Battle Drums

Battle Drums is a 1v1 game where you control an army by giving commands through rhythm. We made it as part of the Global Game Jam 2018 as a team of 6 people. The theme of the jam was transmission, which let us to thinking about how you could transmit commands in an unorthodox way. The playing field consists of two opposing armies, each consisting of three groups of units: Archers, spearmen and cavalry. To control your units, you must input the correct rhythm sequence to the beat provided by the music (and visual ques).

Our team consisted of 3 programmers, an artist, a sound designer and a producer. I mostly worked on the rhythm system, which made everything in the game happen to the beat. I also implemented most of the logic that defined the units.

This was a really fun game to make! In hindsight though, it was a bit out of scope for the duration of the game jam (48 hours). None of us had worked on either a rhythm game or a strategy game before and battle drums ended up being a hybrid between the two. We spend almost all the jam just implementing the systems, so we were left with very little time to playtest, iterate and polish the game.