Hello everyone, this is the last update for beats from the deep we have officially reached the end of the polish phase.

And now have a final product to share with you all. This update will be a bit different for this update we will do a small retrospective of where we started with the Prototype phase and where we ended up at the end of polish.

Our original concept for beats from the deep came funnily enough from Buzz:

When we were trying to come up with a game we all pitched different ideas, that is until our tech guy pitched us this a co-op rhythm minigame from the PS2 series BUZZ! We all had very positive feedback to that idea. We all voted after pitching our ideas and the buzz game won.

So we got to work. In our very first iteration we were still thinking on what kind of rhythm game we wanted to make. We knew we wanted to invite friendly banter and allow up to 4 players. This would replicate the feeling of those BUZZ games from our childhoods. Our artists got to sketching as our programmer got to prototyping the game mechanics.

As you can see it wasn't always a one and done deal. We had several concepts for bosses and themes. Our 3 main ones were cosmic horror, true angels and classical fantasy.  Of course as you all now know, we settled on the cosmic horror Cthulhu. Specifically the third composition for it.

With it settled the programmers got to work on getting the prototype into a playable game loop.

Remember this? The original prototype for our game. This is as of now the latest build and how it looks:

We've moved a couple of things around but most obviously is our choice to have the lanes be 3D and a part of the environment instead of a UI. Believe it or not originally we weren't too pleased with the idea as we had just gotten the UI lanes to work correctly. But regardless we moved forward with the idea because our supervisors wanted to see us try it, and we did like it, it just seemed like it would cause a lot of troubles

(it did) It cost us a lot of time to get it working, but it made our game a better (we hope)!

Of course this is all still relatively close to our previous iterations so it might seem most things went to plan, but we scrapped or didn't have time for multiple features/ideas. For example a class mechanic to further connect a combat aspect to our game. Not only that but also a choose your own input feature:

Not all of it was wasted though. From this concept of classes and combat spawned one of our most fun features: the ultimate:

Scrapping wasn't unique to our prototyping phase though up till the very last days we've been testing and trying out different things. For example, for polishing we tried making a water rising effect for George with hopes he would look like a giant kaiju rising out of the water. But we decided the effect didn't look good and we didn't wanna invest too much time on trying to make it work.

Not all things were just scrapped because they looked bad, or we didn't have time sometimes our choice had more to do with how it would fit into the game. For example our "combo input" notes which were meant to be notes that required a directional input and a normal button input:

Despite being on our tasks for sprint 2 this idea never went that far. Since we quickly realized the game was hard enough as is and if we made it harder it could cause lots of balancing issues. 

Another example of this is multiple difficulties for our music since our sound guy was having troubles making the difficulty of the song balanced. But it ended up being too much work and we simply couldn't keep up. Curious on how long all of this took?

We estimated a total of 632 hours for this project. And logged 504 hours. So in total to get the game to this state it took us a bit over 500 hours. Of course, we aren't done yet with closing out all our tasks just yet. Since we wanna make sure the remaining open ones are well tested.

So what's next for us? Well we will present our game in front of the jury for this game jam/course. We will "pitch" our game to them and hopefully score well during the game jam. If our game won the game jam we would be allowed to keep working on it without having to re pitch it to the school for our next course, and our game would be published on steam. Regardless we plan to stay together for the next course and hopefully put out a cool product at the end of our next course.

We started work on this about 3 months ago, with the hope of making a game people would enjoy. So if you play it and like it please let us know. Regardless we are proud of how far we come with this game and we hope everyone else agrees. 

With this post will bow out.  We hope you all enjoyed going along with us.

- Sincerely, the Beats From The Deep team

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