In this week, I pixelled a splash screen for the game in the same style as the promotional art.

After getting feedback from the team, we decided that it would look better with more motion blur on the skeleton pieces flying around, and with more definition on the leg closest to the camera to avoid it from blending in to the background.

Since the mechanics were all in, I was also tasked with beatmapping the stage in Unreal. This meant listening to the song composed by Nathan for our stage, figuring out rhythms that would be fun to hit the buttons to, and putting them into the blueprints that Luke created.

Since I am quite fond of rhythm games (and arguably one of the most frequent rhythm game players in our group), I had a good idea of beatmaps I could use as inspiration. I went back to replay some rhythm games such as Stepmania, and looked up beatmaps for songs such as 495, and also recalled playing the arcade version of Groove Coaster and looked up the beatmap for Night of Nights for inspiration.

I first started noting down ideas for the beatmap while listening to the song to start with.

I then used Unreal to fill in part of Luke's blueprints for the beatmapping system. The basic system looked like this;

with each node representing one bar. Within each node, there are eight slots (representing each beat and off-beat) for options of which enemy or obstacle to place, with each one requiring a different action of combination of actions. This meant beatmapping became quite tedious and time-consuming, and everything needed to be tested as it was added to make sure that it was both fun to play and on-rhythm. The original idea for the beatmap was changed as I went through due to the difficulty being quite high for a first level.

Once I got to the later bars, I noticed while testing that the last few bars were beginning to go out of sync; this was most likely due to the fact that Unreal had to sequentially check each node to make sure it matched with the counter for the bars going up (i.e. when the bar counter was at Bar 60, Unreal would have to check bars 1 through 59 first.) As such, the blueprints needed reworking slightly to be more efficient, and the remainder of the beatmapping was put on hold until later.

At the end of the week, a representative from the Imaginarium came into uni, and some team members were able to talk to them about suggestions for what to do in the coming months. We were advised to do more work on PR and our Twitter account.