Happy Publishings

The 'EP' version of our game... see what we did there... was published yesterday on Desura! You can download it for free here.

This poster image I made is doubling as our digital game cover:

I am ecstatic with the progress we've made and am looking forward to our release on the Xbox network at the end of the summer (complete with additional levels, music, and tweaks to improve gameplay). Until then, this download will have to suffice.

Fun fact about the poster...

'Move to the Music' is only a stand-in slogan. If you can think of a better one, we'll take it! We thought underwhelming/random slogans might be a funny way to go. Some ideas include, but are not limited to:

• Ritmo - It's Alright I Guess
• Ritmo - A Donald McPartland Experience
• Ritmo - A Game
• Ritmo - Much Rhythm... So Music

TTFN.

Do You Even Bounce?

We're preparing our game for the upcoming EAE fest and publishing on Desura. There are a few things I've been working on:

• Updating splash screens
• Creating a new credits screen
• An obscene amount of play testing / level tweaking

I finally got around to changing the art asset for what we've been calling 'bouncing platforms' (colored platforms that bounce the player without any input). There were some springs already made up, but they didn't work well when the camera was zoomed out, so I made these instead:

They are simple, but I like how they turned out! They correspond to the color of the player that should use them (such a novel idea!). It's been an interesting experience making artwork for our game. I don't usually come up with ideas from scratch like this, but it's a lot of fun!

Alllrighty then.

=izer

This week I'm most excited about a subtle visual tidbit I added to the game:

I need to adjust the background to make them stand out more, but yes, those are equalizers. Well... they are a basic representation anyway. They are actually just five different images cycling to the rhythm of the music. The background seemed kind of boring how we had it, so I figured these help a bit. I'm pleased with the results.

You'll be able to try the game out for yourself soon. Until then, happy gaming!

Behold, the Power of the Cube

Now is the time for level fixing. As I mentioned in an earlier post, when we originally designed the levels all of the players were on top of each other. After deciding to stagger the players' x positions, their notes needed to be moved as well (to keep them in sync with the music).

To fix the levels quickly, we just moved the notes up or down to make them fit with the existing level. But what we really needed was redesigned parts of the levels to make note placement look/feel intentional with the rest of the level assets. This week I focused on changing parts of the level Bass Heavy to better accommodate the yellow (bass) track.

I also changed the colors of bounce buttons on the level A Little Movement. Initially, the level had three music tracks instead of the four that we use per level now. I had to move things around and fix the colors to make sure yellow was bass, blue was drums, green was rhythm, and purple was lead.

In other news, a big visual change to the game happened this week. Alan made up a new model for something to slide under. It looks something like this:

This is not the actual model, but it's very similar to this rubix cube. Instead of being different colors, it's different shades of red. Individual cubes spin around creating a wave-like effect for the object. I like the asset for now, but I'm not sure if it will stay in the game. The corners of the cube cause extra player deaths and making it smaller loses too much detail when we zoom the camera out. We'll probably have to come up with a round-ish model instead for this particular asset.

Maybe something with a little less detail would be nice too. Scale is our greatest difficulty with creating artwork for our game: The drastic camera movements make it so that we can't have much detail at all. Large, simple assets are best. But I prefer scales issues caused by the camera over split screen on multiplayer. We made the right choice there!

That's all for this post. Toodaloo.

Minesweeper

This week I made the end of level rings smaller. A complaint we had during our last presentation was that they seemed too large and didn't match other assets in the game. Just changing the size made it look much better in game.

I removed the bobbing animations from ghost models that replace character models on death. Ghosts should be bobbing to the music... they're dead!

I added outlines to the block and hexagon backgrounds I came up with previously. They look much better now. You can tell they are made up of shapes instead of looking like camouflage.

One issue we had was that after moving the player to a checkpoint on death, the game started up again too quickly. I added an asset for a drum-clap sound and now after four claps the player resumes gameplay (counting them in the way you do with music).

The coolest thing we added this week was a mine.

No, not that kind of mine! A mine-looking thing like this:

Alan came up with this model and I scaled it and colored it to fit into the game. I colored it red because the general rule for our game is that 'red means dead.' I also thought it would be cool to have it spin around and move towards the player (like the spinning spikes). This is an object the player has to slide under.

And now I'm sliding into another week. Thanks for reading. :D

Material Woes

There was more work to be done with cycling through colors this week. Non-technical people can just skip the following paragraph...

First, I modified the update function in our cycling script to prevent renderer.materials from being called with each update. Second, I had to make sure to destroy materials when they weren't needed anymore. Daniel Sanders, a member of my group, discovered that if you don't dispose of materials properly it can cause memory leaking. This really brings me back to the days when I first started learning C++. :D

I was focusing on another course I'm taking (Algorithms) so the above is all I worked on for Ritmo this week. But I did get a chance to start playing a new game. I know it's been out for a while now, but I bought Rayman Legends. Doesn't it look amazing?

This was my first time playing a game in the Rayman series, but it had such excellent reviews I thought I'd give it a try. I fell in the love with the gorgeous art design right away. It's one of the best looking platformers I've seen. Then I quickly got sucked into the addicting gameplay. I love having to free all of your friends and collect enough trinkets to get all of the trophies on each level. They did a great job gradually making levels increase in difficulty. I expect a lot of fun hours will be spent finishing the game.

In short, it's a fantastic. If you haven't played it I highly recommend it.

Ooooook!

Optimization Prime

Ritmo has been having some performance issues. To find the source(s) of the problem we ran Unity's profiler to see where things could be optimized. One section that needed work was the color cycling scripts I worked on.

To fix them, I had to do the following:

• Make a copy of all the materials that change colors and replace the materials with their copies for their corresponding objects (at runtime). This is necessary because there are only two ways to modify a material's color. The first way is to call renderer.material, but this makes a copy of the material each time it is called (for each object). The second way is to just change the color of the material at runtime and all objects that use the material change color as well. The problem there is that the change is persistent. In other words, it changes the meta file for the material in the Unity editor (which is bad news when you're working with a repository). Instead we created a copy of each material and modified that instead.

• Reduce the number of prefabs used per platform. Each platform is a multiple of three in length and was made up of 3x1 pieces. That's a lot of pieces for 255x1 platform. Instead I modified all of the platform prefabs to be made up of only three pieces (left, stretched center, and right). This prevented too many update calls from being made.

It was tedious and time consuming work, but now the game is running at more optimus optimal speed.

I had to sneak that picture into a post. I loved transformers as a kid. Happy gaming!