It’s everyone’s favorite rhythm fighting game that doesn’t exist yet, ‘Rhythm Rumble’, back for more discussion in this week's NiceThinking Episode. Ellen learns a new word, Mark rants about Unity’s PlayerPrefs, and Stephen admits that he still hasn’t learned to take good notes. They all agree that you have to spend more time researching than you want to, and that Dale is awesome.
Stephen leaving an old employeer for a new job also leaves him room for improvement on a rhythm fighting game. The main problems with the old prototype: not rhythmic enough and too simple. The beats the player had to match were up to the sixteenth note (quarter beat) which left players not understanding which beat they were playing to, and an impression of the game feeling sluggish
Some thoughts from the discussion
-Use beat patterns rather than make people keep the beat
-Being able to store (and playback) beats to conjure special moves
-Give the instruments personality to the fighting moves they can make
-Make the game into a metaphor, give it personality - these beats might control instruments, which control rock-em-sock-em robots, rather than making the avatars hit each other with a very expensive bass clarinet.
They mention Sukuri's youtube video about the influence '90's fighting games had on the design of SmashBrothers