AstroBeat

The VR game where you break Asteroids to the beat.

Overview

Time Frame: 1 Week

Date: October 2021

Team Size: 5

Team Members: Caitlyn Lenhoff, Lochlan Belford, Justin Yook, Yuchan Wu, Leah Lee

Role: Gameplay designer, Gameplay programmer

Platform: Meta (Oculus) Quest 2

Tools: Unity

Keywords: VR, Hand-tracking, Rhythm game, space

Description:

AstroBeat is a VR rhythm game using the Quest's hand-tracking feature. The game was built for the Building Virtual World's course at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center. The guests hit holographic drums to the beat to break asteroids before they hit the spaceship. Over time, more drums will appear, giving the guest more of a challenge as they move further through the asteroid field.

Duties/Personal Contributions:

Gameplay designer for the asteroid spawning.
Gameplay designer for the drum spawning.
Main programmer in charge of scripting asteroid spawning based on BPM.
Worked with the sound designer to incorporate the music and sound effects.
Main designer and programmer for the win and lose sequence scenes.

Play the Game (.apk download)

Process

Asteroid Spawning

One of the main mechanics that I was responsible for designing and implementing was the spawning of the asteroids.

First I attempted to spawn them based on frequencies in the music, so that it would match the flow of the music and would have a more meaningful pattern to spawning. However, when attempting this, there was not a very good threshold for the frequency values in our music and it affected the spawn rate. Either way too many objects spawned at once, or none would spawn.

Due to a limited amount of time to work on the project, I ended up switching to a set spawning rate based on BPM. The asteroids would start by spawning every other beat, and then spawn every beat, until at the final level of intensity they spawned every half-beat. This allowed the breaking of asteroids to feel purposeful, increase in intensity, and work decently well with our music.

Drum Spawning

I was the main person in charge of designing and implementing the difficulty arc for the game by designing the pacing of both the asteroids and the drums.

There are a total of five drums: one in the center, one to the left, one to the right, one to the upper left, and one to the upper right. The game starts with low difficulty, as only the center drum is in the scene. Over time the other drums will spawn in, and asteroids will start spawning in those corresponding lanes.

Ending and Starting Sequences

A main duty of mine was to design the win and lose end scenes as well as the starting scene.

In the losing sequence red lights flash repeatedly and alarms blare loudly as if the ship is broken. In the case of the winning sequence, it trigger will hyperdrive and the guest successfully escapes the asteroid field.

The starting sequence is designed to introduce the mechanics in two ways. The first is through a lengthy instruction panel that has the details of exactly how it works. The second being application of the mechanics. I designed the starting scene to use our logo as the first 'drum' that when hit will open the instructions. Then under the instructions there is an actual drum like the ones in the game that needs to be hit in order to start the game. This is designed to give the guest practice at hitting the drums before the actual game starts.