My newer project I hope will become much more without me having to do much more. In otherwords, I want it to be fairly easy to make and still be tons of fun. My friends, I present to you my newest project:
Viva La Samba
Yes, you've guessed right, my very own Samba De Amigo clone. I started a bit tonight. While it wouldn't even be fair to call this image a beta shot, you can just think of it as "a taste of things to come."
I hope to adequately reproduce everything that made Samba insanely fun and addicting, but add my own stuff. What is the Samba formula? Generate a rhythm with the music that must be reproduced by the player.
The engine itself is insanely simple. I've used linked lists from the particle engine to create the blue "rhythm" balls (works perfectly). When the blue ball gets to a target, you have to hit the corresponding button. (hopefully I can 1) get help from somebody else to create a maraca driver 2) create my own driver)
Samba De Amigo had awesome backgrounds that also gave it its charm. While I can't create 3D polygonal character models dancing around, I can create my own background bursting with color and so much life that your eyes want to explode.
I think what I'll end up doing is giving every song its own graphics folder. In there you have a background and several images. The images stretch, skew, rotate, bounce, distort, change colors, fade in and out, and everything to give life and energy to the song.
Imagine playing a Super Mario Bros song. Perhaps the background could be a screenshot from a Mario Bros game, then you have tiles and images of mushrooms and fireflowers bouncing around and dancing merrily on the background while you bust out skill to maintain the beat?
I wanted a game that could allow you to play your own song. That of course, would be impossible as I have no way of dynamically creating the balls to go with the rhythm of any song. Then it came to me one day while I was sitting on the toilet. What if the player creates their own rhythm?
I've decided on a "record" mode. You can upload an MP3 (hopefully, if not then OGG) from your PC to your Dreamcast. You then play the song through and perform the motions on the controller corresponding to the beats you want it to create. When you push a button, the timer on the Dreamcast along with the button you pushed is stored in a text file on your PC. The text file can later be loaded with the song and even saved onto a VMU in the future. After you're done recording, play through the song and the game will create the beats for you based on the text file it made in the previous run. That way you can make a song as easy or hard as you want and have full customizability.
Anyway, there's an infinate number of things that can be done to make such a game polished. Even think about the finer points that made the game so vibrant. If you strike a pose correctly, a thing of confetti would burst onto the screen. Particle engine anyone?
Hell, another thing that I thought Samba really lacked was 4-player capability. It really wouldn't be hard at all for me to make it...
