Minor Scale [2024]

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Minor Scale is a rhythm-based tower defense game where the notes in the rhythm game control which tower fires. It was developed in Unreal Engine 5 by a team of over 20 members as our senior capstone project.

Custom Beatmaps

I created and implemented a system for editing beatmaps. Our team composed all the songs in the game with each song using a lot of midi files. We used those files as starting points for our rhythm game by converting the midi files into beatmaps that Unreal could read and use for gameplay. This allowed our designers to quickly edit the midi files in digital audio work stations and make beatmaps for the game without any programming knowledge.

One of the initial challenges was balancing the difficulty between the tower defense and rhythm sections. Combining two distinct genres was tricky, requiring extensive play-testing to fine-tune the gameplay. I oversaw many play-testing sessions, collected player feedback, and identified areas for improvement to achieve an optimal balance. This feedback loop ensured that the rhythm gameplay was challenging yet manageable, without overshadowing the tower defense mechanics.

Environmental Art

As the environmental art team lead, I created 3D models and textures for all game maps. I also broke up all the assets levels needed to different people to ensure the levels weren’t sparse on details. I also was a part of the ideation for the levels.

Our team had a lot of 2D artists but almost no 3D ones. Even though I also contributed to programming tasks, I stepped in as a 3D modeller due to our team’s limited resources in that area. This is the most amount of people I have worked with on a game but even then jumping between art and programming tasks was needed to complete the project.

Conclusion

I think indie games are at their best when focussing on one type of gameplay. Trying to be a really good game at two different genres was really difficult. Working with a team of talented artists and programmers made this project for me. Learning how to organize and experiment with efficient ways of dividing tasks was a challenge but very rewarding. By the end of the project we worked in small strike forces on specific game features. These strike forces usually comprised of artists and programmers which I thought was a lot of fun.