Beat Hell

As I said previously I was thinking of making a Bullet Hell generated to music. Well after playing around with my earlier attempt at beat detection I think I have finally got a solid system, I grab a snapshot of the spectrum from channels 0 and 1 with a buffer size of 1024, after normalizing the data I save it to a variable which I then use to find the average beat size and work off that. Since all this information is gathered in real time as the music file is being played it won't be the best it can be, however I have played many songs on it now and feel it's working very nicely.

I started with just a player controlled by the mouse and an enemy floating at the top of the screen spitting out bullets according to the music playing. Obviously this was not something that would entice a player. I then added 2 turrets, one on each side of the screen, after much fiddling I set it up so the turrets would fire on the heavy beats like drum hits, while the main enemy focused more on guitar and vocals etc. I also added a simple ability for the player to shoot.

While in my usual chat #gmc I introduced my game subtly (by which I mean provided a download link and instructions on how to play). A few people were more than slightly interested and provided some songs for me to test. One of which was a speedcore song, he suggested it more as a joke since the speed of the beats are insane, so obviously I spent the rest of the time trying to get it to work. After bumping up the fps to 120, lowering the beat threshold and allowing more beats to be detected per second my game finally managed to run the song almost perfectly, that song is now one of the ones I use to test my games new features.

Later I added a simple scoring mechanic, 1 point every time you shoot the enemy, your score gets halved when you get shot. Deciding it was too hard when I couldn't get above 500 points I changed the halving to quartering and set the player to fire 5 bullets at a time (which is 50 bullets per second). I put in 4 levels of difficulty: Easy, Normal, Hard, Insane.

That is basically where I am at in the development of this game. I'm having fun testing out different songs on different difficulties. I have a few favourites already, my most being Sakura a song in Step Mania (you can listen to it here). This is a screen shot of Sakura being played on Hard difficulty:

As you can see the game is pretty dull and basic at the moment, but hopefully I can get some custom graphics into it soon before a demo. My main concern now is replay value, as it stands it has nothing to keep you coming back so I will need to think up some ways of making gullible gamers return!

My next move will be implementing a menu so players can comfortably browse their music and change modes/difficulty. And I will certainly post when I get a demo up! Let's hope I don't get bored of this one too quickly.