Hey, everyone! Welcome to week 3 of our dev blog! My name is Jacob Koonce. I’ve been doing design work as well as composing the soundtrack for Beat Breakers. I’m very excited to share what we’ve been working on with you.

In terms of design, our project manager Jon Brown and I have been working on a rock-paper-scissors system to add more depth to the game’s combat. This is actually a return to one of our earliest paper prototypes and we believe it will really spice things up on the dance floor. Basically, this system allows players to change forms between Flare (Red), Flow (Blue), and Foundation (Yellow). Each form has its own unique ability that adds variety to gameplay. While in Flare form attacks cause damage over time, Flow form allows players to stun/freeze their opponent, and Foundation form causes knock back making it easier to bump your opponent off the edges of the stage. Thanks to our programming team, we were able to implement this new combat design in our last sprint and got some valuable feedback from playtesting.

In regards to sound, I’ve been hard at work composing a 12+ track EDM album using Logic Pro 9. The Beat Breakers Main Theme will be teased on our twitter @BeatBreakersDev in the near future. I hope you’ll give it a listen! I recently finished writing the song for our second character. Since this character is themed around the desert I decided to use middle eastern instruments such as the oud and sitar. I drew inspiration from the desert worlds in Super Mario games as well as the Shantae game series. Currently, I’m working on creating a handful of sound effects. I’ve decided to move forward using mostly 8-bit SFX since this fits with the Voxel art of our game. I plan on experimenting with some hybrid effects as well by layering more dynamic real world sounds with the 8-bit ones.

The team is on track with all of our tasks and our second character should be in the game very soon. We have plenty of work left to do in terms of polish like implementing art and sound assets but we are as motivated as ever to see Beat Breakers to its completion. Thanks for reading! See you next week!