This week we suspended the work on myMO for a few days to enter the Epic Games – Mega Jam. The Epic Mega Jam is an annual seven-day game jam organized by Epic Games that brings together artists, designers, and developers throughout the Unreal Ecosystem to foster creativity and provide an opportunity for individuals and teams of up to five to create and ship something! We decided to enter this challenge just to see what we could learn by trying to create a game in a week as a team. The theme for this year’s Mega Jam was Antiquated Future. The game we ended up building was called ChronoBeats.
In this game you run through a selected history of music genres over the last century. Each genre is an area you will run through starting from Big Band Swing Music, through Rock, Hip Hop and EDM (Electronic Dance Music). The game is based on starting a new instrument every 16 beats. 16 beats are 4 measures or bars with 4 beats per bar. Every 4 bars there is an opportunity to add a new sound loop to the overall mix. All the genres will start with a drum and continue to build as you run through the game.
Entering a room, a “Beat Gate” will appear which is an image of a musician from that era. When you run through that image a beat will start. As you run through beat gate images, you will build new sounds for Drums, Bass, Rhythm, Solo and Dance. When running and building beats, timing is everything! Scoring depends on how well you run your timing. You need to run through each gate with less than 3 beats left in the beat countdown registered on your HUD.
A point is rewarded for 3 beats or less left.
A point is deducted if there is 4 beats or more left.
Success in the game will be running through the gates with the beat countdown of 3, 2, or 1.
At the end of the game, you will enter the MashUP space. There, you can mix and match beats from different eras creating your own ‘timeless’ mix. Proving that in music, the future owes much to the past; it is truly an Antiquated Future.
Here is a video of the gameplay:
You can download the game and play it using this link: https://itch.io/jam/2023-epic-megajam/rate/2274988
We learned a lot about working together as a team and enjoyed the challenge. Go play this mini-game and tell us what you think.
