"Music Fighter" by ValkyrieGames (Entry Complete!)

**Location:** Australia

Since a few people have made already made topics for their construct 2 game contest entries, I thought I'd do the same! Here I'll post my progress and any difficulties that I hit in to in case others may also learn from it.

My game "Music Fighter" will be a music action game, where players will have to play particular combinations of notes to perform attacks against enemies. I'm a little uncertain how difficult it will be to make this a fun game, but I thought it would be enjoyable to try something different and make a game like this so I decided I'd just have a go anyway to see how far I get :)

Hope you guys enjoy reading this topic and joining me on my journey as I work to develop my contest entry! :D

Planet Beat is a peaceful planet, full of fun and music, however recently s large number of bugs have appeared out of nowhere stealing musical beats and raising havoc. Musical Beats are the life of Planet Beat - they make everything work, they keep things alive. You could say everything on Planet Beat was made up of a little Musical Beat.

Being a peaceful planet, Planet Beat was defenseless, and could do nothing as it was plundered by the masses of bugs. But this moment was when a young mechanic would rise to be a hero. Her name is Chloe, and she had been working on a ship. A ship that could gather the power of the Musical Beats to fend off the bugs.

This is her story.

This game is all about rhythm and control. The aim of the game is to hit the beats that appear when they align over the flashing hit pads. Hitting Mana (Blue) Beats will give you mana to use to cast attacks. Hitting Enemy (Red Bug) Beats will allow you to prevent the enemy from attacking. If you miss an Enemy Beat your ship will be damaged by a small amount. If you cast a skill SKill (Green) Beats will appear. If you manage to hit them all, you will successfully cast your skill. Skills range from Bullets, to Energy Beams to Repair skills.

The aim of the game is to survive as long as you can, take down as many bugs as you can with your ship, and to get the highest score.

Tip: There are no penalties for missing Mana Beats (the blue beats) so if things get too hectic, aim for the other Beats!

Basic Attack
Mana cost: 5
Damage: 15
Description: Launch a simple shot filled with highly condensed Beat Energy to the enemy.

Launch Rockets
Mana cost: 10
Damage: 7 per rocket.
Description: Launch three rockets to bombard the enemy together.

Energy Beam
Mana cost: 50
Damage: 10 per second.
Description: Shoot a super charged Energy Beam at the Enemy.

Repair
Mana cost: 30
Heal: 30
Description: Repair your ship for 30 damage.

Summon Mini Fighter
Mana cost: 20
Description: Summons a Mini Fighter to fight by your side. Mini Fighter shoots mini bullets at the enemies for 1 damage per shot.

Speed Burst
Mana cost: 30
Description: Put your ship in to turbo drive to speed past enemies. The ship speeds up so fast that all damage dealt to the ship while speeding is reduced by 50%.

Yes there's an easter eggs! And not just because of easter! Can you find it? This easter egg was inspired by rosareven. Hope you all like it! :D

We're on Facebook and Twitter! Click on the images below to find us!

If you like our project and would like to support it, please feel free to stick our banner in to your signature!

Click here for the code for the banner!

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I give HBGames.org permission to place my game on their online arcade! :)

**Location:** velocitating a straight line

That is ........ ADORABLE o.O

Did you make those graphics yourself??

**Location:** Australia

Venetia wrote:

That is ........ ADORABLE o.O

Did you make those graphics yourself??

Haha I wish I did! I love the graphics too! Actually they were created by Daniel Cook of Triple Town fame and are available from his game development blog at lostgarden.com. I've been following his blog for a while now, and he has some very cool articles there on game development too!

**Location:** velocitating a straight line

Well the game sounds really fun!! I look forward to seeing it!

**Location:** Germany

For probably unnecessary enlightning of everyone reading this: Daniel Cook is actually more commonly known as Danc on the web - just mentioning this, as he's a member on these forums as well ;) (I kind of brought him here in the first place... but that's another story :huh:

)

Actually, those graphics might work ridiculously well with an engine like Construct... quite a good thought! If I can give you a little design advice, however: be more scarce with text borders around those graphics, as they are drawn very delicate and with only the most essential of borders to them. Black borders (or font in general) usually looks quite bad in pitch black, so what designers usually do is go towards a #333 gray or something. In your case, I would use a darker shade of that orange you used, and maybe a less wide border setting.
Just mentioning this, as it really stood out to me when I saw the screenshot... please take it as constructive criticism.

**Location:** Australia

@Venetia Thank you! I'm going to work hard to make something fun to play with! ^^

@BlueScope That's so cool, I didn't realize that he's on these forums! If you have the time you should tell us how you brought him over here! Where do you know him from? Thanks for the design advice, I'm actually not much of a designer myself, which is why any comments like this is really useful to me! I took your advice in to account and changed the graphics accordingly. I changed the black to a #111 gray and thinned the borders. I tried to make the orange darker but it looked very dark so I kept it still a little light. What do you think? :)

**Location:** Germany

I don't really know him past the point that he was joining the topic in here (back when it was rmxp.org) about converting his Zelda-esque graphics into high quality rmxp resources - he came here to say he thinks it's great someone's working on that, and that's pretty much it. That, and I'm very very occasionally commenting at his blog.

As for the screen, either you didn't update it or my phone shows me a cached image... but I still see the very same image ^^"

Sun Mar 11, 2012 4:26 am

The Concept sounds like it should be fun to try out. In both the playing of and designing of.
I'd be interested in the challenges you encounter making this. Far as I've seen not many music centric C2 games have been made.
Good luck!

**Location:** Australia

@BlueScope Haha I see, well that's cool you got him to stop by these boards. For the screens I have updated them, I think it may be the cache that's showing the old image. Maybe if you come check back a bit later? :)

@onzephyr Thanks! I'm already encountering one or two issues with getting lots of sounds to play one after another, but let's see if I can work around it... :)

**Location:** Germany

Yep, I see it now. It's definately better even though #111111 is still pretty much black - looks better though. What I meant with darker orange was to color the orange text's borders, though, not make the text color itself darker... it works like this as well, though :)

**Location:** Australia

Thanks BlueScope! Ahhh I see what you meant now. Good to keep in mind :) Btw I'm looking forward to seeing your game with the graphics fully made by yourself! :D

**Location:** Australia

Update Day 4: Not a great day today. Realized I had to change a lot of things in the game concept to make it fun. Back from the drawing board with some ideas ready to be implemented tomorrow!

**Location:** Australia

Signature banners are out! :D If you like my project, you can now show your love with a banner of your own!
Click here for the code for the banner!
The banner looks like this:

A big thank you to anyone who actually puts one of these up in their sigs for me! XD Hehe :)

Sat Mar 17, 2012 6:29 pm

Looking better and better with each update. When do we get to try a demo :?:

**Location:** Australia

Thanks onzephyr! :D Pretty soon I hope! Once I get the weapon system working! :D

**Location:** Australia

Thanks onzephyr! :D Pretty soon I hope! I'm planning to put a demo out once I get the weapon system working! :D

**Location:** Germany

Now I get what you're going for with this... good luck with further development, nice to see someone else is working on a more individual thing than the platformer and shooter genre :D

**Location:** California, USA

Looks great so far and I must say, after just recently having an idea to the effect of sequenced sound attacks, I really like the idea for this game. Good luck, looking forward to seeing how this one goes!

**Location:** Australia

@BlueScope @Ugotsta

Thanks guys! I'm glad you both like the idea! Just a little bit more and I can release a demo! :D

In relation to the sequenced sound attacks... that's been slightly changed, but hopefully the impact to the novelty of the gameplay isn't too great!

**Location:** Australia

Day 9 (24/03/2012)

1. Implemented Simple Shot, Rocket Launcher, and Energy Beam Skills.

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More to implement tomorrow! Also, 78 events down... running out of events! D: I might have to remove some skills that I was planning to implement :/

Sat Mar 24, 2012 5:31 pm

I really like what you're doing. The concept reminds me Theatrythm Final Fantasy,
which is a game in which you need to match combinations of buttons(I think) to advance.
And you seem to be doing well in terms of the systems, specially the infite path.
Nice job!

**Location:** Australia

Day 10 (25/03/2012)
1. Finished Energy Beam skill animation.
2. Finished basic Summon Mini Fighter Skill, and Speed Burst Skill.
3. Added a background to our WIP forum topic :)

More to come tomorrow!

**Location:** Australia

MarioSuperStar wrote:

I really like what you're doing. The concept reminds me Theatrythm Final Fantasy,
which is a game in which you need to match combinations of buttons(I think) to advance.
And you seem to be doing well in terms of the systems, specially the infite path.
Nice job!

Thanks MarioSuperStar! I didn't realize Square Enix had something like this out! I had a quick look at the wikipedia page and it looks similar to what I'm aiming for! Haha it makes me want to try out the game actually.

Anyway, more work for now, hopefully I get the battle system up and running soon! x)

**Location:** Australia

Day 11 (26/03/2012)
1. Lots of little tweaks today with the graphics, animations and skills. Also added a little polish to the game.
2. Implemented the damage module for damage dealing, monster removing, and damage animations.

The game is almost ready for a tech demo! For now, some eye candy! :D

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**Location:** Germany

That's looking better and better by the day... great job on the graphics, they match nicely with Danc's!
I'm looking forward to a tech demo here... I'm too old and cranky to rock at DDR-style games, but I'll definately try my hardest here ^^"

By the way, did you get the word out to Danc? Might be a bit close, but it wouldn't be the first time for him to feature a game made with his graphics, and I think his blog post reads he'd be happy to hear what people did with it. Just as a though...

**Location:** Australia

Until you release a demo, I'm going to be imagining playing this game with this song >.>

**Location:** Australia

@BlueScope Haha thanks for planning to give it a shot! I'm sure you'll still do fine :P I hope you will still like it. But too old and cranky? I can't believe it hehe. I haven't let Danc know about my project yet, but I think it's a great idea! I'm going to email him immediately! It would be great even just to see what he thinks of the game :D

@rosareven lol rosareven you're absolutely hilarious! I absolutely cracked up when I went to that link and listened. I think I'll have to get something arranged after that. Perhaps a bonus nyan-cat level with the nyan-cat song XD
The tech demo is out now though, have a go and see what you think! :D

**Location:** Australia

TECH DEMO IS UP YAYYYY!

I finally did enough today to get a basic tech demo up and running - it's very basic right now so don't expect too much, but it should show a little of how gameplay will be! Instructions are on the game page. Press the skill keys and try out some of the skills. It's not quite a game yet because you can't die, the player has no HP or Mana, and there's no end goal yet, but hopeully I can get something more proper up soon. The GUI also needs tweaking quite a bit. If you try it out though, let me know what you think about the skills and the process you need to go through to trigger those skills! Also let me know if there's any lag issues, and if there are what kind of browser and computer you're using. Cheers!

Try out the demo here! [Click Me]

Note: If the beats are out of sync with beat of the music, reload the webpage to put it in sync. This will be fixed once we have a title screen going! :)

Controls

* Note: Enemy Attack and Heal and Deflect Skills do not yet work. Mana Beats do not yet add mana, only points.

**Location:** United States

Best game ever.

**Location:** velocitating a straight line

Wow, such polish! This is even more impressive than I was expecting from your screenshots.

Holy poop though, I wasn't able to complete even 1 single skill beat. The mana beats weren't a problem, but my brain mostly fried when it implied I had to hit 2-3 directional keys at once.

Maybe decrease the difficulty curve a little for the beginning? I'd expect the multi-key beat combos at some point, but let me try to get better at keeping up with the game first before throwing them at me! Haha.

I could just be complaining because I'm old and have crummy rhythm though :P

"Music Fighter" by ValkyrieGames (Entry Complete!)

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