Resonance
Tutorial
This game was developed in C++. Lua scripts were used to script enemy behavior, player attacks, and object behavior, and text files scripted in a manner determined by the team were used for levels, objects, and animations. I wrote a level editor in C# and created all of the levels, as well as almost all of the attacks and objects. As the team’s designer, I wrote the project’s Game Design Document. Additionally, I created most of the environment art.
For my second year project at DigiPen, I resolved to form a super-team to develop the best possible game in the coming year. As I led the team in designing our sophomore game, many things were up in the air, but one thing was always certain: It had to be a rhythm game.
Allegretto Rush
My team and I spent many hours that summer standing in front of some of the school’s finest whiteboards, sketching out game concepts and fighting over the most insignificant details. When fall semester began, we started creating assets and programming the game. The end result was Resonance, a rhythm/beat ‘em up game.
Resonance initially appears to play like any standard beat ‘em up: A player character walks from left to right, fighting an assortment of enemies that walk onscreen with standard attacks like punches and kicks. The difference is that all of your basic attacks are terribly weak and completely unsuitable for taking down all but the weakest enemies, so the player is forced to rely on his special attacks to effectively do battle. Performing each basic attack causes a different note to play, and playing short tunes with these notes executes powerful special attacks. As the player progresses through a level, playing one attack’s tune after another, he finds himself improvising the melody to the song playing throughout the stage.
Shadow Clone Fight
One of my main goals with Resonance was to design a game unlike anything already out there. I’ve always been a fan of games that try to push the envelope design-wise, and I figured that this was my best chance to try to do something like this: It’s a lot easier to develop a completely unproven idea when you don’t have millions of dollars on the line. This, of course, brought more than its share of difficulties: without other rhythm/beat ‘em up games to look to, we were largely flying blind in the first few stages of development. We quickly learned that new players were unable to play our game without quite a bit of guidance (solved by adding a tutorial mode), players without experience with rhythm games or musical instruments were unable to execute special attacks (fixed by steadily making the game’s judgment more and more forgiving), and that there was far too much going onscreen for a player to keep track of (addressed by implementing one UI scheme after another until we eventually reached the final state). It was only a few months into development that we found ourselves too experienced with the game to come to any sort of conclusion regarding the learning curve, so we had to constantly seek out new waves of focus testers to let us know whether or not our game was actually playable.
Noise
In the end, we managed to end up a game that we were all rather pleased with. It was a rather startling moment the first time I went to debug a new feature and found that I was actually having fun testing it, and things just got better as we progressed through development and got to see more and more people enjoying our game. My overall goals were always to do something new and to add another entry to the (then) sparse field of rhythm games, but making a game that people like to play was a pretty nice thing to accomplish, too.
Resonance is available for free download from DigiPen Institute of Technology.
My team was interviewed by GameTap for a story on game development programs while we were producing Resonance, and by GameCareerGuide after the project was complete. The stories can be found below:
- School of Thought: DigiPen (via archive.org)
- Inside the IGF 2009: Sneak Peek at Resonance