Beat Boxes by PonyGirlLuna
Beat Boxes
You're a sorter at CarePackage.
Your job is to get boxes off the belt and into the right truck. How hard could it be? Smack the boxes off the conveyor belt and (sometimes) into right place—all to a beat. And try not to set them on fire. Or do. I'm not your boss.
Beat Boxes is a difficult (but impossible to fail), mouse-based rhythm game and features an in-game calibration system.
Controls
This game only requires use of a mouse. No clicking (outside of menus) required!
ESC to pause.
Swipe across the screen to hit boxes.
| itch.io | https://ponygirlluna.itch.io/beat-boxes |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/53/beat-boxes |
Ratings
| Overall | 437th | 3.713⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 211th | 3.85⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 147th | 3.913⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 365th | 4.125⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 407th | 3.964⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 502th | 3.244⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 632th | 3.487⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 37🗳️ | 64🗨️ |
Edit: got the Linux build sorted out and it's now available
One thing that was slightly tricky for me was that it was a bit hard to "reset" to the middle to get ready for the next note sometimes if notes were arriving quickly, because the zone between left and right was relatively narrow.
But overall, I had an absolute blast! Good choice of music as well - it was the perfect music for shoving those boxes around to the beat. Great work!
The hit zones are 100% the first thing I want to improve upon. Resetting or hanging out in the middle is much harder, as hit detection is performed in the center of the screen (and I didn't communicate this well enough) as opposed to two different zones nearer the boxes. It works for a prototype, but for a more involved effort, I would certainly test out better hit detection.
Pretty fun concept though
I pained through it regardless, at the least I got to see the cute "Wrong way ;_;" and "Missed D8" quite a lot xD Somehow got some perfects by total fluke. Managed a highscore of -320,300. Let's see anyone beat that 8)
I'd love to get to play it properly!
Controls are a bit janky (couldn't really understand how the collision on the mouse cursor works). On mobile or tablet, swiping the boxes could feel really nice.
The music is damn catchy though ! Great job :)
The music was fun too and you did a good job of syncing the visuals with the music, as a musician I really appreciated that touch.
However, at times it was hard for me to keep my eye on the cursor and I would end up missing boxes because I couldn't see where the cursor was. I think the main contributor to that was having the accuracy feedback message right over the cursor. I would lose the dot under all the text. Maybe it could benefit from some feedback when the cursor enters and leaves the playable area that sends boxes to their trucks. Like perhaps the world shakes briefly and there's a subtle bump noise as the cursor passes the threshold.
I still enjoyed playing this! Thank you for sharing this with us all!
Overall, great job on the game! In fact, it even made me want to be hired by Amazon at some point xb
And there is some kind of humor to see the boxes stacking all over everywhere :yum:
43,880 on my second try
44,390 on my third try
Honestly this was a really fun game! The graphics look great, the music is fits well (even if you didn't make it), and everything just feels good together. The controls are very responsive which is nice as well.
The only problem I had was the fact that although they were responsive, they felt quite janky. For a rhythm game, this is an extremely important aspect that can not be overlooked. Luckily it wasn't enough to ruin my enjoyment of the game, but definitely something to watch out for next time.
Oh also that stupid bridge/interlude part was way too hard. The rest of the song in comparison was a cake walk
Overall great entry!
@mateu Thank you so much! I'm glad you had a good time! That's a seriously impressive score, too—highest I've seen yet by a fair margin.
I was wondering, though: could I, perhaps, pick your brain about what you thought didn't quite work for the controls? I suspect it's a combination of accidentally hitting boxes in the wrong direction when trying to reset and lack of clarity on the actual location where hits are tested (dead center of the screen instead of closer to the individual boxes) that are proving troublesome. I've received a few comments about janky or difficult controls, but just haven't been able to quantify them well enough. No worries if you can't or don't want to, but I would really appreciate it! :heart:
As for the guitar "solo", I really wanted to push the limits of how fast boxes can be pushed off the belt. While *very* hard, it's definitely doable with a bit of practice. I didn't really expect anyone to manage it during the jam, though (which means I probably shouldn't have left it in there, but I just had to push the timing limits for the mechanic). :P
@aurailus I'm so glad you enjoyed it despite the performance issues! As mentioned above, I'm starting on a post-jam version and will 100% be addressing performance (or, at least, providing graphics options). I currently do have things like ray tracing enabled, which contribute a lot to the look and feel, but also still impact performance more than I'd anticipated for such a small scene (I could almost certainly bake most of that lighting once I learn how—I'm still quite new to Unreal). As for additional mechanics, I have several I already want to implement, and while I'm already considering boxes you shouldn't hit, a really big one didn't even cross my mind and is a great idea! I'll have to see if I can work something like that in.
Just did another attempt, got 71,070
You're right in that the guitar solo part does take practice. The problem is that it takes a long time to get to the part to actually practice it.
Yet another attempt: 76,270
The jankiness I was talking about is pretty much what you and other people have described. It's really easy to get wrong direction boxes and sometimes it's hard to reset your cursor in the center. I may have seemed a little harsh when talking about it in my original review, but it's really not that bad if you get used to it.
I think the biggest problem you have is overestimating how good your players are. Think about it this way: however long you took to code/playtest the game, you were practicing it yourself. That's dozens of hours of playing. Your players are only going to play for maybe 15 minutes if you're lucky. In my opinion, getting a negative score isn't necessarily a great thing for a first time playthrough. What you have to do to avoid this issue is to get other people to playtest your game and naturally assume your player is a literal toddler. I definitely struggle with the difficulty of my games in game jam games. It's so easy to overestimate people's skill level.
Next attempt: 82,660
Next attempt: 80,930
Next attempt: 82,560
Will post a video soon
Although the latency calibration really helped, and the next time I could hit all the boxes in some of all sequences.
Reminds me of an old PS One game: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. There were several mini-games in the genre of rhythm games (I suppose we can name it like that). One of them is to catch the pipes that the ghost throws in the box. There was 3 positions where a pipe can fall. And we had two inputs, left and right buttons. When we release all direction buttons it fastly returns to center position. I suggest you could limit mouse control to make it more accessible. Or make some in-game entity that would react to some of mouse movements. It interupted me when I swipe a box to wrong side, it hits another box, reverse swipe make a row of box become a bunch of box. Sequence of boxes with the same direction is hard to pass because you need to return it to initial position but the next box would move in different direction, etc. If there would be some "thrower"-entity that would react to mouse and push to the same side where mouse moves and returns back and be ready for the next one it would be more controllable.
I remember "Trombone Champ", a curious game. It's a rythm (or I would say melody) game where your move your mouse up and down to change a trombone tone and press any key to play the instrument. I would suggest you to play, maybe it would give you some ideas to improve your experience.
Also, it would be clearer if you would write that we need to correctly position our mouse cursor and not just mouse movements. Because I thought that I just need to move my mouse in correct direction and not touch any boxes (yes, that's foolish of me, the game calls "Beat boxes"). That's cool and unusual but there are some common approaches in rythm games' design. And if you don't follow them you could warn your players about that more obvious.
I really liked the effects and simple design, the game is pretty juicy, I didn't want to say something bad. I wanted to say some useful things that you could improve. Thank you for your game!
P.S. Also, there one fun thing about UI. I had that when I left calibration menu when it prepared to calibrate.
i would kinda expect my mouse to be locked to 1 dimension (left to right), it's a little weird that my vertical positioning also matters
also i had to significantly lower my mouse DPI to do well at this
As for the controls, thank you for elaborating there, too! I've reworked some of it locally and I've landed on a system that feels *significantly* better. I may yet remove hitting boxes the wrong way, but for now I think I have it in a good place. Among other improvements I've probably forgotten about: hit planes are now on the edges of the boxes and there's one for each side, hitting boxes the wrong way has a reduced window size (so it's still possible to hit them, but it generally has to be intentional), there is a very short "immunity" period after hitting a box correctly during which you can't hit another box the wrong way (this one still needs tweaking/testing), and negative points are a thing of the past (tbh I don't know why I even put those in in the first place—looking back it seems so obviously bad).
And the difficulty: I did totally mess up with that one. I had tried a slower song with fewer notes, but just wasn't having fun with it myself, so I didn't think it would be fun at all. But that was absolutely not the right call (and especially not double stacking with negative points). It would have been fun (probably even more so!) with an easier chart/song. :P
But I did learn a lot from this jam and will hopefully do a much better job of handling the difficulty next time.
-
@surweaver Thank you for your feedback! The post-jam version that I'm working on has vastly improved controls and I'm absolutely planning on having it ease you into the game more with easier charts and tutorials. I think some of the difficulty with the controls comes from a lack of understanding of the mechanics, and, while I thought it was clear, it's clearly not as clear as I would like for it to be.
I'm not sure manipulating the cursor itself is quite the right way to go, but it's an interesting thought that I'll try out and see. In my response to Mateu, I detailed some of the improvements that make resetting more feasible. I do want to implement alternate control schemes (like keyboard) for those that find mouse control difficult/impossible, but not yet sure how I want to handle that, as many of the mechanics I'd like to explore rely on the mouse.
I've heard of trombone champ, but haven't played it. I'll have a look at it!
As for the UI bug, I did catch that after the jam, but felt it wasn't worth a hotfix. It's not game-breaking (in that reloading fixes it), so it wasn't a big deal (I do have it fixed locally now, though).
-
@badcop Thank you!! That's quite a score, too! I don't think I've seen anyone else (other than Mateu) clear 20,000 points, so color me very impressed. Vertical positioning actually doesn't matter for this version, but some of the mechanics I wanted to try involve being able to constrain the hit area to a smaller portion of the screen (in typical game jam fashion I had to cut all those), so I'd originally programmed it that way. I just changed the hit test area to include the whole screen once I realized I didn't have the time to utilize it differently, so now it's just crossing anywhere along the very center of the screen that counts.
I'm surprised you had to lower your DPI, too. I generally find it easier to crank mine up and throw my mouse clear across the screen. I do have fairly low sensitivity, though, and will have to try it at both high DPI/sensitivity to see how it fares.
