Tune Town

12-57PM (148).mp4

Submitted for Genre Mashup Jam

April 22, 2021Ranked #17 / 932 Overall

Tune town was part of a week-long jam, where you had to mash together two genres, particularly ones that generally aren't seen together. I had been doing some research on rhythm games in Unity a couple of weeks before the jam, looking into how they work and doing a bit of prototyping to practice. I found that it seemed to be a viable genre that we could play with, and ended up deciding to mash it with endless-runner elements.

I created the 'chunk' system, where we could create prefabs of level sections to be stitched together to form the terrain. This ended up being a really fun challenge, and we slowly iterated the design to include important details like positioning the windows to align with the player's position relative to the beat, to make tracking when you can perform actions easier.


Key things I learned

Online Leaderboards

This had been something I'd been wanting to implement into a project for a long time, and finally had the time to do it. I used PlayFab to create it, allowing users to submit their name and score after their run. I got to learn a bit about how web-related code works, sending and receiving data, and implementing UI for the leaderboards. I feel this helped give our game more replayability, as it remains to be my most played game, with 200+ downloads, 500+ views, and 100+ players submitted on the leaderboard, to this day.

(I also challenge you to try and beat my high-score)

UX Design

Being a rhythm game, we found that giving players subtle hints as to when they can press a button to perform an action was very important. We achieved this through several means, such as the city background slightly bouncing on each beat. The windows in the foreground also would change as well, additionally being placed to sync up with the player's position when they can perform actions as well. Tune Town was a very valuable lesson in UX for me, with feedback being generally positive towards these features, albeit some suggesting there could be even more feedback, so this has been something I've tried to keep in mind for future projects as well.