Neon Cadence

"Neon Cadence" is a music based parcours game. Each level has it's own core melody but is missing the percussion. You can assign a percussion pattern to each of your skills. Percussion patterns vary in complexity and effects (you can find Double Jumps, Increased Air Control, Walljumps, Gravity Changes and hopefully some more if we have time left in the GameJam). The assigned percussion patterns determine when you can use a skill, which links your parcours to the music and rhythm. Your goal is to get the fasted time possible, which will require fluent and precise usage of your skills.

Controls

• Move - WASD + Mouse
• Jump - Space Bar
• Slide - Ctrl (hold) or 'C' (toggle)
• Primary Skill - 'F'
• Secondary Skill - 'Shift'
• Tertiary Skill - 'Q'

Credits

We made this game in 48h for the GMTK GameJam 2021. The team consists of 8 game design students and one of their lecturers. We had fun and hope you will have fun playing our interpretation of this years theme. Hope to see you all again next year.

What was done / What was not?

We made very quick progress with our visual style, but in the end some important elements lack polishing. Especially visual feedback for the player are missing. Our initial inspiration were sequencers. We wanted the player to be able to find new drum patterns and assign pattern to the skills. The pattern then should be visible in the ingame UI (which is missing due to a lack of time) to let the player anticipate the pattern changes. We initially planned to have simpler patterns with weaker effects (for example a small double jump) or more complex patterns that require much more planning but provide better effects. In the levels we wanrted to hide better patterns as items to pickup. Unfortunately, time didn't allow us to finish this. The same goes for Highscores and more UI feedback.

And of course, on the last day, we had some difficulties with Unity and the Timeline to have clean synchronized tracks. But those things happen and we  had fun nevertheless.

In the end, we still think Mark Brown might like our interpretation of the theme.

Used Tools

Unity 2020.3 (URP), Blender, Git, Photoshop, Cubase, Curvy Splines, Dotween