Pulsefire (2024)
A top-down shooter where you not only need to dodge enemies and aim your weapons but also time your every move to the beat of the song.
Project Info
Team Size: 1
Project Length: 1 month
Syncing audio with gameplay
An especially complex part of this project was accurately recording the beat of a song and synchronizing it to the note UI, player input, and audio. Unlike a traditional rhythm game, Pulsefire requires the player to split their attention between their character and the notemap at the bottom of the screen, forcing them to rely on the sound of the song alone to time their actions. This created a very high bar for the responsiveness required — if the audio was off by just half a second, for example, the game quickly became unplayable (trust me, I tried). To tackle this unique challenge, I had to keep a frame-accurate timer in relation to the song's tempo, factor in the time signature to obtain the current beat, and compute the exact amount of time it takes for a note to travel across the screen.
However, due to Unity's imperfect audio timing, there was still a delay between the player input and the sound of the note, which I resolved with a design solution instead of a technical one: I pivoted from responsive audio to a system where the note sound would play regardless of whether the player correctly timed their keypress. After carefully calibrating my system for the different tempos and notemaps of all the different songs, the result was an extremely responsive and synchronized gameplay loop, allowing players to correctly track even complex patterns by the sound of the song alone.