[img]http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/download/5c82b7c35b0ab4fc809cc9f6393bc9c4[/img]
BEAT is a flash game i've been working on and off on for about a year now, i was intrigued at looking into audio analysis and what could be done with it and what started as development of a beat detection engine developed into this. Obviously it's heavily influenced by audiosurf and guitar hero, but it was always designed to be a challenge for me technically rather than artistically.
My main personal challenge was to get it to work with any .mp3 you selected. There are countless flash rhythm games, but all of them give you maybe 5 tracks to chose from, all of which you’ve never heard and are normally pretty rubbish techno synth stuff. By giving the player the freedom to quickly chose a track it adds a lot more replayability and personalisation, in the final game you’ll be able to chose from 3 visual themes too (rock, electro, funk) to best suit the music you are playing and slightly adjust the beat detection
[B][U]Code[/U][/B]
Flash is a piece of crap when it comes to accessing local files, so I knew this would be a problem off the bat. The way I worked around this was importing the file as a ByteArray, then parsing it back into a .mp3 that flash could play as a sound file. My way was a bit hacky, but luckily there was a class hanging around the net that seemed to work perfectly.
The second challenge was the beat detection, currently I analyse the audio spectrum on a certain frame for any peaks. This is done by having a floating point value that gradually lowers over time for each third of the soundwave, enabling me to detect bass, mid and high beats. It’s the best I can do with the limitations of flash, if anyone has any ideas on how to improve it I’d love to hear them.
Demo
[B][U]Alpha[/U][/B]
The Game is now in [I]~ALPHA~[/I]. So please give it a go. At the moment you can either play ASDF mode or ship mode. More visual themes for rock and funk will be added shortly.
[highlight][url]http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/item/8903db1aa60f0a5ddef39fbeadb247df[/url][/highlight]
I am still working on it constantly, so check back for updates if you're interested.
[B][U]Pics[/u][/B]
[img]http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/download/d15ede43b3d6f014052634c0b98d0c9e[/img]
[img]http://www.newgrounds.com/dump/download/10e69f6ab044cf80fe7240f909f204b1[/img]
[B]Updates[/B]
-Uploaded Alpha 0.1
[B][highlight]Any C&C is really useful, thanks.[/highlight][/B]
So it's kind of like Audiosurf? :D!
Yay you finished it!
[editline]12th September 2011[/editline]
It wont work :v:
[editline]12th September 2011[/editline]
There we go
[QUOTE=Quark:;32260167]So it's kind of like Audiosurf? :D![/QUOTE]
It's very like audiosurf haha, was trying to flex my coding muscle more than have any sort of entirely unique concept.
[highlight]C&C would be very useful, anyone, please :([/highlight]
Alright, after playing a track it seems that the visibility isn't good enough, the fast moving pegs work for guitar hero because you have hardware buttons, but in this it doesn't seem like there's an easy way to move the ship beyond the mouse which is very clunky for this kind of game. So I would suggest letting the arrow keys move the ship between lanes and it'd be much nicer to play, along with perhaps upping the time it takes for a peg to hit.
Other than that it was pretty good, I like the menu.
[QUOTE=danharibo;32267093]Alright, after playing a track it seems that the visibility isn't good enough, the fast moving pegs work for guitar hero because you have hardware buttons, but in this it doesn't seem like there's an easy way to move the ship beyond the mouse which is very clunky for this kind of game. So I would suggest letting the arrow keys move the ship between lanes and it'd be much nicer to play, along with perhaps upping the time it takes for a peg to hit.
Other than that it was pretty good, I like the menu.[/QUOTE]
Yeah this is already covered, i'm adding difficulties which changes the max speed of the BEATs and i've already made it so you can change between mouse and key control :)
Anyone else think for a second that the OP was banned when they saw the red text?
[QUOTE=Rocket;32279454]I thought it was just another music game that couldn't figure out the beat for the life of it.
Until it started slowing down when the beat did.
[img]http://i.somethingawful.com/forumsystem/emoticons/emot-aaa.gif[/img][/QUOTE]
yeah it's the best i can do really. I'd LOVE to do something more accurate ala audiosurf, but in audiosurf the game analyses the .mp3 entirely beforehand, something that is essentially impossible in flash. The best i can do is estimate the beats as they happen and calculate the speed for a roughly accurate estimate.
Really need C&C, please :(
Anyone? please
Have you tried selling it?
Find some songs to have built in and keep the ability to use custom ones.
[QUOTE=Darwin226;32306596]Have you tried selling it?
Find some songs to have built in and keep the ability to use custom ones.[/QUOTE]
Way ahead of you on that one, looking for music to add atm. And yeah i'm gonna contact sponsors over the next week, just trying to raise some money for uni.
I'd donate if I could, but I'm just scraping by at the moment. :(
Good luck though! :)
I like it but if you actually could change the look from audiosurf to something creative?
[editline]15th September 2011[/editline]
what I mean by that is not the entire thing just like the ship and add scenery to it
You should make it so that the -1 life text looks different from the 1000 pts text.
Also keyboard controls would be cool.
I think it needs a bit more work on compatibility, none of my songs worked at all, i tried at least 15 different songs with no luck.
[QUOTE=Donkey Kong;32317236]I think it needs a bit more work on compatibility, none of my songs worked at all, i tried at least 15 different songs with no luck.[/QUOTE]
Could you expand a bit? Do you mean they simply didn't play or they just didn't sync well.
[QUOTE=chimitos;32311375]You should make it so that the -1 life text looks different from the 1000 pts text[/QUOTE]
Will do, thanks a lot.
[QUOTE=confinedUser;32310924]what I mean by that is not the entire thing just like the ship and add scenery to it[/QUOTE]
I'm doing different visuals for the 3 different genres (rock, electro (above) and funk) to give it 3 distinct looks. Rock will probably look guitar heroish but funk should be all bright colours trippy hippy shit.
Tried a number of MP3's and the game never started
[img]http://imgkk.com/i/78f7.png[/img]
All I can do is move left and right while the music plays
Interesting. I'm guessing you have an old flash player OR you have a youtube or other flash app open in the browser.
See this is why flash is shitty sometimes, not only can you not analyse seperate audio streams, if you've got any other flash player things open it fucks it up :'(
It's ok man I understand how frustrating flash can be.
[QUOTE=confinedUser;32321648]It's ok man I understand how frustrating flash can be.[/QUOTE]
Yeah i've had to add a disclaimer to the game so people don't have the same problem.
I had the same problem where the game never started, but it worked after I closed my porn in another tab.
[B]MASSIVO BUMP[/B]
The game is now at an alpha stage. Please give it a go and see what you think.
[I]All criticism/advice is fantastic.[/I]
I LOVE how you an import custom tracks. It is really cool, and very well made. I would've liked to see support for .wav files, but for now I like it. Oh, and the mneu looks nice.
[QUOTE=Occlusion;35305561][B]MASSIVO BUMP[/B]
The game is now at an alpha stage. Please give it a go and see what you think.
[I]All criticism/advice is fantastic.[/I][/QUOTE]
[img]http://i.imgur.com/scaBn.jpg[/img]
I'm guessing this isn't supposed to happen?
Happens every time I start a song, I can't import a song because the importing never ends and when I try to select a song from one of the default songs they're all the same.
I really like it. Very nice & clean graphics.
But I had the same error as xThaWolfx
Do you both have the newest flash player? Just right click on the game and it'll show you.
Very cool, and congratulations on getting this far. Here are a couple of the most notable things that struck me though, and hopefully this will be helpful criticism.
1) Perhaps the most important bit: you're not detecting immediate deltas in sample frequencies. Maybe you are, actually! But this never gets translated into the blocks players are supposed to be "catching", so it wouldn't really matter if you were or not. This pretty much destroys the feel of the game entirely in my opinion. The concept for these types of games is for the program to read, and understand things like beats and jumps in sound, and those audible bits manifest in notes, or blocks, or anything else that you touch, catch, etc. on screen.
2) The movement speed of the played track being directly affected by what seems like the loudness of the song playing is not an intuitive feel for this sort of gameplay.
Keep up the great work though!
[B]C&C[/B]
Great game, well made.
But, the concept is overdone and people aren't going to play it, especially not on PC. It seems like it would to better on a mobile device.
[QUOTE=amcfaggot;35310765]1) Perhaps the most important bit: you're not detecting immediate deltas in sample frequencies. Maybe you are, actually! But this never gets translated into the blocks players are supposed to be "catching", so it wouldn't really matter if you were or not. This pretty much destroys the feel of the game entirely in my opinion. The concept for these types of games is for the program to read, and understand things like beats and jumps in sound, and those audible bits manifest in notes, or blocks, or anything else that you touch, catch, etc. on screen.[/QUOTE]
At the moment, i am analysing the sound wave per frame, and checking for any peak anomalies. This actually doesn't work too badly, but because flash can't precompute this, i have to spawn the beats when theyre detected, so it takes time for them to travel to the player. Not sure how else i can do it really :(
[QUOTE=amcfaggot;35310765]2) The movement speed of the played track being directly affected by what seems like the loudness of the song playing is not an intuitive feel for this sort of gameplay.[/QUOTE]
Hmmm, know what you mean. Would tempo work do you think? I could compute the time between beats and use that as a basis for movement speed.
The one thing I noticed when I was playing is that the song immediately cuts out if/when you lose. It's a little annoying when you're getting into a song and you're suddenly dropped out of it because you hit one too many grey notes - maybe do it the way beat hazard does, where you have a score screen and you can sit and wait till the end of the song if you want? It's not a major criticism, it's just a little jarring to hear the sudden silence when you'd rather be listening to the song.
[editline]27th March 2012[/editline]
Other than that I liked it :) but I feel like I've played it before, although not quite as shiny as this.
[editline]27th March 2012[/editline]
[QUOTE=Occlusion;35316973]because flash can't precompute this, i have to spawn the beats when theyre detected[/QUOTE]
I don't claim to have any knowledge of flash, but is there really no way to read through the sound shortly before you play it? Maybe to have two streams playing at a time - one of them a few seconds ahead of the other and with 0 volume, so that the player can't hear it but you can do your analysis, and another stream a few seconds later that the player can actually hear. That way you could analyse the stream a few seconds ahead of playtime, and get your notes in time with the music.
[editline]27th March 2012[/editline]
Oh, you said you can't have separate audio streams. My bad.
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