Beat Bulwark (WIP)

Beat Bulwark has been in development since August 2024, though I had been thinking about the general design and researching the tools required for a while beforehand. It is a mostly-independent honors thesis project, with some visual art assistance and creation from Natalie Benton.

 

The game is an action platformer in which many actions (such as jumping and attacking) must be taken on beat with the music, which is intended to give the game a rhythmic feel akin to Crypt of the NecroDancer or Metal: Hellsinger. The somewhat turn-based gameplay that is created by having the enemies, environment, and player act on the beat has been an interesting dynamic to work around, posing unique design challenges and possibilities.

 

Because of the focus on audio in the gameplay, extra attention must be given to how the audio elements work together including having the music change dynamically with the game state which has presented some interesting puzzles to solve. These puzzles have been both technical (I.E. allowing the player to act both before and after the beat by a small window) and artistic (I.E. what factors should influence the sound of the music, and what can change while keeping it intuitive for gameplay).

 

To use that last point as an example of a solution to one of these design challenges, the result that I ultimately arrived at was tracking some key actions in the game and storing a hidden combo-style value, which influences the variation of the music that is played through switch groups in Wwise. More layers are generally added as the player does well and progresses, but the lower layers have a simple castanet pulse on each beat that is removed as they progress if they are making few mistakes. This serves to help the player act on beat at the beginning of a level or if they start struggling.

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The project was first shown off at the University of Arizona iShowcase for Fall 2024, where I gathered useful playtesting feedback to iterate on. It should be in a relatively finished state by May 2025, when it will be shown at iShowcase 2025 at conclusion of the thesis project, but I plan to polish and release the game fully after this time if it is still not yet completely ready for a general release.