Tori, our Music Engine

Hello everyone! Creating games is a very hard work. This year has been full of that, but we are very excited about what is to come. We can promise that we'll surprise you in ways that you didn't expect, but in the meantime, here is a short update for all of you.

Tori

To create this game to the standards that we and our players expect, we have needed to dig deep in the world of procedural music. The good news is that Tori, our interactive music engine is almost ready to rock with musical mechanics that the world has not seen yet. Tori is the distilled knowledge of 7 years of working in rhythm games. Its has all the features that our previous games have had plus more, and this time they are revealed in a fancy Unity interface with nodes, connectors and all that. It will be the heart of Boom Fighters and hopefully many more games to come. After working with FMod in Audio Ninja, Pure Data in Beat Boy and creating an initial implementation in Unity for Moana: Rhythm Run, we finally settled down in Tori. The engine has all the good things of the aforementioned tools and more, including these:

• Placing sounds in the timeline with sample accuracy.

• Pitch change for fast forward, slow and even reverse! <- This last one is rare.

• Creating sounds that are part of a longer audio file (extract loops out of songs) without cutting the original file.

• Preview tools to design/modify the sounds.

• It can work with music timing (BPM) but it is not restrictive. For example, one song can have some parts with certain BPMs while other parts can have a different BPM or even no musical timing at all. Pure freedom 🙂

• Sequeners to compose different sorts of patterns.

• Connectors between sequencers to create a “navigable” song. A song that can go from part to part in no specific order more that the logic that the developer creates.

• Preview tools to design each pattern at a time.

• Extensible architecture for new types of sounds and sequencers (an maybe instruments in the future)

There are more amazing things to come, but they will be revealed as our universe expands d(-.-)b

Boom Fighters – Lightweight render Pipeline

As we are warming up to integrate all the new musical mechanics that we have on our sketchbooks, we updated Boom Fighters to the latest Unity version 2018.2.6!

All of that rendering tools are so tempting 🙂 We couldn’t help but start testing the new shader graph editor and the Lightweight Render Pipeline. The results are amazing! we could recreate our flat color shader for the characters and we could give a more realistic (dramatic) look to the environment. It still runs at 60 fps in Macbooks, so we are good! We are heading to the look that we are looking for, something close to Mario Kart Deluxe (Switch). Expect a lot of new mechanics soon!

Documentary of the GTR Final in Melbourne

On our travel to Melbourne for the final of GTR, I met Oscar Ascencio from No Problemo. He works on the creation of documentaries and I had the opportunity to talk to him about what we are doing at Cocodrilo Dog. He was interested in the story, so he offered to create a short documentary about my travel to the city. Recently he contacted me again to show what he have done with the footages captured and this is the result: Steam post image At Cocodrilo, we have always thought that it would be great to create a documentary about the company. There are thousands of stories to tell that may be interesting for some people. Maybe someday we’ll create it on a bigger scale, but for now we are happy to see this piece 🙂 Thanks Oscar!