8 Glock rockin’ beats
Examining the birth of the rhythm shooter and the challenge of fusing beats and bullets
The challenges of fusing beats and bullets in rhythm shooters
From Halo’s 30 seconds of fun to Doom Eternal’s pounding combat loops, every firstperson shooter moves to its own rhythm – even if it’s one you instinctively feel rather than hear. Recently, game developers have been looking to turn the volume up and make that connection more explicit. Harmonix’s Audica combines shooting and music, but it’s more a rhythm game with guns than the reverse. VR favourite
Pistol Whip, meanwhile, sets its on-rails action to a driving EDM score. Now two new games are going a step further: they’re FPSes first and foremost, but they demand your actions match their tempo.
If you spend any time on social media, you’ll likely have noticed one game in particular making a splash. In April, Dan Da Rocha tweeted a 30-second snippet of footage under the Screenshot Saturday hashtag. “Here’s a rhythm FPS game we’ve been messing around with,” he wrote. “It’s been pretty fun to work on so far!” Yet the idea behind Gun Jam was not new by any means; he’d been kicking it around since early 2018, while working on puzzler QUBE 2.
“I was playing this FPS prototype and tr ying to think of a unique hook, something that hadn’t really been done before,” he tells us. As he played, he began to zone out and listen to the background music before inspiration struck. He started tapping his finger on the desk in time with the soundtrack, and then carried on playing, this time forcing himself to only shoot on the beat. “It felt pretty good,” he says.
As the idea began to take shape in his head, his first thought was an obvious one: has this been done before? The Google results brought up Harmonix’s sadly abandoned Chroma, but nothing else. By September, he’d started putting together prototypes for a game that married Doom with Dance Dance Revolution. The game has a traditional vertically-scrolling note chart – as seen in Da Rocha’s Twitter post – which invites players to fire on the beat. You don’t need to hit an enemy with every shot, but as long as you shoot each of those coloured notes and take out enemies regularly enough, your score combo will increase. The finer details are yet to be ironed out, but the core concept is easily understood.
Or so you’d think. Da Rocha pitched the game around for a long time, but no publishers were biting. The lack of interest left him ready to shelve the idea, but something convinced him not to let it go. “I’d put so much time and energy into it, I thought ‘I can’t just let this die on a hard drive, I want to see what people think of it.‘” It was his girlfriend that pushed him into sharing his efforts on social media. The clip took about an hour to put together, he says, after which he spoke to a friend who gave him tips on which hashtags to use and advised him to post it and turn Twitter off, so as not to set any expectations. “Then he messaged me and said, ‘Oh man, it’s starting to take off – you need to get in there and start replying to people.’ It was a real rollercoaster of emotions, and it became clear that we had to do something with this.” He laughs. “And, of course, the publishers all came out of the woodwork.”
Meanwhile, Derby’s Awe Interactive had been busy making its own rhythmbased FPS, BPM: Bullets Per Minute. As Da Rocha’s initial tweet began to pop up on his own timeline, David Jones was patiently waiting for production to be completed on his game’s debut trailer. That it followed hard on the heels of the formal announcement of Gun Jam was a coincidence, he says, the result of Covid-19-related holdups convincing the studio to publish the PC version itself rather than wait for its publishing partner.
The story of both games, in fact, involves a succession of coincidences. Jones and Da Rocha are friends, with both having just finished working on firstperson puzzlers (Jones wrote Bulkhead Interactive’s The Turing Test) when they independently came up with the idea to combine rhythm and shooting. Both, too, were inspired during idle moments. For Jones, it all
Da Rocha started putting together prototypes for a game that married Doom with Dance Dance Revolution
coalesced during a single workday. “I was walking around my office and I saw my friend playing Crypt Of The Necrodancer, which is probably the closest parallel to our gameplay,” he begins. “Then he started playing The Binding Of Isaac. And then I was watching a Noclip documentary about the making of Doom, where they talk about how they’ve got this slot system where enemies have slots in which to [launch] their attacks. And I thought: that’s a cool idea, but you could definitely transcribe that into a piano roll, like on a synthesiser, where on each quarter note, eighth note, 16th note, an action occurs from certain enemies.” By November, he’d come up with a concept: a single image of an angel screaming that would eventually result in a story based on Norse mythology. In BPM, you’re cast as one of five Valkyries, tasked with saving Asgard from an invading army of demons.
It wasn’t until the following August during a casual chat that the two discovered they were making similar games. A collaboration was mooted; Da Rocha was keen, but Jones wanted to go it alone. “Basically, I had too much of an ego,” he laughs. “By that, I mean that I left my previous company because I wanted to tr y doing something independent where I felt creatively fulfilled, where I was in the driving seat. And as soon as you team up with someone, then you have to create a common vision. And I didn’t want to do that.”
The two have, happily, taken their idea in different directions. Both games have been promoted with rock/metal soundtracks, but Da Rocha suggests the original vision for Gun Jam was to have four worlds, each one themed around a different genre of music. BPM, on the other hand, is a Roguelike with procedurally-generated stages, and a score primarily inspired by Knife Party, Tom Morello and Muse. “It’s almost a tribute album to Muse’s Absolution, without tr ying to be too much like it,” Jones says. “We’re going much more for big arpeggiated synths.”
Both admit that the concept alone brings with it a number of unique problems. Accurate aiming while focusing on the beat is one: Jones says solving it has taken months of careful iteration. “Early on, we had small enemies requiring a great degree of precision in both timing and aim, and it just didn’t feel right. So we’ve been tweaking the size of enemies and the thresholds of a shot being accurate and on time and reached a point where we’re happy.” The key, he says, is to make players feel both skilful and on rhythm without making unfair demands of them. “I mean, we could have made Quake with the railgun and that’s what it started off as, and it feels awful,” he laughs. Though it’s comparatively early stages on Gun Jam, Da Rocha’s game may have an alternative solution: spread guns, where your bullets have larger hitboxes. But that wouldn’t have worked in BPM, which features long-range weapons, including sniper rifles. Each of these comes with its own reload sequence – the revolver, Jones says, is arduous in the sense that each bullet has to be manually inserted, but if you love rhythm games, it might just be the most fun to use.
But there’s a far bigger technical challenge, and it’s one that applies to every rhythm game: latency. As Jones points out, the latency on keyboards and mice isn’t always consistent. “It gets even more complicated when you’re on a television, because you can have up to 60 milliseconds latency,” he says. “That is a real problem in our game where you can shoot on smaller subdivisions of a note, because the delay is almost a 32nd note.” It isn’t a problem for Guitar Hero, he adds, thanks to the relative simplicity of accounting for the delay. In a firstperson shooter, with significantly more variables, it becomes a much bigger headache. “Basically, if you have lots of enemies and characters on the screen, you have to add latency to your sound engine to give it time to prepare that sound to be sent to your headphones. Synchronising all that is essentially black magic and lies,” he laughs. “It’s why Pistol Whip is so great to play, because it’s on a VR display, so
The key is to make players feel both skilful and on rhythm without making unfair demands of them
the latency is incredibly low.” So can we expect a VR release for BPM? “We’ve entertained the idea, but we’ve made a game where you move incredibly fast, where you can blink through the air when you jump, where you’ve got a world moving to the beat, enemies dodging and crazy red shaders. We have made a game that would induce motion sickness better than any other.”
While a VR version is off the table, BPM’s PC launch in August represents a thrilling first: the start of a whole new subgenre. And though Gun Jam will be much later to the party, Da Rocha believes there are plenty of possibilities for the future of the rhythm shooter. Whether it takes off, he says, will depend on how well both games communicate their appeal to a wider audience. “You have to come in with the expectation that it’s not going to be like Call Of Duty, where you just let rip whenever you want. I’d liken it to Fortnite’s Build Mode – if you saw that for the first time, you’d be like ‘What is this?’ I was the same, but then you see these kids creating these crazy structures rapidly and once you get into that and understand that then it becomes this awesome thing. What we’ve got here, once you understand how it plays, you’ll find out it’s really fun.”