Rhythm Clicker — First TDEMO Team Game
Rhythm Clicker was an experimental idea that I and the rest of my team came up that took the Incremental Theme of this weeks TDEMO into a slightly different direction. Typically when you think of an Incremental, you think of games like Cookie Clicker where you tend to click or purchase certain modifiers and a generalised value will increase over time. While this was a kind of obvious choice, I wanted to kind of push the idea a little further and see how far I can stretch the “Incremental” narrative.
The responsibilities of our team were divided up such that most people had a individual area to work on. It was definitely a task to balance out everything because especially in regards to art, everyone had a different styles which we would need to facilitate somehow to involve everyone in the process of the game. Luckily, we took the usual “George” approach, which is to mismatch things with the hopes of appealing to the comedic/random side of the player. (tends to work most of the time>:D). We split up the team into 4 artists, and 2 programmers, with a individual (me) who would help out on both sides.
In my case, I was responsible for a lot of the fleshing out of the theory behind the game, such as how the multiplier works or how we might achieve the gameplay loop in terms of programming. Usually I would love to focus on programming, but I’m a noob in Unity and C#, so although I did help out in that area when it came to my own contributions , I mostly focused on what I knew and how I knew I could help out my team the most.
I also had a hand in finding the audio assets which you can hear in the game, and syncing them up in Audacity so they loop correctly and sync well with each other. If I had to go back and change something, I’d most likely try and find somebody to play some music for us so it would flow better, however because we got hit with a lockdown fairly quickly, it was hard to organise this in time with people going home.
On the Art Side, I helped flesh out the User Interface. We had initial plans to have a menu but this was scrapped due to time constraints and also that for a Incremental, it’s probably better if we just have them thrown straight into the game, as it isn’t like they’ll be navigating back out and in (unless you had a shop!). That being said, I designed and programmed the UI to display figures as well as the multiplier. Initially, it was planned to have a separate “circle” holding this multiplier, but I didn’t get enough time to finish this up, and we had to settle for it being within the string.
Finally, I worked on the video showcasing the game. Being the video editor that I am, I made it as chaotic as possible to reflect both the game and the development cycle that we had to go through. I thought it was quite well edited given the time frame (was approaching the personal 7 hour limit), so if you scroll up you can check it out using the link!
In reflection though, I think that we ran into a lot of issues when it came to time management. It was very difficult to organise meetings with everyone, as members were busy with other things when others weren’t, and one was unluckily in another timezone, which made it slightly difficult for the programming side to work and voice chat subjectively about how they were going to achieve their tasks. However, we managed to get a game out which is better than nothing, and everyone contributed something to the final product!
If I had to change something, It’d be probably making sure that we have more frequent meetings and checkups. In the future, I’m going to probably try fit in some standups where people can just say what they’ve done and what they plan to do, as it’ll be beneficial for everyone that way!
Bye for now, and check out my game here! :)
