Contest: NDS GAME - Dual Step Revolution by Shoryu

[Shoryu]

Hi there   
I was afraid not to make it in time but my entry for this compo is here : Dual Step Revolution

So what is this?

It's basically a Dance Dance Revolution for the Nintendo DS. The purpose of this game is to press the button at the right moment when the arrows are at the top. You have to press the right keys exactly when the arrows match the ones at the top. You have to do this until the end of the song. Keep an eye on the red bar at the right. If it's empty , you loose...




How to play

The controls are simple.

Left arrow : left d-pad or Y
Down arrow : down d-pad or B
Up arrow : up d-pad or X
Right arrow : right d-pad or A


Different modes

There are 2 modes for each song:

- Normal mode
- Survival mode

In normal mode , when you success at pressing the right key, the meter goes up. So when you missed some arrows, you can still have a full bar if you manage to press the next arrows perfectly.

In Survival mode, when you miss an arrow it will affect definitely your bar. It means you cannot have too much misses since the bar won't go up again.

Why only a few songs are available right now?

I'm still adding them as you read. I mean i suck at arrow timing  and song choice  , so it needs some time to have this set up since i'm all alone on this project.

Why using mod format?

Maybe i'll try to use other formats that would work great with filesystems like gbfs, but for legal matters i 'm afraid i can't have popular mp3s coming along with my game so i suppose i will have to support  .dwi or stepmania formats in the future to make it easy...

Thanks to

Mollusk for PAlib
Dekutree64 for his mod player
all the dsdev.fr community
and everyone who will play that game

Anything else?

If you have any suggestions or comments you're welcome !

[Shoryu]

and here are the files, too bad it's a rushed release 

[rize]

I'm really bad at this sort of game... which surprises me because I've been a musician for 12 years (playing guitar and even drums the whole time).  So I should have great rhythm!  Maybe it's the genre of music (I'm mostly into music with really intricate melodies and maybe a bit of crazy rock/metal drum work like in f-zero x on the 64).

Anyway, one problem for me is that I find it hard to realize when I have hit a step correctly.  The visual cues don't seem to be enough for me (especially since I'm focused on the top left of the screen).  The problem is that a sound cue would interfere with the music.  Anyway, that's probably just me sucking.

I think the real problem is that the game should have used the touch screen instead of the d-pad and face buttons.  This would make it more like DDR.  Maybe you can put 4 big touch buttons on the touch screen (like a virtual ddr thumb pad).  That way there's only one pad and two thumbs, just like real DDR (one pad two feet).  I tried it out on a blank screen and it feels a lot more natural.  Of course, you'd have to polish all the finger prints off your screen before playing another game 

[rize]

I should mention that not being big on DDR, I forgot that you must sometimes step on two pads at once (and the DS touch screen only supports one touch point).

However, with a somewhat complex touch reading algorithm, I still think it could be done.  Basically, when you touch two points, the screen returns the mid point which tells you which two pads were touched, except in the case of left+right and down+up which share the center of the screen as their midpoint.  For those you could decide between the two combos by watching the touch down and touch up events (since it's very unlikely for the player to touch both thumbs down in the same 60th of a second AND lift them both up in the same 60th of a second a bit later).