ClickBeat!
 

Original news post.
http://www.thephorse.net/beatclick/s.../screen_01.jpg

A long time ago I started this project in my head to make a clone of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan!. Together with my good friend Aymes we started working on what would become ClickBeat. We wanted to make it so that people could make their own scripts as easily as possible, while still being able to add animations to the background just like in Osu! and Elite Beat Agents.

The project was quite ambitious by our standards, and it took us a long time and much starting and stopping to get it all together. Sadude (who did some great Jpop DDR scripts for Stepmania) helped tremendously along the way by giving advice as to what the script language should be, and I can't thank him enough for that, it really made a huge difference. Diana did the awesome art of the girl. Other than that, it's all me and Aymes! :D

Anyway, the game basically revolves around the player clicking circles that appear in time with the music. You get a rating for each click depending on how good you do, and periodically you get a report. And at the end you get a rank! It's basically EBA with the mouse, but it plays a bit differently because of the larger surface area of the screen and the mouse cursor, so I don't think it feels like a ripoff. ;)

So yeah! Check it out and join the forum and give feedback and spread the word and... stuff!

I hope it's okay to post about my own music game here!

I don't see why it'd be a problem to post about it, it is a music game.

I gave the game a download, and I have to say that I'm pretty impressed. I think the UI could use a little work, but other than that you have the gameplay mechanics of EBA/OTO down pat. Any chance of a script editor being part of the program soon?

That's something I thought would be very useful, but it would've taken us so much work that nobody'd even remember EBA by the time we were done. We're definitely still thinking about it though, it's just something that will take a long time to do (especially since if we're gonna do it, we wanna do it properly).

If you're interested in making scripts, you shouldn't be shy to have a go at the script language. It is actually quite simple to learn, and I'm pretty sure that once you get the hang of it, it's faster than any editor would ever be.

You know, considering I've never played Elite Beat Agents before, I gotta say, this game is definitely a nice piece of work. I'm impressed with it. Only problem I'm having is timing issues, but I'm sure I'll eventually get it.

So far so good!! Like the others, i'm impressed as well!

Have you advertised this on Bemanistyle forums?
I'm sure a lot of people would LOVE to give this a try.

How hard is it to create a script for a song?

Really nice job.

Some songs work a lot better than others, however. Your space one is probably my favorite. The song and level are both top-notch.

A key component to Osu! was that the distance between the circles usually corresponded to the time between the notes. Some of the scripts I had a hard time placing the beat because they were spaced differently yet had to be clicked right after one another.

I like that music can be triggered by hitting the circles (like a beatmania game) instead of just playing along to the music (like DDR).

Adding the other feature from Osu! (the dragging a ball along a path) might be interesting.

Thanks for the support guys! We're getting quite a lot of downloads, it's all quite exciting. Hopefully some people will make some cool scripts! =D

I would say that it's very easy, but then I was part of the team that designed it. ;) But it really depends on the songs. For example, the circles of Edison Slide took maybe an hour to do because it is mostly repetition. Same for the Space Travel one. The actual animation makes use of one of the particle systems (as you may have noticed), so that was pretty easy to program also.

As long as you know the BPM of the song you're doing, placing the circles is really easy. And how far you want to take the background animation is really up to you! If you need help doing scripts don't hesitate to ask. :D


Thanks!

You are probably experiencing some of the hiccups in the earlier scripts I did before I had any idea what the hell I was doing. =D Seriously though, that Space Travel one is one of the later ones when I had much more of a hang on what kind of music and circle placement would work. But I still find myself continually improving.

I really wanted to get that in because I love that about beatmania. It's quite hard to program so I didn't do it for all the songs, but I have plans for more songs that use it...

We haven't figured out a way to code it yet! It's really baffling me.

Just gave it a download. I'm impressed. I had a little trouble getting from side to side since some of the circles were really spaced out, but then again, I think my mouse sucks and it's over sensitive...

Anyway, as Jazz said, I like your Space song a lot. Very catchy. Keep going with this. It could be the next big music game on the PC.

I gave it a download too, and it's pretty decent. What I didn't like though was the lack of direction the notes had, and I'm pretty good at Osu/EBA myself.

I think it'd be better if you made the target-like rings which close inwards on the notes bigger and gradually adjust it for different difficulties. Basically, the same as what Osu has, but since it's copying it anyway you can still make it look pretty good. Just look at what the makers of DJMAX made, and that was based off beatmania.

Well :D Not sure what you used to create the game... but i can prolly cook up a script editor in VB (.net) for it... :)

Looks like someone's getting noticed: