Blog for RoGUE’s Prototype 2 – The Proposal

After watching the popular viral video of the wedding proposal provided to us. We were a little stumped, but decided that since one of the key themes of the game would be the happy wedding music that we would do a musical game. In the past, many know musical games to be like Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution, Rock Band, and many more; we decided to create something similar to Dance Dance Revolution. We plan to use the wedding song used in the video “Marry You” by Bruno Mars to try and create something similar. In order to fit the time limit requirement of the assignment, we decided to find a remix version of the song that lasted a little longer and was a little more upbeat. Our game models were primarily by three of our group members, though they are not heavy on details.

The blocky human characters that we modelled were also animated with skeletal animation techniques in Maya and simply imported into Unity. One group member was in charge of collecting our modelling assets and implementing them in the level which was simply a grass plane with trees and houses.

Male Bystander

The game theme is very happy using bright colors; we also have small ball-like creatures that are supposed to represent some sort of cuteness. These will simply be bouncing around happily. The gameplay is simply the camera moving along the track of our level, somewhat symbolizing the car driving in the wedding proposal video. The player’s progress is tracked by the score in which they accurately hit the proper arrows keys on the screen, here’s a screenshot:

The controls for The Proposal are fairly simple, where the player uses the arrow keys in conjunction with the arrows that appear on the screen. Our game’s controls were derived from the game DDR (Dance Dance Revolution), with arrows that come down from the top of the screen and the user must hit the corresponding key (left, right, up, down) before it hits the ground. The player starts off with 100 points, and this is pretty much the player’s health. The game will end when the number of points goes under 0. For every arrow that is missed and hits the ground, the player loses 10 points, and for every key pressed incorrectly, the player loses 2 points. This is to prevent the player from “spamming” the arrow keys in order to get a good score, and we felt that losing 10 points is a fair amount for the player to lose whenever they miss an arrow. The player can only receive 1 point whenever they hit the right key, so they must try to get as many points as possible. As the player progresses through the game and gets more points, we added 2 point thresholds where if the player reaches 150 and 200 points respectively, the game will get much harder. Double arrows will appear more frequently when the player passes the thresholds, making the game much harder. We implemented this in order to allow better players to get more of a challenge while beginners will have it much easier. 

For the programming aspects, our designated programmers in the group learned how to create 2 scenes and to switch between them, which will be used for switching between the menus and the actual game. The programmers also learned how to program particle systems and to create them in Unity, which will be used for the arrows. These particle systems were then attached to the arrows whenever they get destroyed by the player when they press the correct key. They also learned how to create and destroy objects through code, which will be implemented for the arrows, so that each arrow will “disappear” after the player presses the correct key. The programmers also had to learn how to loop animations in the code, in order to animate all the bystanders. When the bystanders were imported into Unity from Maya, they only animated once, and our programmers figured out how to loop the animation to make them dance for the entire game.