Trailer
The Game
Beat your best scores In Neon Beats, a new platformer game enriched by a
Rhythm-Centric Gameplay and Neon Ambiance!
Neon Beats is a side view platformer Game in which the level react to the Game Music.
In this game you will play as a little square in an abstract universe. Your goal is to complete levels and try to get the best score possible!
My work
Neon Beats was a 8 Weeks School project in which I worked as:
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Game Designer
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Level Designer
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Level Builder
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QA Tester
Game Design
My main role as lead Game Designer on the project was to create efficient and elegant mechanics.
The Mechanics Player needed to be as simple as possible:
Move
Jump
Wall Jump
Wall Slide
All the more complexe mechanics come from the environment. The player can use the full potential of the Character Controller thanks to the Level Design.
There are two types of Environmental Mechanics in Neon Beats, the ones related to the rhythm and the ones that don't.
Level Design
In Neon Beats, to design the levels, I followed a process that kept 4 principles:
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The Level must serve the music
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A Logical Interest Curve
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A Micro & Macro Progression
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Easy to Learn, Hard to Master
The Level Serving the Music
Our main intention was to create a gameplay that follows and interacts with the music.
I designed the levels in a way that the intensity of the gameplay fit the rhythm of the music. Whenever the melody becomes stronger and faster, the gameplay becomes more difficult and stressful as well. The contrary is also true.
A logical Interest Curve
During the process of design, we created the concept of “scene”. The camera takes a step back by dezooming so that the player can see multiples challenges ahead.
We found out that the scene provokes a peak of interest for the player, compared to more basic challenges.
That allowed us to structure the level with the aim of keeping a growing interest throughout the level.
A Micro & Macro Progression
We designed the mechanics to be simple and understandable, but we still needed a progressive learning approach.
In order to keep the player in a good flow state, without him getting bored or frustated, I tried to introduce the environment mechanics step by step, with a crescendo challenge.
But this creshendo is not only visible inside a map, on a macro level the player will be asked to be more and more precise and fast with his inputs. For every hard moment comes the reward, it can come from a collectible, a rewarding mechanics, a melody that will satisfy the player etc.
Easy to Learn, Hard to Master
While designing the game, we tried to keep the mechanics as simple as possible so that even the less experienced player could finish the levels of Neon Beats.
But we also wanted to please the more competitive players and that is why there are some tricks that the player can learn to be always faster.
Furthermore, the scoreboard at the end of each level allow the players to compare their scores and be the best!
Release
After finishing the project, we wanted to release it on steam. We created a new level so that there would be a little bit more content to the game.
The game was officially released May 3rd on Steam!
It was well received by the community, in term of downloads and opinions. So well received that people wanted us to continue working on it and create more levels and that is what we are currently doing. We want to released new level as part of a DLC.
The Team
