Beat Street by solluxx
A rhythm city building game. Build a sustainable city by managing the needs of each building, pollution, crime, happiness, fires, and more! Every building you add creates a new note on the rhythm bar that you must upkeep. Missing notes will mean that building won't do its job that day. You'll need a good city planning strategy, quick fingers, and superior rhythm to build the biggest city you can.
Controls
- Q, W, E, R - Plays the corresponding note on the rhythm bar
- Space - Toggles pause mode
- Mouse - Use to choose and place buildings
- Numbers 1-9 - Toggles the different overlays (supplied electricity, water, etc)
The Buildings
- Residential - Increased population and generates income, pollution, and crime
- Fire Station - Fights fires that occur nearby
- Police Station - Lowers crime nearby
- Generator - Supplies power buildings that need electricity
- Pumping Station - Supplies water to buildings that need water
- Waste Disposal - Lowers pollution nearby
- Entertainment - Increased happiness nearby
How to play
- The goal of the game is to maintain the highest population and happiness you can.
- When you place a building it will be added to the rhythm bar as a note. This note will repeat once a day.
- If you don't play a buildings corresponding note it won't function that day. For example, missing a fire station's note means it won't fight fires on that day!
- Happiness is determined by how well you control pollution and crime around these residential buildings. You can use entertainment buildings to increase it as well.
- Watch out for fires! If you don't put them out they will burn down the building and spread!
- You can use space bar to pause the game and take a breather if you are getting overwhelmed. While paused you can look at the overlays and switch you selected building but not place buildings.
- Each note you play costs a small amount of money. Be wary of spamming the notes when there are no building notes to play!
- Try and play each note when it is close to within the light blue lines on the rhythm bar.
- You can track each day using the clock in the bottom corner or the yellow new day line on the rhythm bar. New days mean income from your residential buildings and the reset of all your buildings notes.
- Try and time your building placements on the rhythm bar to create consistent beats that you can play without looking.
How big can you make YOUR beat street become?
| Windows | https://solluxx.itch.io/beat-street |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/beat-street |
Ratings
| Overall | 423th | 3.591⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 797th | 3.071⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 87th | 4.05⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 309th | 3.929⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 530th | 3.548⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 604th | 2.875⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 882th | 2.333⭐ | 17🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 844th | 2.971⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 15🗳️ | 15🗨️ |
The mix of elements is pretty smart.
The rhythm part isn't very rhythmic, more just a grind (which i'm okay with).
I enjoyed the city build portion. I'd enjoy seeing this game more fleshed out! Interesting entry!
I really enjoyed this game! I LOVE LOVE LOVE the meta of placing buildings in easy to remember patterns. It definitely changes the quality of your town that you create. My first go around was met with an awful lot of fires. Once I got it down... it was very prosperous!
I guess my only wish was that the game would "help" your music somehow. I have no idea how you'd do that, but my "music" at the end was... not great. Of my own accord of course! But I wish there was a handicap for that. :)
Great job! Super impressed!
@diptoman I completely agree, a soft rhythm in the bg would really help I think. Definitely something I would add if we worked on it further. We actually wanted to go down to three notes instead of four, both for difficulty and keyboard support reasons but the work to remove features would have taken too much time. Thanks for your input!
With a bit of polish, I think this could be a real gem! Good job, and keep at it, guys!
It's a neat idea, but I think the rhythm track needs to scroll faster to keep me interested (and stop when I'm doing city editing). And if the game ended up emerging some funky beats, turning the city into a musical instrument, it would be awesome.
The rhythm mechanism is slow enough to let you build and understand how things work, so the experience is smooth and fun.
I agree with the comments saying it lacks some music track a bit.
Graphics are very beautiful and placing elements more and more wisely is really fun!
One thing though, I don't know how you manage the keyboard in your code, but changing the layout on my system to qwerty didn't work, it was still recognize as azerty. (I should try with windows instead of linux, maybe this would fix this issue). After a moment of practice this was not a problem anymore, even if I had to manage q and w with the same finger ^^
This is really a great work, I loved the experience!
* Is there a way to see the building's area of effect if it is already built? I mean, I could always hover a new one of the same type on the same cell, but that's additional hassle.
* Maybe show which (empty) cells have water and electricity supplied? Little icons or something. That would make the point above redundant.
* Some background beat would be nice.
* Show which building's note is currently playing. It may be important for supply buildings.
But that's really picking. I would expect that stuff from Steam-level game (if you want to make one), not from a jam entry.
Suggestions ...
Introduce the elements gradually (in a type of tutorial, especially for beginners in the genre).
Put a background song that matches the sound elements (SFX).
Keep working! :)
What do you think of mine? :)
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/sam