Melodefense

Hi!

We are building a musical tower defense game based on a step sequencer. We built the original prototype at Global Game Jam 2013 Istanbul, inspired by that year's theme "Heartbeat". We liked the idea so much that we decided to build a complete game on it. But, we needed to wait two years to be able to work full time on the game.

We are using Unity 3D for the release version. So it seems like a good idea to keep the related part of our development blog here.

The prototype in this post was made with Corona at GGJ but we need it here to explain the game mechanics first. The latest Unity build can be played here on http://www.melodefense.com (current version is very similar)



Melodefense is a musical iteration to a classic tower defense game in which you make music by defending your base from enemies approaching from linear columns. Player towers can shoot but enemies can only attack when they get near the towers. Every tower has a specific music loop of an instrument attached to it. In this version we have 6 towers and 6 loops: Kick, Snare, Hi-hat, Bass, Arpeggio, Chords. Placing a new tower triggers the music loop attached to that tower type. Music loops are made of 16 beat patterns and towers shoot according to these pattern. Placing towers of different types adds music loops over already playing ones.



In addition to these, a step sequencer continuously scans the battle arena that is also divided into 16 parts. When the scanner detects an enemy, it plays the specific synthesizer note set for each column. This results in randomly generated melody lines shifting slowly in time. This way an interactive music is composed depending on the gameplay. Actually, Melodefense is a music toy that allows you to make music by playing a tower defense game.



Currently, you gain points in time. You can buy towers with these points. Enemies reaching the last line gives a penalty that cost you some points. You win if you can pass all the waves, you loose if you run out of points. This will probably change in the future but it was working fine for the game jam.

We are a team of three from Istanbul:
Kerem Tiryaki - Developer
Murat Kalkavan - Illustrator
Guney Ozsan (me) - Composer & sound designer

Melodefense updates will also be on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Tumblr and RSS. Please share your comments and ideas wherever is convenient for you.

 

The concept sounds cool, but it really wasn't much fun to play. It was just try and build a tower in each lane.

There is loads of scope for bonuses/combos if you can place multiple towers and make it act more like a sequencer.

 

Thanks a lot. We were suspicious about that and it is nice to hear such a critic. The current version is just conceptual and not playable actually. There is also no balance or progression. We are now trying to evaluate some mechanics to integrate musical concept and a progressing gameplay with better fun elements.

Next week we will be jamming for a few days to have a player friendly demo for testing some mechanics. I'll share the results here.

 

We are currently challenging with developing an overall concept for the game. We noted down some questions about it:

• Who are we?
• Who is the enemy?
• Why enemy is our enemy?
• Why does the enemy attack us?
• What are our towers?
• Why are the sounds of towers make music?
• What and why are we defending?
• What happens when the enemy reaches the last lane?
• What happens if the enemy beats us?
• What happens if we can beat the enemy?

Our current concept is abstract and leaving all these questions open. We also don’t want to leave human element completely outside the scope. Human element would allow better communication and creating more close relationships with the players.

But we are afraid to leave the safe abstract language and include human elements. Forcing a poor concept not fitting the game dynamics natively would leave an uncomfortable feeling and alienate the players.

So, our first choice is to go safe and stick with the current abstract design and experiment on developing a sign language.

We also checked various vintage analog synthesizers (google image search) to see if we can get some inspiration:


Since we keep things abstract, our priority is to tell more about the functions of each element. Also signs should be convenient for an upgrade system. Here are the first ideas!

Towers give clues about their sound and type:


Enemies give some clues on what is coming after us, first two are fast and weaker, latter two are slower and stronger:


A possible look into the game scene:


And this is our poster for #screenshotsaturday:


We are not yet satisfied with this. Keeping things abstract has its own difficulties. It makes it harder for us to develop a long run progression. Also we need to teach the players some sign language even though there are better ways to introduce things in a way that they can get natively. We'll be working more on this.

 

i recommend checking volotic. It reminded me of this a little and a bit more what I was expecting.