Developing a rhythm game with LÖVE

Last week at the end of that article I mentioned that I was working on a game in order to explore LÖVE. That game is called Beathoven. It is a rhythm game based on the remix sound of the 5th symphony of Beethoven made Lionel Yu and Nicolas Chazarre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTjh29xo0so

Instead of using a piano like controller, I wanted to use something a bit more like those music arcade game with button spread around the screen.

And I went with 4 buttons spread as a diamond. 4 buttons means 4 fingers game play, which sounds not too overwhelming, but still fun.

Some screenshots

image (17).png

image (18).png

Current features

Splash screen
Title screen
Timer before actual rhythm game starts
Gameplay with 4 buttons (tracks) with instant pressed notes only
Scoring at each right note
HP reducing at each wrong note
Note streaking tracking with different messages at different levels

Planned features/work

Game Over screen with scoring and retry button
Finalizing the notes balancing and rhythm
Adding more animation in the UI
Game responsive
Game introduction
Better particles effects
Long notes with kept-pressed buttons

It’s difficult to reduce multiple hours and several thousands lines of code in one blog article, so I’ll share a couple of things.

📬 Tracks’ queue

In order to save the notes currently on the track of a button, I made this Queue class (based on the classes.lua I shared in my last article.)

local classes = require "classes"

local Queue = classes.class()

function Queue:init()
    self.first = 0
    self.last = -1
    self.items = {}
end

function Queue:count()
  local count = 0
  for _ in pairs(self.items) do count = count + 1 end
  return count
end

function Queue:enqueue(value)
    self.last = self.last + 1
    self.items[self.last] = value
end

function Queue:dequeue()
  if self:count() == 0 then
    return nil
  end

  local first = self.first
  local value = self.items[first]

  self.items[first] = nil        -- to allow garbage collection
  self.first = self.first + 1

  return value
end

function Queue:deleteFirst(value)
  local i = -1
  for k = self.first,self.last,1
  do
    if self.items[k] == value then
      self.items[k] = nil
      i = k
    end
  end

  -- Value not found
  if i == -1 then
    return
  end

  for k = i,self.last,1
  do
    self.items[k] = self.items[k+1]
  end
  self.items[self.last] = nil
  self.last = self.last - 1
end

function Queue:print()
  local res = "Queue: { "
  for k,v in pairs(self.items) do
      res = res..k..": "..v..", "
  end  
  print(res.." }")
end

return Queue

When I press a button, a note is dequeued, and we check if the note was overlapping the button. If it was, then it’s a success and if not, then it’s an early miss.

🥁 Beat Finder

A rhythm game means playing with the rhythm/beat of a music.

In order to do that, I could think of several solutions:

Using Fast Fourier Transformations on the sound data to detect high frequencies peak and put a note at that moment
Using the 5th symphony partition
Using a tool like Audacity to automatically detect the beat

I went with the latter, knowing that I would still have a lot of manually editing to do, to make things fun.

If you load a sound in audacity, you can click then on Analyze > Beat Finder

This will add a label track with a label on each beat detected. You can export it then File > Export > Export Labels. It’ll provide you a text format easily parsable.

Conclusion

If you were looking to making a rhythm game on your own, I hope that my findings can help you to get kick-started quickly. If you are interested in Beathoven and/or would like to participate in the dev, let me know. For now, the game is not open source, but once I am happy with the state of the code and game I’ll share it.

Developing a rhythm game with LÖVE

Comments

Game Dev

How to make a LÖVE WebGL build?

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A better way to discuss?

Modern dependency management

Street Epistemology

Some screenshots

Current features

Planned features/work

📬 Tracks’ queue

🥁 Beat Finder

Conclusion

Command Palette

Comments

Game Dev

How to make a LÖVE WebGL build?

More from this blog

Some screenshots

Current features

Planned features/work

🤝 Some sharing

📬 Tracks’ queue

🥁 Beat Finder

Conclusion