Space Drummer by Guilloteam
Oh no! Music has been outlawed in Space !
Set your drum loop to customize your fire rate, and go fight the Music Space Police!
// The game now has a post Ludum Dare update, that you can find on the itchio links below. We also plan to work on it a little bit, to see where we can go with it!
Controls :
Mouse to create your Drum Loop
Arrows / WASD to Move
A game by Michael Assing, Delphin Casado, Adrien Jeannerod, Julien Revel and Clément Ribeyre-Soret.
| Youtube | https://guilloteam.itch.io/space-drummer |
| Youtube | https://guilloteam.itch.io/space-drummer |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/space-drummer |
Ratings
| Overall | 48th | 4.238⭐ | 103🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 75th | 4.124⭐ | 103🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 30th | 4.275⭐ | 102🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 165th | 4.188⭐ | 103🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 153th | 4.314⭐ | 104🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 13th | 4.525⭐ | 102🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 200th | 3.725⭐ | 91🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 149th | 4.047⭐ | 98🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 163🗳️ | 112🗨️ |
I did find a fun bug tho. If you alt+tab for a while and come back into the game, you'll get a minigun xD
The only thing I would love to see added is a point / scoring system. At the moment there's really no incentive to kill the space ships who are just flying by. Give it a point system and this game is absolutely awesome.
We try to break the game by making a fake rythm, and it still worked well with the background music !
Gameplay is a bit left behind, we focus a lot on the music (but it's the point of the game so...)
I would like to see the ship a bit faster, and see some specials attacks if you press buttons in rythm !
Really good job, well done ! :smile:
Thanks for this, music is so good and train in the game.
(Can have link to level music to listen it ?)
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/762553836?t=01h43m03s
It's a 5 stars for me! :smile:
I was initially going to make the complaint that there's no enough incentive to create loops that are musically nice/interesting, but then I realized that the process of trying to find a powerful loop means you get to experience a lot of drum patterns that you'd never key in yourself. which is actually super super cool.
it's also quite hard! how many levels are there?
some criticisms:
- often felt a bit like the drum loop was disconnected from the music; generally I don't think my rhythms matched super well to the backing track.
- gameplay readability could be better. in a game like this where there's a lot of action and different things going on, keeping the visual noise low is important imo. of course the graphics do look very nice, and these two things make a difficult balancing act. I think I'd be happier just with a bit more contrast for the projectiles.
- in theory you don't have to use 4+1+4+4, but as far as I could tell there was no gameplay reason not to max out. there's already a decent bit of space to play around with those beat numbers, but I think I'd prefer some more flexibility. a couple of obvious ideas off the top of my head: you could have some direct flexibility, where you have a total of 16 points and can put them where you want (if ride "costs 4"), or something similar; maybe with beats after the 4th costing double (so you could sacrifice two snares for a kick, or whatever). another idea is having fewer beats gives you a faster tempo, etc. I don't know what would actually be the most interesting though ^^
- it's a direct use of "loop" but I didn't really feel "stuck" in the loop, you know? the loop was my friend :P I can't blame you for taking this concept and running with it though!
all in all though, I think this is a really cool design :) I've wanted to work on a rhythm + vertically scrolling shooter myself for a while now, and this is good inspiration+proof that it's a cool design space ^__^
The drum sounds do feel like they have a bit of a delay to them at the starts of the audio files, which is slightly off-putting, but it doesn't actually matter in the game. I can also see just spamming notes being the ideal win scenario here, so it's nice that you limited how many of what you can place. It does still mean you need to place the maximum allowed to be optimal, though.
I'd really like to see this made into a full game, especially with a progression system of some kind to help fix some of that. Inventive idea overall that I think you guys did a great job on.
Yeah, score system is one of the things we planned but couldn't do in time, you're totally right about the lack of incentive to destroy eneemy ships ^^
just one thing ive noticed about the notes although they were fixed to a quarter note grid, the music felt like it was dragging.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/765076622
Thanks for submitting your game!
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/767511277?t=1h32m56s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
The only thing I would suggest as an improvement would be to allow players to change their beats (aka strategy) at least after each stage, perhaps even more frequently.
Almost shameless plug - check out [our experience](https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/47/stuck-in-a-loop-station), you might find you like it. While the beats are not so woven into the core mechanics of the game, it is similar in some aspects!
I think right now the most important issue to tackle is finding how the beats that you craft actually matter in the moment to moment gameplay. As of right now it's sort of decorative, as your fire rate is pretty high. If the BPM was lower, as in music generally, the intent of each note/beat would be much more pronounced, and I imagine it will affect gameplay in the same way. Tactically at least.
I would try lowering the BPM and increasing the damage of each individual projectile and then see what happens. Also, maybe try looking into different kinds of projectiles/abilities that somehow interact differently with each other, so that you can craft your own combos and get in a rhythm with them, as most combo-based games want you to do anyway.
All in all a solid entry, I'm encouraging you to keep working on it!
Our great dev @jrevel did an amazing job at updating the game, fixing some bugs and improving the general experience of the player. You can find this update on the itchio page linked above.
Thank you guys very much!
The art is awesome, by the way! It's heavily animated and there's a lot of variation in the enemy ships and backgrounds. The UI was well designed as well. It feels really professionally made in this regard.C ongrats to the artist(s), good job!
All in all, a nice twist on the vertical space shooter genre! This has a lot of potential, if you ask me :)
Keep up the good work, see you at next jam ! :D
This game was just a straight-up delight. I love the mash-up between rhythm game and SHMUP, it's genuinely something I had never seen before. I would love to see this expanded to include new instruments and backing tracks. This game has a bunch of potential for the future!
This is your first LD game but it seems like you guys have more experience than that. You have a decent sized team and a lot of polish, so have you all worked on projects together before?
Really impressive overall and it's one of the few music looping games I played this LD~
While space shooters are a tried and true staple of LD games, teams like yours that can bring fresh things to the table continue to amaze me. Needless to say, the implementation of music as a mechanic as well as the actual music of the game are delightful. And the puns at the start of each level? Very well fitting! The rest like graphics and polish are great too. Not much to say about those, other than as a whole, everything synergized quite well!
Space Drummer is a glorious experience! Your team must be very proud of it, and well earned. Keep on drumming! :whale:
I feel the feedback loop between the beat and the battle can be improved. Like the real influence of your beat design on the battle... You can experiment by adding new samples/weapons, more limits on samples or maybe even removing the ability of the player to move the ship (e.g. the movement will be determined by the beat itself). And then, given the short beat/battle cycle, you might improve the importance of the beat for the game outcome.
I think you should open the game to a short intro level, get the player familiar with at least a subset of the sounds/weapons, and then let them choose how they want their ship to be after understanding the context of those choices.
I suppose one should definitely expect something marvellous with a team as large as yours, but you certainly exceeded my expectations, especially with only one programmer on the team. I absolutely adored the concept of mixing my own drum loop and having that affect the weapons. Wonderfully executed and I always have a big soft spot for rhythm or music-based games.
I think the two things the game was lacking most was feedback and variation. The enemies were nice and effective as they were with multiple angles of attack and different projectile types, but hitting them didn't feel super satisfying. I agree with your comment that it's definitely difficult to strike a balance between useful feedback and distracting from tracking the enemy projectiles, but I'm sure with a bit of iteration you'd be able to find it. With regard to the lack of variation, I wonder if you might consider perhaps building multiple different kinds of drum loops you can switch between for different kinds of enemies, each with their own stat build - perhaps difficult stages increased the tempo or something, there's plenty you could do I think and it would be super fun.
Wonderful music, very catchy, found myself singing along to it. Loved the level names, even if I only technically made it to level 3 Ior 2nd level boss) I'm sure the post-jam version is even better and I'd love to know where you go with this game.
Thanks for hanging out on stream and well done on the excellent entry.
For a game that has an immense amount of polish in art, I was actually surprised at a seeming lack of satisfying juice to give that crunchy feel that makes your weapon fire feel powerful and satisfying. Firstly, hitting and destroying ships has no sound effects associated with it. The color blinking is too slow to be noticeable: a larger, more exaggerated animation would have helped. I would also add an explosion effect on where the bullet collided with the enemy to signify a successful hit. And of course, I'd add a good dose of hit pause for successful hits and defeating enemies.
I also thought the game could use some more balancing measures. I often felt enemies had too much health. I also felt my ship was too large, and all the bullets appeared too small, making it easy for me to get hit. It would have also been nice to slowly introduce the weapons as upgrades, and add some risk vs reward measures like a shared resource meter on all the weapons when allocating their fire timing on the drum roll.
I look forward to the future of this game, there's a lot of cool stuff I can see coming out of it!
https://youtu.be/vvR6P6ZVvL4?t=7489