Name: OctoRhythm
Status: Early Alpha
Team: me + 1 musician (
Leonardo Perantoni)
Platforms: PC and Mac (needs a Leap Motion Controller)
Status: Released!
- Store link
- Soundtrack Introduction
Hey everyone! I've been a lurker for quite a while, but as I'm in the middle of developing a new game for the past month or so, I thought it'd be a good way to start posting!
So, my name is Yanko and I'm an Indie dev hailing from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I'm currently working on a game for the Leap Motion (
http://leapmotion.com). For those who don't know, it's a device that is about to be released that is basically a "kinect for hands" - it works incredibly well and their developer support is great - I got my dev unit for free and they're constantly giving me feedback.
OctoRhythm
So, I wanted to start a demo project that would be easy to do. Obviously, the first game I thought about was Rock-Paper-Scissors, but that just wouldn't stick for too long. So I ended up having this idea of a weird mix of Simon Says, Jo-Kem-Po and rhythm game. In the first day, this is what i had:
The gameplay worked like this: the computer would show you a sequence of symbols. You had to memorize them, and then do them again with your hands to the beat. If you got everything right, a new symbol was added; if you got 1 or more wrong, you'd lose a symbol. If you got to 0 symbols, you lost.
The next day, it evolved to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuZk7rJ-3GI
Then this:
I posted that on the Leap developer boards and got an email from Adam, who's the awesome dev relations guy on Leap Motion, and we talked about testing a rhythm-only gameplay (meaning, you wouldn't have to memorize the symbols). This was the first publicly released video of that gameplay mode:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP4CKGd9MPoAfter a ton of tweaks and suggestions, I ended up separating the memory and non memory related gameplays. Now, instead of getting the symbols shown to you and then shown again on non-memory mode, you have this constant stream that flows to the beat, and you must repeat it. So here's the video I just recorded:
The symbols flow in from the left, and you have to match them. I've also included 2 handed symbols to add a bit of diversity - it's kinda hard having symbols that are both common to people and easy for the device to recognize.
The Plan
I plan to release this along with the Leap in may, so I'm starting to intensify the work on the game. As of now, my idea is having 4 modes:
a) Rhythm, which you just saw in the video
b) Rock-Paper-Scissors: the same as rhythm, but you have to display the symbol that would win the computer in an RPS match
c) Memory: the old memory sequence mode
d) Memory + RPS: memorizing and displaying the opposite sequence.
The player would select the gameplay mode, then be taken to this "level selection" screen, where he would have to play the easier levels to unlock the harder ones, and the other gameplay modes. The difficulty would be set by the BPM of the song, and by the chance of getting 2 handed symbols.
I wanted to keep it relatively casual, which would also allow me to use the remaning time I have tweaking the look and feel and juicing it up, instead of making a more complex game with less polish. But I'm looking for suggestions, especially for things to spice up the gameplay without getting too far from it's simple roots.
So that's about it. Thanks for reading this far and if you have any comments/suggestions/criticism, shoot away!
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