Part 1 Background Story and Basic Mechanics
A drummer Roger, was cursed by a witch and his soul merged with his drum. He needs to find several epic items to remove the curse. Thinking about the game mechanics, it seems that platform games always contain some obstacles and some enemies. So I want to separate these two functions to make the players more strategies to arrange what state they will stay.
You can press F to switch your state (human or drum). When you're in a human state, Space is responding to the jump function, while it is an attack method for the drum state. Space is for the dash, but it shows different performance methods in each state. When you press that button, the human state will dash a short distance, and avoid the damage on the path, and the drum state will keep rolling as long as you press that. Rolling drums will deal damage to the enemies on the path.
Part 2 Character Design
The first thing to determine is how the game protagonist is designed. As a drummer, he has to give the player some elements of rock visually, so I designed him with a red jacket as well as black gloves. Having blonde hair with some fashionable elements of hair and with jeans, our handsome protagonist will take shape.
The game's witch as a final villain role, should have more obvious villainous characteristics.
In the original version, I designed just a few features about the witch, but got feedback: villainous features are not obvious enough. So I adjusted the design of the character's eyes and gave the witch a more evil expression. Such a design may be more immediately recognizable to the player than the fact that this is a villainous character.
Part 3 Music Design
The game is set up as a rock character, but it is obviously somewhat comical to be turned by a witch into a monster that fuses with the drums as one. With the nonsensical attack skills and the city streets flooded with neon lights late at night, perhaps the design of jazz music is more in line with the overall context.
Considering the Bass tone as the root note and soul of jazz, I imitated the classic jazz arrangement by having the Bass repeat some rhythmic melodies in the bass. After writing these, the overall structure of the piece is written by properly imagining the saxophonist improvising the melody on this root note and reconciling the two with the piano melody in an eclectic way.
The subsequent details are the drums responsible for getting the player rhythmically moving and adding Marimba tones as appropriate to make the melody memorable for the player.
Part 4 Background Image and Menu
The main menu is the first place players enter. Therefore, it is necessary to give players an excellent first impression of the game in the design of the main interface.
Used pixel-style arcade characters to build the title, and drew some buildings in the corresponding style. The backgrounds use silhouettes of some tall buildings, and different levels are achieved by changing the tones of the silhouettes.
