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Rhythmic Ruckus!
Video Showcase
Rhythm Ruckus is a 1st person shooter where almost everything has some sort of action with every beat. Cannon balls fire at this beat, your grapple launches you on the beat, spikes retract and poke out and even some enemies move via the beat.
This beat will progressively get faster the higher your score multiplier becomes. This multiplier increases the more your score increases. The multiplier will go back to normal though if you either die or don't gain score in a quick enough fashion.
One great way to gain score is by finding mini-game rooms hidden around the map. Collide with a mini-game spawner and you'll be teleported to a mini-game room. These mini-games last a small amount of time however you can gain quite a lot of score from doing these!
At the end of the level, you get rated based off your score.
There is also another part of this project which allows you to mess around with a synth. There's not much else to this part of the game however feel free to play around with it and have fun!
Development-Behind The Scenes
Greetings! Welcome to my page!
During my 1-up scheme placement at the University of Staffordshire , I learnt about quartz clocks and MetaSound. These were both really interesting tools and through this curiosity, I decided to revolve my project around these 2 core concepts.
Through this idea, a lot of concepts came to fruition. Spikes which would appear and disappear to the beat, enemies which would only move to the beat, player abilities which would be more efficient or only work on the beat and so much more. The idea of ramping up difficulty to reward player skill also eventually crossed my mind as I thought that adding this would help make the game feel more satisfying to pull off. The player would get rewarded with skilful play by allowing certain player moves to register quicker, whilst still making other aspects more challenging to balance that reward.
In this section of the page, I'm going to discuss the BPM/point system, the synth as well as other mechanics I made with audio in mind.
BPM System
The BPM system was made with quartz clocks, as mentioned previously. This quartz clock will then
fire an interface everytime the beat increases.
This interface then gets shared between each actor by grabbing the game mode and using it
as a reference for the interface message. Not only does this create a hierarchy which each actor
can follow easily; but it also helps keep the game optimised and reduces the chance for the
code to feel like a mess to follow along with.
With this, I made it so a multi-tude of actors interact with this interface differently. Something
I wanted to get right though was the UI as I had to try find a way to tell the player that a beat
is taking place, even if there's no audio playing. This is because I wanted this game to still be
accessible to players which either need to play the game on mute or suffer with hearing issues.
The solution I came up with involved the UI bouncing with the beats of the music. Not only did
this help remedy that issue but it also greatly enhanced game feel as each beat now had
a lot more impact.
The synth was a really interesting deep dive into MetaSound and how it interacts
with elements in Unreal Engine. This is because this synth was one massive metasound with its own individual patches and filters.
Because of this extensive MetaSound, I was able to replicate noise generators, tune,
deformers and much more.
For the visuals here, I decided to try replicate a synth in a 3D space by utilising line traces. To do this, I created a new player character which would shoot down line traces once it entered "synth mode". Once here, there would be actors which interact
with the line trace in different ways. These synth actors were children of a main actor
which would interact with a line trace and this let me create a lot of children with
wildy different functions. For example, the keys move down before returning to their
original position and the knobs use percentage maths to change rotation, based on the actors current value. These actors would then communicate with the metasound and would help warp the sound that we can hear from the synth.
Synth
Other audio mechanics
There were even more mechanics in this game which aren't affected by the BPM however.
One mechanic I created was an NPC which would turn to face the player and would create dialogue if you got close enough. The sounds these characters speak is simply a voice line which plays for a couple of milliseconds, before looping a certain amount of times. This voice line would also have its pitch, tempo and overall distortion dictated by random valus. The actual loop amount would depend on the length of the text that the NPC would display; making the NPC speech modular as a result.
I also made it so whenever you collect coins, the sound effect increases in pitch the more you collect. This was done to create a more satisfying feeling whenever you collect a bunch of coins in a row.
Another mechanic I created were enemy damage sounds. Each time you hit an enemy, you would hear a pop. This pop however would increase the less health the enemy has; to help create a satisfying audio effect. This was once again calculated by the enemies health percentage; once again making this effect modular. (It also made attacking an enemy with a lot of health really satisfying).
Thanks for Reading!
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