Week 1

Hello world! This is the first weekly update for Dragon Drummer, a drumming rhythm game where you hold the drum sticks (still need to work on that pitch…) You can try out the WIP alpha here. It’s all programmer art atm but the basic gameplay is there 🎮.

Choosing a name

Finally decided on a name for the game, which honestly was a huge relief. Sonya and I had decided on making the main character a pig so was trying to find a punny pig name. Here’s the shortlist

• Paradiddle Piggy
• Drummer Pig
• Pig In Pocket
• Go Ham!

Then one day “Dragon Drummer” popped in my head and I liked it but I didn’t want to abandon piggy. So, I retroactively imagined a backstory where our piggy is on a journey to become The Dragon Drummer. Cute~ And now we’ve got a story mode too!

Practice Mode

Implemented a practice mode where you practice and loop sections of each song. UI is horrible at the moment but it works! Eventually will have musical meaningful sections like Verse, Chorus, etc.

Fill Mode

With Dragon Drummer I want the player to have some creative freedom. I’m testing out a feature where there are “fill sections” during the song. During a fill section the user is free and encouraged to perform their own fill. To give the player some ideas, there is a fill section in practice mode with example fills. If the player executes any of the example fills during a playthrough of a song, they’re also awarded a badge. This is a bit of a hidden feature right now, probably need some kind of tutorial to explain to players. If you wanna try out some fills, you can play the ‘normal-fills’ variation under ‘Crush Encounter’. Let me know what you think!

UX Improvements for Game

Made a bunch of small UX improvements to the game including

• Navigation with arrow keys
• Soft fade out for audio when transitioning between scenes
• Dismissable one time hints for users
• Polyfills to support more browsers
• Preserving song selections when navigating back

Setting up the blog

One of my excuses for not starting the blog was not having a domain name. Once I got dragondrummer.com I started working on setting up infrastructure for the blog. I had thought about using something like Medium but I didn’t feel like writing yet so I sunk maybe 10 hours in writing code for a custom blog. The website you see now is built with Gatsby which I highly recommend if you like writing React code. I also switched to Netlify for free hosting over Firebase since with Netlify I can just push updates to my Github repo and everything is automatically live.

Staying organized

This week I started using ClickUp for project management purposes. I’m liking it so far, especially the Kanban boards and the dopamine boost from moving tasks to the closed column.

Social Media

Setup Facebook and Instagram accounts for Dragon Drummer this week.