rhythm fighters

Sword Dancing aka Rhythm Fencer Progress

RF1

Bryan, Sam and I have been working on very small prototype of a rhythm-based fencing game, which is basically a Necrodancer and Nidhogg mashed-up, albeit a quick and dirty one.

RFrhythm RFmove

A visualization of the rhythm that Sam hooked up to represent when the player can move, and the basic tile movement Bryan rigged up.

The idea is that all the players’ movements can only be executed if they are on the beat. The goal of the game is to score the most number of points. You do this by landing a lunge successfully. The mechanics include moving right and left, lunging, which you do by default when moving forward, parrying, which deflects a lunge, and feinting which fools a parry. In the cases where a player executes a successful parry or feint, the other player cannot attack on the next beat leaving them open to a lunge, but they can retreat. Lunging in turn breaks through a feint and scores a point.

 

p1Mid p1Low p1High p1Parried p1Miss

Lunge, Feint, Parry, Open to attack and Off the best

Player movement is tiled, meaning they can move only one tile every beat. Players may not occupy the same tile, so if there is one tile between them and they are both trying to advance onto it, they will stay in the same position. If both players execute the same move on each other, i.e., lunge-lunge, feint-feint, parry-parry, they are each thrown back one tile so there are two tiles between them so they have space to regroup and choose their next move. After each point each player is reset to their original tile to start a new bout. This is faithful to actual fencing, and to give the players the chance to try out different strategies.

Rhythm-Based Fighting Games: A Brief Search

I decided to do quick search of existing rhythm-based fighting games and this is what I turned up, with regards to commercial examples anyway:

There’s Zen Studio’s Kickbeat, which uses its sound track or takes whatever music input you provide and coordinates a series of instantiated would-be challengers to attack you on the beat, unless you smack them down first, which you do by providing the correct input based on the enemy’s color and position.

 

SNK Playmore’s The Rhythm of Fighters in which you link inputs together to create combos. You have some decision making in that you can block, but it seems mostly to be input matching to a beat.

 

Then there’s this unexpected item, developed by 505 Studios (?), Way of the Dogg is some oddball game that revolves around input combination to the rhythm of Snoop Dogg/Lion’s opus of rap songs. Very strange indeed.

 

All of these games look like they take Guitar Hero or DDR are as their inspirations, which is cool, but it just frames the rhythm recognition/input combination mechanics as fighting rather that music making or dancing and so the strategic layer that you find in fighting games is pretty thin. Also, it doesn’t look like any of them have a multi-player element. What we are trying to do with Rhythm Fencer is to preserve that decision making/strategic element, while requiring the players to be on a persistent beat. I’m sure other games must have explored this concept. The research continues.

– Bob

Sources:

Kickbeat Review
The Rhythm of Fighters Review
Way of the Dogg’s Website