Dance Assassin
I’m a huge fan of music games, and like trying to think of ways to extend music gameplay to other genres. An idle thought about the similarities between trying to move through a crowded dance club and moving through crowds in Assassin’s Creed made me realize that there’s never been (to my knowledge) a rhythm/stealth game. Sounds like a great idea for a prototype!
I decided to implement a prototype that followed two blind leaps of logic: An assassin in a dance club would be conspicuous, but people are unlikely to take notice of somebody who’s dancing like everyone else.
I had been warned that Flash often performed poorly with rhythm games, and was likely to go out of sync, so I made an audio engine the center of this prototype. After I composed a simple song to serve as the music, I chopped it up into pieces four seconds long each, which I numbered and gave to the audio engine. Rather than playing an entire song file, the audio engine keeps track of time and begins playing each piece of the song when the appropriate time arrives, allowing any synchronization errors to automatically correct themselves every four seconds. In addition to this, the audio engine flags which ‘beat’ of the song it is currently playing, allowing actions handled by the rest of the game (such as initiating dance steps) to match up with the music being played.
The biggest issue I encountered with this prototype once I had gameplay up and running was balance. If the stealthiness decreased too slowly, there was no reason to dance; if it decreased too quickly, the game became very unforgiving. Likewise, I needed to find a happy medium for how much stealthiness is gained by dancing to land somewhere between requiring the player to spend a significant amount of time dancing (since it is the core gameplay mechanic) against not making clearing a level too time consuming (since most people do have other things to do). After replaying the levels over and over, and trying to break the mechanics whenever possible, I felt I eventually managed to arrive at a set of numbers that worked.
Of course, one thing that I realized shortly after this became playable was that it wasn’t truly a stealth game: since the final gameplay is more a matter of managing numbers and charting a path, it seems more like a puzzle game than anything else. In future iterations, the ’stealth’ aspect could be increased by lights that move across the dance floor, and dancers that shift across the floor in a more realistic fashion, possibly taking offense and drawing attention to you if you step too closely to them.