Beat Painter is a VR game that my two friends and I developed stemming from our love of rhythm games, and our desires to see the elements of a rhythm game combined with visually pleasing results. The goal of this game was to create essentially a Beat Saber spinoff where instead of simply slicing cubes, the player would complete a canvas after they had concluded a song.
Embedded Files
BeatPainterTrailer.mp4Explanation of Mechanics
Explanation of Mechanics
Upon starting the game, the player has a virtual palette attached to his left hand, and a virtual paintbrush attached to his right hand. A visible ray will be cast out of the palette controller on menu select screens. To hit a button (i.e. start game, difficulty select, restarting a game, and returning to the home menu), the player only needs to press the trigger button while the ray is over a button.
During the level scene, colored ghost strokes will come from a canvas in the background towards the player. In hard mode, a stroke is spawned at the start of every measure of the song, while in easy mode, a stroke is spawned every other measure. When a ghost stroke is in range of the player (marked by an abrupt slowdown in the ghost stroke’s movement, which occurs at the start of the measure after which the stroke is spawned), the player must paint it in order to score points.
First, the player must switch their paint color to match that of the ghost stroke, using their palette. The left thumbstick can be used to select a color from a radial menu, indicated by the physical paint blobs on the palette. Alternatively, the X and Y buttons on the left controller can be used to cycle through available colors. The stroke can not be painted unless the player has selected the correct color.
Secondly, the player must paint the stroke using the paintbrush, by tracing along it with the left joystick. The more accurate the movement is, the more points the player will score for the stroke, up to a total of 10 points per stroke. If a stroke is sufficiently accurate (i.e. more than half of the points for the stroke are scored), a matching paint stroke will appear on the canvas in the background.
Development and My Contribution
Development and My Contribution
Initially, since the other members of my team were unfamiliar with VR, I cooked together a quick prototype of actual Beat Saber in VR using the Meta Quest 3 Headset. When I confirmed that all of the VR settings were correctly configured, we split off the development into creating a system to detect paint strokes, a system to detect start and end of paint strokes, a scoring system, and a mapping system to let the game recognise paint strokes, which, as displayed on the preliminary map concept, was just a combobulation of paint strokes. I worked on the mapping portion, and the spawn/detection gimmick for the paint strokes, making sure that the raycasting felt pleasant enough for a player who was supposedly trying to paint something on beat. I also put together a simple haptic system, and a particle trail system that follows the brush points around, to give the players more of the feeling that they are actually painting something.
The gameplay trailer video for our project is featured above. In the future, I definitely would like to add more custom maps for songs that I enjoy to this game, as well as perhaps find a way to automate the generation of the maps.
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