Beat Down is an adaptation of ‘Downwell’ fused with rhythm. The player must platform downward, shooting and jumping to the beat of the music in order to blast enemies and blocks on their descent.

I wanted to challenge the idea of convention. Commonly rhythm games are combined with other genres to create a unique experience. Whilst working on this project I developed my skills in creating a tool to mathematically calculate BPS in a song and manipulating those timings to be in sync with the game. After some testing I noticed that a human rhythm can easily get lost so I developed a user interface to display the correct timings to allow the player to accurately time their actions with the music’s beat.

For the development of Beat Down, I designed an adaptation of ‘Downwell’ and most of it’s main mechanics, then I implemented the rhythm component and tied it to the shooting/jumping. I learned that added the rhythm component makes otherwise regular actions more satisfying when combined with game juice.

While developing Beat Down, I developed my skills at responding to player feedback via google forms. I gave the game out and used feedback to improve upon or add addition content to provide an overall better experience. In addition, this also showed me that my experimental mode, each replaced the traditional projectile bullets with ray casting and added orbs which refilled the players amount when collect, was the preferred way to play the game. This was because it allowed for shooting to feel like it was done closer to the beat of the music and the extra ammo meant the player had to land on the ground less resulting in less disruption in the flow of the game.

However, personally would have been better if it was less similar to Downwell. I instead would have the player and enemies move on a grid which their movement could be manipulated via a kick attack that, in turn, would contribute to a dual purpose design.