Mini-dev blog #5

It's late October, we are still tingling in the afterglow of our demo launch last month, and the game dev marches on.

If you've played to the end of the demo, you may remember how funkmaster Cliff portended a serious situation for our heroes involving a metal band. We won't say any more about that but on an unrelated note we have finished another of our internal showrooms, the live house DC10. This is a place where our heroes find themselves out of their element so we worked extra hard to make it a stark contrast to the cozy brown haze of Callahan's where their live gig journey began.



Also this month we are finishing up visual effects for the band, adding little touches like these two. First we're adding some simple light animations to the music during playback, and another where band members will play accompaniment in the goal area while waiting for the last character to join. One thing we thought of when doing environment animations for Backbeat is the frequency and synchronization. With funk there is more swing in the beat so it doesn't make sense for everything to flash off and on to a pumping four-on-the-floor like you'd find in Hexagroove. So we make the color changes and speed a bit more organic and less unified in the presentation.



Finally, we're getting ready on the marketing side by adding some new branded art for splash screens and dashboards. The key is to show up visibly in all storefronts regardless of the size of the thumbnail when scrolling through, so the logo has to be prominent, while keeping the background eye-catching enough to make you want to see the image enlarged. What do you think?



We made a sneak appearance with Backbeat at IndieCade's GameTasting last weekend, and have entered our first competition as well. Keep your fingers crossed and cheer for us!

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Do you have an idea for a dev blog topic? Curious about the team and story of Backbeat? Comment on this post or tweet at us, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Stay cool and funky!
-- The Backbeat team at Ichigoichie

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