Game #4 – Beat Boxing

Today’s luck of the draw was:

Multiplayer – 8+ players
Single touch controller
Health – Music

I guess I should just get over the fact that most of these are not going to be easy… hence the challenge. In the controllers list, I listed single touch to differentiate between multi-touch and single-touch screens. In this case, I stretched it to mean that the game was operated by only pushing one button at a time.

After scribbling a few worthless ideas, I was kinda stumped, so I put the book down and wrote up the previous three days games on the blog so that I’d be all caught up. It wasn’t until I was sitting in the car later in the day, waiting, that I finally figured out what I was going to do.

It seemed that music and health could only mean one thing… DDR. And you can’t play that on a single touch interface! So I mulled around ideas of how you could modify DDR to be single touch. Then something clicked.

I call it Beat Boxing… which I thought was a pretty clever name as you’ll soon see. Looking at it now, it’s like DDR meets Taebo. Basically, it’s a rhythm game like DDR or guitar hero, but the buttons are padded buttons attached to a metal frame. You punch and kick the corresponding colored pads to the music. Since we don’t punch and kick at the same time, or even punch with both fists at the same time while kickboxing, this fulfilled the single touch requirement.

Teh mockup of LEET!

The next issue was making it 8+ multiplayer. I think the most obvious is to make it tournament friendly, or to do a last man standing type event. For example, have tons of people in a gym or something, all on their own machine playing the same song. Then the song gets progressively more difficult like Tetris, and the last person to not have lost due to scoring badly wins.

Another option would be to have a battle mode where you send attacking waves of intensity to other players by playing well. An example of this can be seen in Tetris DS.

Can you think of ways to improve this idea?

Lastly, my wife suggested a more cooperative approach where you were playing back to back and you needed to use each other to cooperatively switch machines at a specific time and similar stuff like that. It would make it more choreographed looking and achieve a coolness factor that way. It’s a lot kore complicated, but if pulled off well could be awesome.

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