Origin

Rock On, Raccoon! is a game I worked on during MassDigi's Summer Innovation Program in 2023. SIP was an internship that spanned over the course of the summer where each team made a unique mobile game from concept to publication. My team of 6 ended up wanting to make a short mobile rhythm game, and thus, Rock On, Raccoon! was born.

My Contributions

Firstly, I was the team's character designer, artist, and animator. I designed and animated 6 different animal bands, and worked with the team on what aesthetic we wanted to go with for each of them. I also worked on the design team and created the beatmaps for all of the songs in the game.

Art

I created each animal band from concepting to animation, and worked on some UI as well. Each animal band had a unique color palette, as well as a highlight color that was unique to the band.

Design

I worked with the programmers to figure out how to refine the process of importing beatmaps into the game. We decided to use a system that took imported .txt files and spawned the notes based on a system of numbers that corresponded with certain rows of notes.

In order to make this easier for me to beatmap, I created a Google Sheets document (seen below) that visualizes where the notes will be on the screen. It also includes cues for changes in lighting, dialogue cues, time signature, and tempo. This way, it's easier to map out the levels and focus on gamefeel and flow without worrying about which numbers corresponded to what. This also allows for future developers to easily understand how the system works. Especially because I saved all the previous beatmaps in the document for easy reference.

When mapping, I used my previous experience transcribing music and playing rhythm games to create maps that felt natural and satisfying to the player. Taking into account that most people would be playing this game with two thumbs, I mapped with the goal that there would be a maximum of two notes played at the same time, and through playtesting, I adjusted difficult or confusing sections. Overall, I'm very happy with how the maps feel to play, and the document I made was a total lifesaver when working towards that goal.