A downloadable game

BOOM BIKE

You are deep in enemy territory, stuck behind robotic lines. With nothing but your old, beat-up Yamaha motorbike and a conveniently unattended rocket launcher, you make your escape. An entire platoon of enemy 'bots is standing in your way.

CONTROLS

  • Move the mouse left and right to move your bike left and right (you cannot look up)
  • Left click to Fire rockets
  • Press Q to ask your on-board computer how much health you have left.
  • Press ESC to quit the game any time.
  • Press ENTER after you die to restart the game.

TIPS & HOW TO PLAY

  • There will be no need to make turns--you are on an infinite straight road.
  • Get your bearings by moving as far left and as far right as you can. You'll hear a sound cue when you can't go any farther left or farther right.
  • If you let an enemy pass you by, it will reappear in front of you.
  • You have 5 HP.
  • There are three enemy types: Walkers, Zaggers, and The Plow.
  • Walkers walk slowly forward in a straight line.
  • Zaggers move left to right while moving towards you.
  • The Plow hurtles forward at a very high speed and is much quieter than the other two.
  • It takes only one rocket to destroy Walkers and Zaggers.
  • It takes three rockets to destroy the Plow.
  • Your rocket launcher has to reload completely before you can fire it again.


SUMMARY OF THE DEVELOPMENT EXPERIENCE

I came into this project wanting to create the audio-only equivalent of a twitch shooter. This meant that spatial recognition and being able to tell where sounds were coming from would be very important. My first attempt was to completely sidestep the in-built Unity or GVR spatial audio technology, using nothing but audio stereo pan and volume to determine "hits." I switched over to working in 3D and using GVR spatial audio to give the player a greater sense of aiming and moving through space.

LESSONS LEARNED

Despite using GoogleVR (GVR) spatial audio, I found that having too many sounds coming from the same general area (in front of the player) made fine predictions of enemy locations difficult to make. GVR also did not allow me to use Unity's audio mixer features. For example, I wanted to use Duck Volume to lower music volume while important player-related SFX were playing. Since this didn't seem possible to do with GVR, I unfortunately had to remove music from all parts of the game except the very end for the sake of gameplay.

After this design exercise, it became apparent to me that in an audio-only game, clarity comes first. Sounds should be simple and not fatiguing (admittedly, many of the sounds I used in Boom Bike are fatiguing). Sound cues should be very distinct from one another. If different SFX are too similar, and come from the same general direction, they can blend together into a murky mess. Music, while certainly great to have, should not drown out the sounds of the game, especially if one's audio-only game requires movement in 3D space. Furthermore, audio sources that are drones and loops can be very hard to pinpoint using GVR.



Download

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Boom Bike OSX.zip 43 MB
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Boom Bike PC.zip 41 MB