Source of Inspiration
Our idea comes from clapping games in childhood, and we want to recreate the fun that players get from playing clapping games in childhood.
In the clapping game, I extracted several key elements:
Beats
Fast Game
Simple Rules
Turn-Based
Body Movements
We can't reproduce body movements in mobile games. But we can compensate for children's pleasure in making various gestures with visual stimulation through exaggerated and interesting actions of avatars in the game. We can even make avatars in the game do more movements that they won't do in clapping games, such as forward, backward, and jump. Because those actions are very laborious in reality, which will also make the rules more complicated, but they can be easily done in the game.
Game Prototype
So our first version is designed as an RPG rhythm battle game. Players can use commands to make avatars perform various actions according to the beat.
According to the design, Tim Yang produced our first demo with Flash as below:
I also used PPT to draw a prototype of our game interface.
We have encountered difficulties in how to reflect beats in the above interface. Because traditional rhythm games usually use a small square on the score or buttons that light up in sequence to prompt the player to click the corresponding button in accordance with the rhythm. But we are not a pure rhythm game. We don't want players to just click the button according to the rhythm without any thinking. Each beat in the music is actually just around in our turn-based game.
I analyzed the existing rhythm games. In fact, the visual expression of the games' rhythm is composed of two elements:
Decision Line
Upcoming Beat Hint
Following their approach, I also added a decision line and a gradually enlarged beat prompt line to the game. Our beat prompt line is made into a gradually enlarged water ripple. When the water ripple coincides with the button, it is when the player needs to make a decision. And we added the highlight of the button and line, when the prompt line and the button overlap, to enhance the prompt.
According to our original design, several of our designers also made a list of tricks, which allow players to use the combination of direction keys and skill buttons to produce different effects, to strengthen the decision-making and numerical depth of the game, and also increase the game's playability.
Rean Zhang even added different classes to our game characters, differentiated the energy consumption and damage caused by different skills according to their risks.
Unfortunately, after we developed these features and tried them out for other friends, we found that the moves and skills were too complicated for players without complete pre guidance. They just followed the rhythm of the music and click thoughtlessly, which is not in line with our expectations. Since our minigame game finally only had 5 minutes to play for the judges, we canceled most of the design of Linfeng, and the final interface only left the three decision-making options: charge, attack, defense. This can be regarded as a compromise for this competition.
Since we only have two weeks of development time, even though we are not satisfied with many details, and canceled many features, but we are happy that the judges had a great time during the 5-minute trial play.
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