DJRPG
The latest result of my holy quest to shove music elements into genres where it just doesn’t belong: a music RPG battle system.
So: The leader of your party of heroes is a DJ, who prepares for each quest by preparing a playlist of music. Each song has a special effect (such as buffing or debuffing allies, enemies, or both) that takes hold whenever it plays. After preparing the playlist and charging into battle, it’s the DJ’s responsibility to use his controlling techniques (in this example, restarting a song and skipping to the next one) to make sure the current music maximizes his allies’ effectiveness.
On the menu screen, select the music you want to use with the numbers 1 – 6 (though I really don’t recommend using 6). Once you’ve begun the battle, the left and right arrows select which hero you’re controlling, A and D select which robot your current hero is attacking, and up and down select your hero’s next action. Once a character’s time meter (the second bar, below the health meter) fills up, he will launch an attack at whichever enemy he’s currently targeting. Selecting a special technique (anything besides “ATK”) will empty your time meter, rather than reverting it to 50%. The DJ on the left can restart the currently playing track or skip to the next one, the hipster in the center can use his incredible apathy to permanently raise the party’s defenses, and the metalhead on the right can perform an attack so vicious and violent it hurts him as well as the enemy. There’s no win or lose screen this time; for that I’m very sorry.
The mostly-automatic battle system wasn’t part of the original plan for this, but sprung up by necessity: if the song currently playing has a significant effect on the battle, the player cannot be allowed to idle while selecting his moves to “wait out” an unfavorable song. I initially looked at using something like Final Fantasy’s Active Time Battle system, but decided to go with the current system — players setting the actions their heroes will eventually perform when they gain the ability to act, rather than quickly inputting the command for the attack after the hero is ready — because I wanted the battle system to feel less frantic than ATB based ones often are.
The demo here is a microcosm of what a full game of this would ideally be: were I to develop this into a full game, you would likely make a playlist of full-length songs (rather than short clips) at the beginning of a dungeon, and use that playlist throughout the entire dungeon. In that case, rather than trying to plan out a single battle, you’d be plotting out the next 10 – 20 minutes, trying to balance healing and buffs with what you expect to come at you in each section of the dungeon. Admittedly, planning that far in advance would be difficult to do blindly, so there would have to be some way of getting a vague idea of the dungeon’s layout in advance (such as blueprints stolen from an enemy or an overheard comment regarding especially well-shielded robots on the third floor)
Another feature I would really like to see in a full version is giving users the ability to use their own music collection within the game. This could manifest in two ways: either players find items with predetermined effects they choose to pair up with a song (for example, the player finds a song that raises his party’s attack, then chooses a song from his hard drive that will be his attack-boosting song from now on); or players simply selecting songs and the game parsing the ID3 tags and analyzing the song itself to determine what the effect will be.
The track “Dance Assassin” (which may sound familiar, if you’ve played my other prototypes), which does nothing to aid the player but makes the enemy robots incredibly powerful, is a remainder of a mechanic I didn’t have time to implement: enemy DJs. The way the prototype currently stands, the player is free to control the music however he chooses. I think it would be interesting if there was some (rare) enemies who could disrupt this: by skipping past a particularly advantageous track, or queuing up one that hurts the player. This way, the hero’s DJ abilities would be more essential, as they would be actively fighting with the enemy for control to ensure as favorable conditions as possible.
This prototype is a little more rough around the edges than usual, since I only had about a day to throw this one together. The sample music clips are products of my band Sharks Bigger Than Sharks, mostly because they’re the closest thing to music I actually own the rights to.