Jukebox Beatdown: Final Release and Gameplay Video

After several months of work, I am excited to announce I am releasing the final build and gameplay video for Jukebox Beatdown, my VR rhythm-combat game!

New Features in this build Include:

1. A ranking system that gives you a grade based on your accuracy, speed, health, and ability to stay on-beat.

2. A new fourth phase in the Funky Franny battle. During the saxophone solo, Franny will now unleash slash attacks upon the player.

3. A new interactive tutorial that tests the player’s understanding of core mechanics.

4. Visual overhaul of Funky Franny’s attacks

5. A “Lose” Screen that shows how close you are to beating Funky Franny.

6. A rework of the game’s sound effects.

7. Reworked the third phase of the Funky Franny fight to make it easier.

To see all these new features in action, check out the new playthrough video below:

Thank you to everyone who supported the development of this game, especially our team and playtesters!

Credits:

Game By: Brett Moody

Music By: Benjamin Young

Vern-Omega Voice By: TinyMike

Blog Post #4: The Finish Line

This most recent sprint was one of the most challenging but fulfilling sprints yet!

The end of this sprint coincided with the final submission deadline for the Oculus Launchpad program, so it was time to finish the project’s remaining essential features while also building out promotional materials and responding to playtest notes. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much. 😊

The Oculus Launchpad program only distributes grants to a handful of its more than 100 participants based on the merit of their vertical-slices, so my demo had to be looking and playing its best. I didn’t have the money to continue building Jukebox Beatdown beyond my vertical slice, so the project’s survival depended on the grant.

For my project to be eligible for Oculus’s consideration, it had to meet the following requirements:

1. Provide a complete experience in five minutes or less.

2. Meet the Oculus Store’s technical standards, especially in terms of performance.

3. Be accompanied by at least a basic press kit.

In this post, I’ll discuss how I reached each of these goals, which are divided nicely into the categories of Design, Engineering, and Marketing:

1. DESIGN: Building the game’s five-minute demo by scripting the attacks of Funky Franny, the game’s first boss.  By doing so, we hoped to achieve the game’s central promise of boss-fights set to music.

2. ENGINEERING: Optimizing the game so that it met the Oculus Store’s technical requirements (and didn’t trigger VR-nausea).

3. MARKETING: Building a professional and exciting presence for the game online through my press kit.

The final banner art for the project.

Design

This was far and away the most fun sprint of this game’s production because I finally had the technical foundation to fulfill the game’s central promise: boss battles set to music.

Like the movie Fantasia, we wanted all the bosses in Jukebox Beatdown to have their actions choreographed to music.

This was an intimidating goal. The song I commissioned for this project had multiple saxophone, horn, drum, synth, bass, guitar, string, and keyboard tracks each with either a unique melody or rhythm. It was a bit overwhelming to decide which sound would be paired with which attack.

To make this process easier, Ben Young, the game’s composer, designed our song so that it had four distinct, self-contained phases. We thought that these self-contained phases would make it easier for the player to notice when the music matched with the action of the game.

A screenshot of the Ableton project for the game’s song.

To cut through the noise (pardon the pun), I made a list with two columns for each of these four sections. One column had all the tracks in that section (saxophone, guitar 1, guitar 2, etc.) and the other column had a list of attacks I could create for the game. This list was an anthology of riffs on attacks I had seen in other games with great bosses, such as Dark Souls 3, Cuphead, Titan Souls, and Furi, plus some inventions of my own.

Dark Souls 3: Aldrich, Devourer of Gods Boss Fight

Cuphead: Dr Kahl's Robot Boss Fight

Furi: The Strap / The Prisoner Boss Fight

Titan Souls All Bosses + Secret Final Boss

From there, it became a jigsaw puzzle of music, visuals, and gameplay. Using the music, which was basically set in stone, as a starting point, I tried to pair the attacks and music together. The design process was complex and went like this: what fits a guitar melody better, a flurry of lasers or a series of rapidly-exploding bombs? If I tie the lasers to the guitar, that means I can’t use them for the saxophone, so what should I tie into the saxophone? If the lasers are more difficult than the bombs, maybe they should be with the saxophone, which comes in predominantly at the end of the song – but now I am using the bombs for the horns, so what should go with the guitar now? Moving one element displaced another.

This process of experimentation continued until we had built out the first several phases of Franny’s fight:

However, now that we had added all this new content, our framerate had dropped into the teens. It was time to put our engineering hat on and optimize the project.

Engineering (Optimization)

From an engineering perspective, VR development can be one of the most challenging forms of game development. One of the main reasons that VR development is so challenging is that the slightest amount of lag can make someone sick. If you’ve ever played a new game on older hardware, you’ve probably noticed the game’s graphics lagging for a moment before updating to where they should be. This is never desirable but is especially unwanted in a VR context because the slightest amount of lag can cause the player to get nauseous.

The dangers of lag.

People get nauseous when the stimuli that their eyes are receiving does not match the stimuli that the vestibular system in their ear is receiving. (The vestibular system gathers and transmits data about our body’s position through several organs in our ear.) To minimize the difference between what these stimuli, Oculus requires all desktop-connected VR content to run at 90 frames per second.

Not my diagram. I would credit this but the original link is now a 404.

Unfortunately, after my first design pass, my game was running at around 15 to 30 FPS at worst on my mid-range Razer laptop. To hit 90 FPS, I had to use many optimization tricks, including:

1. Using object pools as I mentioned in my previous blog post.

2. Eliminating almost every unnecessary UI canvas object from my scene in Unity as they were constantly being recalculated, putting unnecessary stress on my CPU.

3. Eliminating almost every dynamic light in the scene and replacing it with lightmapping, which is essentially the practice of “painting in” a scene’s lights and shadows beforehand than simulating those at runtime.

However, the most impactful step for me was reducing my draw calls.

A draw call is the directions that a CPU (Central Processing Unit) gives to the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) about what to render in a scene. Specifically, the draw call is the information that the GPU needs to render each object in the scene. While most computers’ GPUs do not struggle to execute these directions once received, preparing these directions puts significant strain on the CPU, which results in lag.

To use a filmmaking metaphor, you can imagine the CPU as a location scout and a GPU as a lightning-fast set-builder. In the context of the metaphor, the CPU is visiting the “real location” and sending instructions back to the GPU on what to build in the movie-set. The CPU/location scout looks at objects that make up the “real location” and communicates every visual detail about them to the GPU/set-builder, who recreates them.  However, to extend the metaphor, the CPU/location-scout is using a slow fax machine, so sending these details to the GPU/set-builder takes a long time and can slow down the entire process. Thus, the more succinct the directions can be, the faster the GPU will be able to build the set. We’ll use this metaphor as a way of explaining some of these optimization techniques.

Below is a timelapse that shows a scene in Jukebox Beatdown being rendered one drawcall at a time.

To reduce my draw calls, I used two techniques: mesh-baking and texture-atlasing.

Mesh-baking is when a developer takes several meshes (3d models) in their level/scene and turns them into one mesh. If we bake three meshes into one, our CPU will now need to process one draw call for those three meshes instead of three. In the context of Jukebox Beatdown, we generally baked together most meshes that shared the same shader, which is code that dictates how an object reacts to light. Our floor, for example, was made of about sixty different meshes; we baked these into one object.

To continue our movie metaphor, now that the meshes are baked together, our CPU/location-scout can describe, for example, a group of ten stereos as a group of ten stereos rather than communicate information about each stereo one-by-one. Put another way, it’s the difference between counting bowls of rice versus counting individual grains of rice. Preparing and sending the directions is the bottleneck in this context, so using succinct instructions is paramount.

All our floor meshes were baked together. With the baked-mesh turned on.

With the baked floor mesh turned off.

The original list of our floor meshes. There were 50+ floor meshes.

Texture-atlasing is the process of aggregating all a game’s textures onto one image file. If a project is not texture-atlassed, every texture in the game is contained within a unique image file. The problem with this setup is that as the number of unique images go up, the number of draw calls go up as well. So, in order to minimize the number of images that need to be sent by the CPU, developers will pack as many textures as they can onto one image or texture atlas. The GPU will then look at this atlas for every texture that it needs.

In our location-scouting metaphor, texture-atlasing would mean that instead of taking pictures of every scene in our metaphorical “real-location” and sending them through the slow fax machine, our CPU is instead sending one page that contains all the pictures.

A texture atlas for the buildings in a virtual city.

All these changes together helped us reach our technical performance goals. Now, it was time to make sure our project’s marketing was as engaging as the project itself.

Producing

The Oculus Launchpad program is highly competitive, with only three to five grants awarded to around fifty entries. I knew that some of the other entrants had teams that were five or more people strong (compared to my two) and had significantly larger budgets than I did, so I knew my project needed to look as polished and exciting as possible.

At the Oculus headquarters in San Francisco area for the presentation day.

For my project to receive the grant, it had look professional. I knew that I had the skills to reach the required level of polish as a designer and a programmer, but maybe not as a voice-actor, graphic designer, or 3D modeler. Even if I did have the skills for those later responsibilities, I knew I didn’t have the time to do them all.

I had a $200 and a month to get the project ready for Oculus.

To ensure that I would get everything I needed by the grant deadline, I made a list of what features and assets would constitute the vertical slice of Jukebox Beatdown and then planned backwards from that date (February 28th). I then prioritized each of these items by how important they were and how much lead time they would need in order to be completed. My scrum training came in handy here.

From there, to decide which items I would outsource, I took a “time is money” approach. I estimated how long each item would take in hours if I did them myself and then multiplied that number by my hourly pay. I then compared how much it would cost to pay someone to do the same job on Fiverr. When a task was significantly cheaper to due via Fiverr, I outsourced it.

Ultimately, I ended up outsourcing a considerable amount of work, including the voice-acting, poster design, logo design, and character artwork. I spent $200 between several vendors to get all these items. This amount of work took about two weeks to be delivered.

In the gallery below, you can see the final artwork followed by the original sketch I sent to the Fiverr artists:

The Final Game Banner

My Sketch of the Banner

The Final Logo

My Sketch of the Logo

Final Funky Franny Character Art

My Sketch of the Funky Franny Character Art

Final Kumquat Character Art

My Sketch of Kumquat

To do so, I started using Fiverr, a freelancing website, which was a great experience. If you decide to use Fiverr for your work, consider using my referral code, which will give you 20% off your first order: http://www.fiverr.com/s2/5b56fb53eb

Full disclosure: I will receive Fiverr credits if you sign up with the above link as part of their referral program. I am not affiliated with them in any other way. My opinions are my own.

Presentation

With my game built, optimized, and marketed, it was time to present to fly to Menlo Park, CA and present the game:

next Steps (Several Weeks Later)

Unfortunately, Jukebox Beatdown did not win any of the Launchpad grants. However, I am very happy with the project and will be polishing the vertical slice for release on itch.io so that others can play it.

Amongst other small tweaks, this next sprint will be about:

1. Adding more attacks to Funky Franny’s moveset.

2. Adding a system that ranks the player’s performance within the boss battle like this.

3. Giving the game more “juice,” which means to make the game feel more visceral.

Thank you for following the development journey of Jukebox Beatdown! You can expect one or two more blog posts about the project followed by a release on itch.io!

I Gave a Talk About my Game Jukebox Beatdown at the Oculus/Facebook Headquarters!

In February, I had the chance to talk about my rhythm-combat game Jukebox Beatdown at the Oculus / Facebook headquarters as part of the Oculus Launchpad program’s Demo Day!

During Demo Day, all of the Oculus Launchpad members are invited to Northern California to present their projects to the Oculus leadership and the other Launchpad members.

Check out a recording of the talk below!

Jukebox Beatdown Development Blog #3: Hitting Reset

This past month working on Jukebox Beatdown has been demanding but productive: I rebuilt the game’s mechanics, reconstructed my codebase, and recruited new team-members. In this blog post, I will update readers on new features within Jukebox Beatdown. Along the way, I will also talk about the challenges I faced and how I approached them as a designer and software engineer.

(The section entitled Engineering is structured more like a tutorial, so feel free to skip if you are not interested in computer science.)

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Overview

My design process is very player-centric, so playtesting (asking friends to give feedback on the game) is a crucial part of my process. My friends’ feedback provides direction for the next phase of development. If you have been following this blog, you may remember that my most recent playtest session gave me three primary notes:

1. The game needs more “juice.” In other words, there needs to be more feedback for the player’s inputs. More simply, the gameplay is not satisfying.

2. If the game is going to be marketed as a rhythm game, music needs to be a bigger part of the game’s mechanics.

3. It needs to be clear that the player’s hands are the player, not their head. Alternatively, this mechanic needs to be reworked.

4. Most importantly, the core gameplay loop (“boss fights synced to music”) sounds compelling, but the most recent execution of that idea is not engaging players.

This blog post will cover three main topics: Design, Engineering, and Producing.

An still from the previous iteration of Jukebox Beatdown. Dr. Smackz, the giant boxer pictured above, punched to the beat of Mama Said Knock You Out by LL Cool J.

Design

I am generally a bottom-up designer, which means that I try to find a fun, exciting, and unique mechanic then build other aspects of the game (story, art, engineering) around that mechanic.

While the above adjectives are subjective terms, there are a few concrete questions that can confirm the presence of each:

1. Fun: If a player plays a prototype of my game, do they want to play it a second time?

2. Exciting: When someone hears the elevator pitch for my game, do they ask a follow-up question?

3. Unique: When hears someone the elevator pitch for the game, do they assume it is a clone of an existing game? (I.E., “So it’s basically Beat Saber?”)

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, Jukebox Beatdown was passing the “Exciting” test but failing the “Unique” and “Fun” tests. People were hooked by the pitch but bored by the gameplay. They also perceived the game as being a Beat Saber-clone, when it was actually a rhythm game crossed with a bullet-hell game.

Beat Saber is one of the most famous VR games and by extension, the most famous VR rhythm game. Due to its fame, I wanted to steer clear of any mechanic that resembled Beat Saber too closely.

Given this, I decided it was time to start over and try to create a new mechanic that engaged players and incorporated music. If I could not create a new mechanic that passed these requirements in two weeks, I would put the project on ice.

My previous game’s most popular minigame revolved around using tennis rackets to keep falling eggs from hitting the ground. It was a weird game, but a fun one!

My last VR game had had success with a basic “bat” mechanic (you had to bounce eggs falling from the sky with tennis rackets), so my first inclination was to prototype a version of that mechanic that could work in the context of Jukebox Beatdown. I created a “Beat Bat” that the player could swing at enemies. If they hit the enemy on the beat, which was designated by a bullseye-like icon that shrunk as the beat approached, they would get a critical hit.

A very quick screen-grab of the Beat Bat prototype. It didn’t feel intuitive to me and it felt too similar to Beat Saber.

As a player, I found this mechanic difficult and awkward. It also felt too much like Beat Saber, so I went back to the drawing board once more.

My next idea was to have the player shoot on the song’s beat in order to apply a damage multiplier to each bullet. I was worried that this mechanic would feel shallow, but I also figured it would be accessible to less musically-inclined players, so I built a quick prototype. My first prototype rewarded the player with a more powerful bullet when they shot on the beat in 4/4 time regardless of whether a note was played at that time. I liked this mechanic, but it felt too basic and unsatisfying.

To learn how to make the rhythm mechanic more compelling, I decided to study existing rhythm games made for both VR and traditional platforms. I studied Audica, Beat Saber, and Rez Infinite, but by far the most useful game to play was Pistol Whip. Whip was useful partially because it had a similar shoot-on-the-beat mechanic, partially because its implementation of that idea was frustrating, and partially because it was built for a different kind of audience. These elements made me think of how Jukebox’s mechanic could be different and, I thought, more satisfying to its audience. (As a side note, all of the games mentioned above are excellent. My notes on the games below reflect my personal tastes rather than my opinion of the game’s quality. They are all extremely well-crafted.)

Below were my main takeaways and notes from playing those games:

Pistol Whip:

Pistol Whip is a on-rails VR shooter in which you get additional points when you shoot on the beat.

• The shoot-on-the-beat mechanic always applied even if there was no instrument playing on the beat. This created awkward moments in which you had to shoot on the beat but there was no way for you to know when the beat was occurring besides a faint visual tremor in the level’s environment art and a haptic effect on your controller.

• The shoot-on-the-beat mechanic served no strategic purpose; this made it less compelling. As far as I could tell, there was no incentive to shoot on the beat besides raising your score. I felt that this limited the appeal of the game to people who care about high scores. As someone who never felt strongly about leaderboards, this made the mechanic less interesting to me. (There are people who love this kind of mechanic, so points and leaderboards are a great idea; I just felt the mechanic was a missed opportunity.)

• The feedback for shooting on the beat was too subtle: when you shot on the beat in Pistol Whip, the only feedback you got was a red dot above the enemy you shot. This felt like a missed opportunity to reward players.

• Your hitbox was your head: in Pistol Whip, you are your head. In other words, to dodge the enemy’s bullets, you need to move your head around. I’m not a fan of this design because:

  • I personally dislike standing up for long periods of time to play a game.

  • I worry about banging my head against my furniture.

  • My hands afford me finer control than my head does.

  • This control pattern makes the game inaccessible to some players with disabilities.

Audica:

Audica is a music-shooter from Harmonix, the creator of Guitar Hero. It was one of my favorites.

• A rhythm-game can be made more interesting by requiring the player to hold down the trigger at times. This was a mechanic I had not seen in many other VR rhythm games and which I may incorporate into Jukebox Beatdown in the future.

• Audica has fantastic particle feedback for every successful hit. Particle feedback is highly satisfying.

Rez Infinite:

Rez Infinite is a critically acclaimed music-action-adventure game in which your shots are timed to the music.

• Rez Infinite made the interesting choice to ensure that the player bullets always hit the enemies on the beat by having the player lock-on to enemies and then fire homing missles rather than shoot them directly. When the beat played, the missles would fire out of the player and hit the locked-on enemies so that it appears that the player has hit the enemy in perfect time with the beat. I want to recreate this effect with the homing missles Jukebox Beatdown’s bosses will use against the player.

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With these notes in mind, I built a new prototype with changes that I felt made the gameplay more interesting:

• Shooting-on-the-beat became a risk vs reward mechanic. If a player shot on the beat consistently, they would be awarded an increasing damage multiplier: their first shot on the beat would multiply their damage by two, their next shot would multiply their damage by three, and so on. However, if the player missed the beat or was hit by an enemy, their multiplier would reset to one. This gave players two options: they could either time their shots to the beat in pursuit of a high damage multiplier (but have to lower their firing rate to do so) or they could ignore the multiplier and simply blast away, making up for their lack of damage per bullet with a higher firing rate.

• Shooting-on-the-beat was made more dramatic. As the player shot on the beat, their bullets would grow larger and change color. Additionally, a Guitar Hero-esque combo counter was tied to the player’s hands.

With the shoot-on-the-beat mechanic on firmer ground, it was time to incorporate more music into the boss’s attack patterns. In my previous prototype, I had programmed the prototype’s boss, a giant boxer, to punch the player on the beat. However, almost none of my playtesters perceived that the boss’s attacks were tied to the music and some even expressed that they wished that it had been! 

It was time to turn things up a notch. I felt that if players did not recognize events on the beat, they might recognize specific actions tied to specific notes. With some engineering secret sauce, I put together a pipeline that automatically tied notes to specific game-events. For example, a C# note could fire a rocket while a B note would shoot a laser.

The red bullets that the Beat Brothers are dodging are triggered by notes within the song’s melody.

However, as I will note in the Looking Forward section, this change was still too subtle for players to notice.

Engineering

This section is more technical in nature and resembles a tutorial. If you are not interested in computer science, feel free to skip this section.

After I implemented the above mechanics, I found the game had two big problems: poor performance and significant disorganization. 

Performance:

Due to the high number of projectiles on screen and some funkiness with my music-syncing plugin, Jukebox was crashing within ten seconds of start.

To fix this, I implemented a game programming pattern called an Object Pool. The purpose of an Object Pool is to enable a program to generate and manipulate large groups of in-game objects without adversely affecting performance. Large groups of objects can cause problems because the operations for Creating and Destroying these objects are computationally expensive, especially when executed many times per frame. To sidestep this issue, the Object Pool instead generates objects at program-start then places them within a “pool” of similar objects. When one of these objects is required, it is activated and moved to where it needs to be. Once it is no longer needed, it is deactivated until it is required once more. This saves performance significantly because it removes the need to perform many expensive Create and Destroy operations.

In the case of my game, this pattern was a lifesaver because the gameplay evolved to include up to 80 bullets on-screen at any given time. With this pattern in place, I was able to eliminate crashes.

As the bullets go offscreen, they are deactivated and returned to the pool. From Ray Wenderlich.com, one of the many resources I used to learn how to create an Object Pool. Click on the link above to learn more about Object Pools.

Organization:

Once I felt more confident about the project’s direction, it was time to refactor my code.

During prototyping, my code had gotten messy and found myself losing time because I was writing multiple versions of the same few functions for similar classes. For this reason, I decided to create some basic Inheritance Trees.

If you are not familiar with Inheritance Trees, it is a manner of organizing code so that it incorporates basic is-a relationships. Is-a relationships are useful because they allow us to define objects using abstract terms rather than stating every attribute of every object from scratch. The textbook example is classifying animals:

Assume that you do not know what a Dog is, but you do know what an Animal is. If I tell you that a Dog is an Animal, you may, for example, know that an Animal is living and that it can reproduce, so a dog must also be able to do those things. Rhinos and Chickens, by virtue of being Animals, must also have these attributes.

Assume now that you know what a Dog is but you do not know the traits of particular Dog breeds. If you know a Dog has ears and four legs, you can assume that a Greyhound, Chihuahua, and Great Dane do as well. That is the value of an Inheritance Tree: it enables you to define objects/classes without having to repeat yourself.

To write the inheritance tree for my health functionality, I took all my health classes and wrote down all their properties and functions. I then identified which properties and functions I wanted in every object that had health. These “essential” functions and properties were then put into my most basic health class. After this class was written, I worked myself “down” the tree, creating increasingly more specific classes as necessary.

One advantage of an inheritance tree like this is that it helped me enforce certain design standards. For example, I wanted every object to play a sound effect and spawn an explosion effect when it “died” so that combat always felt dramatic. By defining this functionality in my base Health class, it was included in all the sub-classes (descendants of the base Health class like EnemyHealth, PlayerHealth, BossHealth) so I did not have to remember writing the same functionality for every sub-class. 

Producing

One of the more challenging aspects of this project has been finding appropriate and compelling music on a tight budget.

Fortunately, I’m excited to announce that Benjamin Young, a composer whose credits include Love, Death, & Robots and Star Wars: The Old Republic, will be composing and recording an original disco song for the game’s vertical slice! Check out more of Ben’s awesome music here!

For the last bit of exciting news, I’m happy to say that we have a new logo! In my next blog post, I will introduce our new poster and concept art as well!

Looking Forward

After implementing the above changes, I hosted a playtest party in December to see how players would react.

The response from the twelve play-testers was generally positive and it was clear that the next move would be augmenting these changes rather than changing direction once more.

 The critical feedback grouped around three main points:

• The shoot-on-the-beat mechanic could be made more complex. In its current iteration, the shoot-on-the-beat mechanic is tied to the snare drum section of Disco Inferno. Some playtesters felt that the rhythm section be made more complex.

• The boss’s attacks need to be made more interesting. At present, the boss follows a simple attack pattern in which he moves around the stage then does a special attack in which he spins while shooting many green pellets. This needs to be made more interesting.

• The player needs more interesting choices within the game-loop. The risk-vs-reward dynamic in the shoot-on-the-beat mechanic is interesting, but I can give the player more opportunities to make interesting choices. For example:

  • Create “beat zones” that reward the player additional points when the player hits the beat within them. Make this a risk vs reward mechanic by putting the zones in dangerous spots.

  • Build a mechanic around holding down the trigger.

  • Reward the player for alternating which Brother/hand shoots on the beat.

• There needs to be clearer feedback for the player’s actions. Combos, hits, and boss attacks need more visual and audio feedback.

Thank you for following the development of Jukebox Beatdown! To get blog posts, beta-invitations, and launch coupons for the game delivered to your inbox, sign up for our mailing list below:

Exciting News: I have been accepted into Oculus's 2019 Launch Pad program!

I’m excited to announce that I have been accepted into the 2019 iteration of Oculus’s Launch Pad program!

What is Launch Pad?

If you’re not in the world of VR, Oculus is the world’s preeminent VR hardware company. They are known for building some of the world’s most popular VR headsets, including the Oculus Rift and the Oculus Quest, their amazing new standalone VR headset.

The Oculus Quest.

The purpose of Oculus’s Launch Pad program is to populate the VR ecosystem with new and diverse content. At the start of the program, one hundred developers from North America are invited to San Jose to attend a two-day VR bootcamp led by Oculus. They are also invited to Oculus Connect, Oculus’s flagship VR conference, that same week. After this initial training, Launch Pad members are provided technical support as they develop vertical slices of the projects they initially pitched to Oculus in the application stage. In early 2020, these developers will have the opportunity to pitch their vertical slices to Oculus again in hopes of gaining funding and ideally, launching their game on the Oculus store.

Some amazing projects have come out of Launch Pad in previous years, including Bizarre Barber, an awesome VR action game from NYU. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work towards creating a VR demo of the same caliber.

For my application to Launch Pad, I submitted Jukebox Beatdown, a VR boss-rush game in which every boss fight is a distinct interactive music video.

In Jukebox Beatdown, you play as Kleft and Kright, two up-and-coming alien musicians that are tied to the player’s left and right hands respectively. Your goal is to make it to the top of the Billboard Galaxy Top 10. To do so, you will need to battle the existing Top 10 musicians in a series of fast-paced, music-themed boss fights.

For more detailed information about Jukebox Beatdown, please read my initial post about the project.

Kleft and Kright’s first album. If these characters look familiar, that is because they are Goopy Le Grande from Cuphead (2017) on the left and Slime from Dragon Quest (1986) on the right. They will be replaced when we finalize our concept art.

So What’s Next?

Right now, I am exploring the best way to build an awesome vertical slice of Jukebox Beatdown. Since the game is made up of a series of boss fights, I think the most logical vertical slice would be a single boss fight.

To create this vertical slice, I will need to achieve the following:

1. Find or commission original music for the boss’s score.

2. Nail down the game’s mechanics as I outlined in the previous blog post.

3. Sync the game’s visuals to its music in a satisfying and clear manner.

4. If there is time, optimize the project so that it approaches the technical requirements for the Oculus store.

Most likely, I will not hit step four and not totally complete step three. However, I think the game should be able to stand on its own should that happen. In game producing, I believe you should find what makes your game fun first then build everything else around that element.

I’m excited to see San Jose and attend Launch Pad!

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Will you be at Oculus Connect and/or Launch Pad? If so, fill out the form below and we can meet up!

New Project in Preproduction: Jukebox Beatdown

I’m excited to announce that I am in preproduction on a new Virtual Reality game tentatively titled Jukebox Beatdown! In this post, I will discuss what this project is, why I am working on it, and what I hope it will become.

Jukebox Beatdown is a VR boss-rush game in which every boss fight is a distinct interactive music video.

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Wait, What’s a Boss-rush Game?

“Boss-rush” games are a subgenre of the action genre in which the entire game is a series of boss fights. Popular examples from this subgenre include Cuphead, Titan Souls, and Shadow of the Collossus.

An epic battle from the Shadow of the Collossus.

So why make one?

One of the great things about boss-rush games is that they afford their designers significant room to craft dramatic moments. Since the game is focused on a small number of set-pieces, far more time can be invested in giving each boss a strong, memorable personality. This is important for me because I want to create a game that is manageable but also has a strong, unique aesthetic.

The bosses in the dazzling Cuphead ooze personality.

The other great thing about boss-rush games is that they are very modular. In most boss-rush games, you can take a boss or two out of the game and still have a complete experience. This is important for me because I am currently working fulltime and have limited availability to work on this project. Whether I get around to making three bosses or ten, I want to make sure I can deliver a complete experience to players.

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You play as Kleft and Kright, two up-and-coming alien musicians looking to make it to the top of the Billboard Galaxy Top 10.

Kleft and Kright’s first album. If these characters look familiar, that is because they are Goopy Le Grande from Cuphead (2017) on the left and Slime from Dragon Quest (1986) on the right. They will be replaced when we finalize our concept art.

To do so, you will need to battle the existing Top 10 musicians in a series of fast-paced, music-themed boss fights.

Some ideas for bosses that the Handymen could battle.

Every boss will have a unique song, art style, and attack pattern.

I want the player to feel like they are stepping into the world of music when they play this game. To achieve this, each boss fight’s environment will be themed after a prototypical music video from their genre of music. For example, you might fight a grunge-themed musician in a rusted, sepia-tinted industrial park or a classic music conductor in a large, ornate orchestra hall. Below are some music videos from our moodboard. These videos were all chosen because they have a strong, consistent visual style.

Deee-Lite - "Groove Is In The Heart" (Official Music Video)

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit (Official Music Video)

LL Cool J - Mama Said Knock You Out (Official Video)

The Trammps - Disco Inferno

Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam (Official Video)

Beastie Boys - Sabotage (Official Music Video)

In the same way that each boss will have a unique art style and song, they will also have a unique attack pattern that compliments their song. For example,

• A dubstep-themed boss might launch a cascade of bullets when, “the beat drops.”

• A heavy metal-themed boss might swing his “axe” around to hit the player.

• A disco-themed boss might take the form of a giant disco ball that rolls around the stage to crush the player.

In most cases, these bosses will take after a common “boss battle” archetype. These are some of the boss archetypes from our moodboard:

A "Bullet Hell" Boss

A "Swinger" Boss: Executioner Smough from Dark Souls (2011)

A "Charger" Boss: From Binding of Issac: Rebirth

The "Giant" Boss: Colossus of Rhodes from God of War II

Gameplay

To defeat these bosses, the player will need to pilot Kleft and Kright, the two aliens living on their hands, around attacks while simultaneously “spitting beats” (musical notes) at the bosses. One thing that makes this game fairly unique among VR action games is that the player is represented by their two hands rather than their body. I made this decision because I found that this gives players more precise control than a typical VR control scheme in which an imprecise hitbox stands in for the player’s body. Boss-rush games are very skill-based, so it is important that when the player dies, they feel like they are at fault, not the game.

Spartaga VR has a similar control paradigm to this game. Your hand is you.

To keep the game interesting, I want to experiment with introducing some rogue-like elements to the boss-rush. These would include:

• Implementing permadeath (when you die, you have to start over.)

• Randomizing the order of the bosses each time you play.

• Giving the player random upgrades each time they start the game and beat a boss.

These elements could limit the audience of the game to more hardcore players, but I also think it could add a great deal of replay value to the game.

What’s next

In my current demo of the game, you go through a short tutorial and fight Dr. Beatz, an enormous boxer punching to the beat of LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out.” 

While early playtesters have generally responded positively to the game’s concept and theme, it’s clear that there is still work to do in terms of making the core gameplay loop exciting. These tasks include:

• Adding more “juice” to the game (making the game’s mechanics feel more impactful).

• Incorporating music more into the game’s mechanics.

• Making it more clear that the hands are the player.

Though there is a lot of work to do, I am excited to begin this process!

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