Well, this project was not going well at all, and I ultimately decided to just cancel it and move on to something more productive. I consider it an experiment in game design, and it may not even be doomed forever. I'm keeping a positive attitude about it. I'd like to celebrate my failures just as much as my successes, and I wasn't naive enough to believe all of my projects this year would be successful. So, this article is going to be more about the creative process and how to learn from failure than about the project itself.
I think the main thing that got in my way with this project was a lack of a clear design goal. In short, the design of the game was too open-ended, and I spent more time wondering what I should try next to make the game fun, interesting, or unique than I did actually working on it.
I think the first major problem with Big Beat Tower Defense was the lack of a unique core gameplay loop. Every game has a loop that players go through. In Super Mario Bros., the core loop is running, jumping, and reaching the castle at the end of each level. In Call of Duty, the core loop is moving, aiming, shooting, taking cover, and outlasting your opponents. I wanted to create a core loop that was both fun and unique.
So, what's the core gameplay loop for a tower defense game? Well, it essentially consists of placing a number of towers (limited by your available resources) strategically in order to protect your city from a horde of enemies. Whenever you survive a horde, you progress to a more difficult one. In Big Beat Tower Defense, the difference is that all the enemies move in sync with the music and you only gain currency by pressing a button in sync with the music.
I guess BBTD's gameplay loop is unique enough, but I don't think it was very fun. At the very least, I don't think it was any more fun than a standard tower defense game. Having enemies move in sync with the music doesn't really change things from a mechanical perspective: it's really more of an aesthetic change. As for having to press a button in sync with the music to accumuluate money to build more towers, it's just not that exciting, and it also has potential to make the game too easy. I'll deal with these issues individually.
In Rhythm Heaven Fever, pressing a button in sync with the music results in a flashy animation and progresses the game forward. Each successful button press is a little victory that gets you closer to completing the level successfully. In Dance Dance Revolution, stepping in the right place at the right time keeps the music going, improves your score, and either starts or continues a new combo. It's always exciting to land your foot on the right place at the right time, and especially so when it happens at the end of a tricky sequence of moves. In BBTD, pressing the button just increased the amount of currency you have. Even if I added some flashy music or sound effects for every successful button press, I just don't think it's nearly as exciting. The real excitement of the game comes from the tension of hoping that your strategically placed towers will be able to defeat your enemies (and the fun comes from watching the enemies get crushed by your expert positioning). The currency required to build more towers isn't an active part of the game. Rather, it serves as a limit on your resources, preventing you from doing something trivial like placing a tower on every available space on the board. I now understand why the accumulation of currency in tower defense games is always passive: usually given as a reward for either defeating an enemy or for defeating a whole horde of enemies.
It wasn't long before I realized that allowing players to accumulate currency by pressing a button (even if you had to do so in sync with the music) can make the game incredibly easy. If someone plays the game perfectly and hits the button exactly on beat for the entire game, they will have essentially a limitless pile of money, which means that they can place as many towers as they want, which will make the game a complete pushover. The more I thought about this problem, the more I realized that there really isn't a good way to balance it without removing the mechanic completely or without damaging the difficulty of the game in the opposite direction. I considered messing with the numbers a bit. There were two relevant values to tweak: the amount of currency awarded for each beat-synced button press, and the price of each tower. To make things simpler, let's pretend the first value is fixed and try tweaking the price of each tower. If we lower the prices of the towers, we run into the problem I described earlier, where someone who lands lots of beat-synced inputs will be able to place towers all over the place, pretty much removing the strategic side of the game (which, I believe, is the selling point of tower defense games in the first place). However, if we raise the prices of the towers, we run into the same problem: only players who can consistently land most of the beat-synced inputs will even get to have a chance at placing enough towers to survive, so again the focus of the game is drawn away from the strategic placement of towers.
So, with those considerations in mind, I decided the mechanic of accumulating currency through beat-synced inputs had to go. In short, the problem with that mechanic is that it reduces the potency of the strategic tower placement aspect of the game, which is where tower defense games really shine. However, now that I've removed that mechanic, there's nothing left (other than the aesthetic enhancement of beat-synced enemy movements) that really makes this a rhythm game.
After deciding to remove the currency accumulation mechanic and shoot for a more traditional "passive income" mechanic (where you gain currency for surviving a horde of enemies), I started wondering where there was room for rhythm mechanics that required player input in my game. I had two different ideas, but I don't think either of them were worth pursuing:
In addition to having a variety of towers to build, many tower defense games also allow players to upgrade their existing towers, improving their effectiveness in fighting off enemies. I thought it might be cool if upgrading towers in my game required some sort of beat-synced input. Ideally, this would mean executing a sequence of buttons in sync with the music and being rewarded with a tower upgrade when successful.
The other idea I had was to assign each tower a button and to require players to press the associated button on beat with the music in order to make the tower fire a projectile at a passing enemy.
Ultimately, I think both of these ideas suffer from the same problem: they both require an insane level of micro-management (this is especially true for the second one). The most fun tower defense games I've played start to get really fun once you have lots and lots of towers in the battlefield. However, there are also more enemies at that point, so you need to rely on your own numbers being high in order to combat the high number of enemies. I think that asking players to perform beat synced inputs to upgrade their towers might disincentivize tower upgrades, since their time might be better spent simply placing more towers, and I think that requiring players to perform beat synced inputs simply to fire their towers tips the difficulty of the game from challenging to just plain stressful.
So, I was feeling pretty stuck. I didn't know what I could do to actually pull this project together. It seemed to be lacking in the fun department. I walked into this project thinking it would be an interesting experiment in the blending of two video game genres, but it was starting to look more and more like a failure. Every time I sat down at the computer to work on it, I just wound up using most of my time to just stare at the wall and try to come up with a solution to my problem. I wasn't engineering, I wasn't making any artwork, I wasn't working on any music, and I wasn't even prototyping any new mechanical ideas on paper. The project had come to a dead halt.
As my mind wandered in the middle of my writer's block, I kept thinking about rhythm-based mechanics. After a while, my brain became frustrated with the idea of blending rhythm mechanics and tower defense mechanics. It started to feel like cramming a square peg into a round hole, and my brain just started to give up. Then, I remembered another game I had played that blended rhythm mechanics with another genre...
The game is Mother 3, the sequel to Mother 2: Earthbound. It's a JRPG that has some light rhythm mechanics during combat. Basically, when you're attacking an enemy, you can press the A button in sync with the music. Every time you land a successful input, you do additional damage. You aren't penalized for missing inputs, only awarded a bonus for succeeding. It's fun, it works without detracting from the JRPG mechanics of the game, and it's memorable.
Having said that, it's a little basic. That's not a criticism of the game: I actually think the simplicity is one of the game's strengths. I think there's more untapped potential in blending rhythm mechanics with JRPG combat, and I intend on figuring out what that is in the future. Maybe it'll be one of my projects for my 2019 challenge!
Well, I think I'm going to let this project go for now and focus on something that doesn't just make me stare at the wall for a few hours from my workstation. I'm going to use the rest of February to get a head start on March's project. From now on, I'll be writing a new article for this series every Friday, so stay tuned for updates on my next project in my 2019 game design challenge!
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