  The lights also go out.  Often you will walk into a well-lit room only the have the lights go dark in anticipation of an onslaught of necromorphs — the game’s enemies.  Fortunately all of the game’s weapons come with mounted flashlights (something the developers must have learned from tedious flashlight-weapon switching of Doom 3) that you can use to search around poorly lit areas.

The menus and HUD conspire with the graphics to keep you cemented in the role of Isaac Clark.  Dead Space features no on-screen menus, displays or notifications instead all menus are projected from Isaac’s RIG — the suits worn by characters in the Dead Space universe.  Isaac’s health is displayed along the spine of his RIG, ammo counts are displayed on all weapons, and maps and other information screens are projected from Isaac’s chest.  The result is that a third-person, over-the-shoulder game can grab a player and ground them in a character much like a first-person game.

Using a deep-space science-fiction setting sets Dead Space apart from other horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill.  Rather than shuffling zombies infesting a small town neighboring a wooded area you are thrust into a cold, massive ship stuffed with some increasingly swift-moving alien creatures.  Here, again, Dead Space takes a few cues from Alien.  The sections of the ship run from engineering with blaring claxons and devices shooting view-obscuring steam to the cavernous hydoponics area with it’s ambiance of chirping animals and insects.  It all has the slow-building tension of Alien punctuated with short bursts of intense action.  The best part about all of this is that it never tires, the game manages to stay tense from the initial necromorph encounter til the credits roll.  Usually horror games drop the scare factor in favor of action toward the end so the unending scariness of Dead Space sets it apart in this department.

Bolstering the tension is the excellent audio in the game.  The sound in the game is top-notch but beyond that the way sound is used is exceptional.  Rather than just cue “scary music” when Isaac crosses some threshold the music slowly builds and fades as Isaac moves through his environs.  Enemies can also sneak up on the player because musical cues don’t always give them away immediately.  And sometimes the music and audio cues result in nothing.  That’s right, the game fakes you out.  Oftentimes you’ll hear a clank in some ducts and it’s nothing but background noise.  This does two things: it keeps the tension ratcheted up and it really makes the Ishimura feel alive and real.  Games tend to one-up each other in the graphics arms race, and Dead Space can certainly compete there, but it will take all comers in the audio department.

Even though Dead Space sets itself apart from most horror games the game cannot seem to escape a few horror genre standbys and gaming cliches.  The knock on most survival horror games is that the player controls like a tank, and here Dead Space and Isaac Clark are no different.  Isaac may be fairly accurate using his ranged weapons and “strategic dismemberment”, but melee attacks really feel like canned animations that more often result it death for Isaac rather than necromorphs.  Also, Isaac runs like a defensive lineman, sure, he’s fairly fast enough, but he feels clunky and many of the game’s enemies are much faster.  In fact, I would say that player movement generally feels clunky with the exception of aiming.

The aiming in Dead Space is really great and ties into strategic dismemberment.  Strategic dismemberment essentially means that you can shoot off enemies’ limbs and they will change tactics accordingly.  For example, in the game’s many zero gravity environments there is a type of scropion-like enemy that moves around by grabing the ground and crawling and attacks with a stinger on it’s tail.  You could take the typical videogame route and go for the head shot, but blowing off this creature’s head will not kill it.  You could then go for the tail since this is what deals damage to you, but that takes many shots.  The best bet is to go for the arms.  Shooting off one arm severly slows the creature down and the second effectively kills it.  All this aiming and dismemberment is aiding by the fact that all weapons have a laser sight in addition to their handy flashlights.

Dead Space also suffers from what I called repetitive gaming disorder.  That is, you seem to repeat similar tasks or spend a lot of time tracking down x number of whatever.  These sort of tasks aren’t such a problem in and of themselves, but having them crop up more than once over the course of a fairly short game definitely feels like padding.  Rather than performing lots of repetitive tasks I would have preferred that the story were fleshed out a bit more.  Most of the story elements and background for the Dead Space universe are conveyed via various logs found around the Ishimura.  While I feel this is an excellent form of organic, non-intrusive story telling (ala the Metroid Prime series) it doesn’t really do enough to explain what is going on, so much so that it feels like bits were intentionally omitted for a sequel.

Somewhat wanting story and movement controls aside Dead Space is definitely a must play game.  The game sets a new standard for it’s genre and does an excellent job establishing an atmosphere through not just the use of fancy graphics but also audio.  Play this game.