Retroactive was created for the Extra Credits Holiday 2018 Game Jam.
The theme was Preset - this game takes a twist on presenting things, the game presents the title and the title IS the game - How you may ask? Just play it!
Also - there’s a beachball in the game - if i have to explain you wouldn’t understand.
As you can see from the screenshot it is strongly influenced by the '80 retro-futuristic style, Synthwave/Outrun and the old intro for Jonny Quest.
The game is short - but I can see myself turning it into something more…Maybe.
Gameplay video
Download Link:
Source:
Update:
The game (or ~10 seconds of it) was features in a episode of Games You Might Not Have Tried Yet:
Light effects are not enough, I suggest making color bars along the slopes, flashing to the beat. You can also try changing the color according to the bass level ratio.
I know it’s not perfect.
This was the first time I tried visualizing music, so I used the first thing that worked - three 1 pixel lines from a histogram of the audio. I’m reading up on perceptual music feature extraction and it’s not all that simple. Even if you have all the beats, energies, harmonics, chroma, etc plotted you still need to reduce it down to a single 0-1 hue value for every 1/60 of a second. There’s also the risk of disco-seizure, anything in the 5-30Hz (and then in 100-120Hz?) can trigger epilepsy or at least a headache, so I want smooth, gradual changes rather then many sudden, repeating flashes.
If you run the version on github it should have a better shader, the color separation should be more in line with the beats.
There’s another EC jam in a month or so, I’ll probably make something in the same style (but not genre nor gameplay) and improve the shaders.
You can simplify. If the rhythm does not change, it is easy to calculate. You can create something like MIDI data for the time stamps of the effect. example
The downloaded version from GitHub looks very beautiful. In terms of turns, need to act more slowly, sometimes too quickly, the nerves are at the limit when they are still shooting in the back. I can boast that I passed it.
