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Dev Log #7: Marketing

Hello everyone, my name is James and I am a member of the marketing team working on Beat Breakers! Today I wanted to talk about some of the successes we have a found while advertising our game and what we can improve on in the future!

Success through Content

Working with the developers of Beat Breakers has been a fantastic experience as they are always willing to collaborate when it comes to marketing. When we ask for content, the artists almost always have something for us to post to help the spirit of the game as well as the overall gameplay. On top of this, the producers do a great job of reminding their team about their own blog posts and for getting us stuff to post or demos to put up on the itch page. This stream of content is super helpful, as repetition is what helps keep our game in the forefronts of our followers minds.

One issue we have found in content management is the idea of content pressure. We certainly don’t want anyone to rush through something just for the sake of meeting a deadline to give us content. We want the work to flow naturally, so it’s important to find a balance between always asking for things and staying back and pulling stuff on your own. This also goes for blog posts, since blogs seem much more sincere when written over actual events, rather than hastily scrawled at the last minute to fulfill some sort of deadline.

Community Management

One aspect of our marketing presence that we need to fix is the outreach to the community. We follow quite a few fellow indie dev peers, so it’s important to help and support them along their journey as well. Also replying to people who post on our stuff is always a good idea since this helps reinforce our brand in their minds and they come out of the interaction with a more positive attitude. We do a lot of pushing content, but at the end of the day if people don’t remember having full interactions with the team, they probably won’t be too excited for our game when launch day comes.

Thanks for reading and see you on the dance floor!

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Week 5: Music and Sound

Hello! Jacob back at it again with the dev blog. We’ve got some interesting things going on with sound this week that I’d like to share with you.

This morning, Indy and I met with sound design professor Norbert Herber. We had a very insightful conversation about how well everything is meshing together to create a cohesive audio experience within our current build of the game. There are three elements of sound design that I’ve been focusing on for this project. They are music, sound effects, and voice lines.

In terms of music, everything is falling into place well. The genre of music is well-realized and the beat is clear to the players so that they know when to move and attack. To create a more a dynamic mix, however, I need to consider adding more atmospheric sounds and instruments. When there is silence in a song that isn’t done intentionally, the music can fall flat and lose its appeal. I plan to add some white noise and tweak the drum kits to better fit the sound I’m looking for.

Sound effects are coming along nicely and will be implemented into the build soon. For this pass on sound effects I decided to focus more on how these sounds could fit within the context of the songs and the game world. Instead of being something that abruptly interrupts the player’s experience like the UI sounds, all attacks and combat sounds are from drum kits. Some sounds are layered over others to create unique percussive noises but the idea was to create effects that felt like they blend in with the song. Putting these sounds into this frame of mind makes for easy listening and a more intuitive experience for audio cues.

Voice lines are our newest addition to the game and have really added some flavor. Jon and I recorded a handful of announcer dialogue that has been implemented into the game in various ways. Some lines are set to trigger at the end of round 1, some at the end of round 2, and others that play during the match. Since we didn’t want the announcers to be too distracting while players are battling we gave these voice lines a 1 in 15 chance to be triggered when an attack lands successfully. The game pulls from a folder of voice lines so they have the potential to be different every time. The commentary adds a bit of comic relief and definitely helps to lighten the mood.

As of typing this, there are 17 days left until the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and even less before some of us leave to go on the Train Jam. At this point, it’s a race against the clock to complete our next sprint in time but we plan on finishing strong. Our second playable character Nazyilan (Naz), or snake lady as some know her, is finally in the game and polish is going well. We can’t wait to show you the progress we’ve made! Until next week!

- Jacob

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Week 4: News Update!

Greetings all, Jon Brown here (but you can call me JB). I’m the Project Manager and a designer for SendPie Studios and this week I’ll be filling you in with the latest-greatest news from the Beat Breakers team. As GDC looms over the horizon, there’s a word that echoes in the minds of developers across the globe; deadlines. They’re tricky beasts that can cripple teams if not carefully approached.

Here at SendPie, we’re constantly learning to use deadlines to fuel the fire of development in a balanced way. Pay too little attention and the flame can die out; Pile too many on and the blaze can get out of control. I’m happy to announce that we’ve found our equilibrium that has us on track to launch the Alpha in time for the conference! (*knocks on wood*)

In the past few weeks we’ve juggled team additions, revamping systems, and a necessary boost in content creation. It’s amazing for me to see how much our team’s communication and organization has grown in the short time that we’ve worked together. We owe some of this growth to the effective use of our tools of communication, Jira and Slack, but each team member’s commitment and motivation plays a large role.

Tune in next week for details about our FINAL sprint before GDC. As always, thanks for reading!

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Dev Blog: Week 3!

Hey, everyone! Welcome to week 3 of our dev blog! My name is Jacob Koonce. I’ve been doing design work as well as composing the soundtrack for Beat Breakers. I’m very excited to share what we’ve been working on with you.

In terms of design, our project manager Jon Brown and I have been working on a rock-paper-scissors system to add more depth to the game’s combat. This is actually a return to one of our earliest paper prototypes and we believe it will really spice things up on the dance floor. Basically, this system allows players to change forms between Flare (Red), Flow (Blue), and Foundation (Yellow). Each form has its own unique ability that adds variety to gameplay. While in Flare form attacks cause damage over time, Flow form allows players to stun/freeze their opponent, and Foundation form causes knock back making it easier to bump your opponent off the edges of the stage. Thanks to our programming team, we were able to implement this new combat design in our last sprint and got some valuable feedback from playtesting.

In regards to sound, I’ve been hard at work composing a 12+ track EDM album using Logic Pro 9. The Beat Breakers Main Theme will be teased on our twitter @BeatBreakersDev in the near future. I hope you’ll give it a listen! I recently finished writing the song for our second character. Since this character is themed around the desert I decided to use middle eastern instruments such as the oud and sitar. I drew inspiration from the desert worlds in Super Mario games as well as the Shantae game series. Currently, I’m working on creating a handful of sound effects. I’ve decided to move forward using mostly 8-bit SFX since this fits with the Voxel art of our game. I plan on experimenting with some hybrid effects as well by layering more dynamic real world sounds with the 8-bit ones.

The team is on track with all of our tasks and our second character should be in the game very soon. We have plenty of work left to do in terms of polish like implementing art and sound assets but we are as motivated as ever to see Beat Breakers to its completion. Thanks for reading! See you next week!

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Dev Blog: Week 2!

Hi! I’m Nick LaPlante, and this is the second weekly dev blog from SendPie Studios. For a long time, I was Beat Breakers only dedicated artist.  I am happy to announce Adam Christie is our newest team member and artist. At the beginning of this sprint we hired Adam to help us during the final push to release. With our art team doubling in size we are now able to accomplish some of our stretch goals. Today I am going to talk about what those goals are and when you can expect to see some more art previews. 

Over the past year all our screenshots have had a large expanse of space in the background of the battle stage. We always felt this space would have been better filled with some more voxels to match our stage and dancers. We also wanted to make use of this space to help tell the story of Beat Breakers. I was never able to get around to working on the background unfortunately. Thankfully, with Adam on board the background is finally getting the love it deserves. 

Being an intergalactic game show we will needs camera’s, lights, arena seating for the audience, and much more. This past week we tweeted (#BeatBreakersDev) a few teaser images of the models for the background. Including a stage add on and a shiny new stage light.  Adam is sitting right next to me as I type this working on the audience seating.

We plan on releasing another round of screen shots this week showing more of the models for the background. Looking a little into the future we will release full screen shots and gifs of our second character in a few weeks’ time. That’s all from the art team for now, Thanks for reading!

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First post: Current Progress!

Hello! I’m Indiana Reed, and this is the very first dev blog from the SendPie Studios team. We have been working on Beat Breakers, a rhythm fighter game, for a little over a year now. We just finished planning our first sprint coming back from winter break. So, I’ll talk about a big change we made from last sprint.

Before the break, we set out to make our rhythm system much more robust. In short, the rhythm system checks whether the player performed an action on beat or not (or how far off they were from the beat). This is something we originally wrote ourselves. However, our needs increased and we eventually decided we would be better off just finding/buying a solution. 

After some research, we settled on using Koreographer from the Unity asset store. I gotta say this asset is a must have for a rhythm game. The default version comes at a $40 price tag and does pretty much everything we need it to. It’s not the most intuitive asset, but it does have decent documentation so you can get the hang of it.

In the end, this gives us a lot more freedom with our soundtrack. It also increases the possibility for visual effects tied into the music. In terms of this next sprint, there’s another character in the works! Additionally, we’re working to add some environmental effects to sell our gameshow theme a little more. And of course more gameplay tweaks. That’s all I have for now. Thanks for reading! I hope you’ll join us again for our second step into devblogs.