Dev Blog Archives - Cocodrilo Dog

Tori – Interactive Music Engine

September 30, 2018/in Dev Blog /by CD_admin

Hello everyone! It’s been a year full of hard work, but we are back 🙂

At the beginning of this year, we were proudly part of the dev team for Riff VR to build the guitar engine and other cool stuff for our client IMEX Media. Since mid 2018, our focus is completely back on our beloved Boom Fighters. This are the first 2 milestones of our work: Tori, our interactive music engine and our test with the new Lightweight Render Pipeline

Tori – Interactive Music Engine

Tori is the distilled knowledge of 7 years of working in rhythm games. Its has all the features that our previous games have had plus more, and this time they are revealed in a fancy Unity interface with nodes, connectors and all that. It will be the heart of Boom Fighters and hopefully many more games to come.

For us this is a very valuable asset where we believe that we have improved the way that interactive contents can connect to music and currently is patent pending.

Please watch this early overview video to get an idea of what we are talking about:

After working with FMod, Pure Data in other games, we finally settled down in Tori. The engine has all the good things of the aforementioned tools and more, including these:

Tori, Lightweight Render Pipeline

September 19, 2018/in Dev Blog /by CD_admin

Boom Fighters – Lightweight render Pipeline

As we are warming up to integrate all the new musical mechanics that we have on our sketchbooks, we updated Boom Fighters to the latest Unity version 2018.2.6!

All of that rendering tools are so tempting 🙂 We couldn’t help but start testing the new shader graph editor and the Lightweight Render Pipeline. The results are amazing! we could recreate our flat color shader for the characters and we could give a more realistic (dramatic) look to the environment. It still runs at 60 fps in Macbooks, so we are good!

Boom Fighters – 2018 and Beyond

January 17, 2018/in Dev Blog /by CD_admin

Its been a long time since I wrote the first entry of the blog, but a lot of great things have happened since then. In the first post, I wrote about bringing a demo of Boom Fighters to Game Connection to be played with an electronic drum kit. The timing wasn’t enough for our team to complete that goal for this event. Nevertheless, we had a great Game Connection event where we we showed our previous games as sample of the game mechanics, and the concept art images of Boom Fighters. This is a picture of our booth:

In this event, we met with a representative from Global Top Round, an accelerator from South Korea and San Francisco. He liked the Boom Fighters concept as well as our portfolio and we also liked their vision of boosting indie game studios. During the following weeks we exchanged few emails to find out more about the program and finally we decided to apply in mid 2017, when they opened their web platform to applications.

During the following months after Game Connection we were able to put together what we wanted: A demo that could be played with an electronic drum kit:

After submitting the game and following the evaluation process we were finally notified by the end of September that Cocodrilo Dog was a finalist. The final took place in Melbourne, Australia and the top 17 studios out of 100+ studios around the world needed to show and pitch their games in order to make it to the top 10. Fortunately we made it 🙂

For more information about this, you can visit these articles:

Press release Gamasutra: http://ubm.io/2zuVMtE
GTR – Cocodrilo Dog in Japan: http://bit.ly/2iJx92f
GTR – Cocodrilo Dog in Corea: http://bit.ly/2jdx5vy
GTR – Cocodrilo Dog in Australia: http://bit.ly/2zoOFn5

The Path to Interactive Music

February 11, 2017/in Dev Blog /by CD_admin

Hi, my name is Juan Reyes (@MiniBeatBoy) and I’m a game programmer, industrial designer and musician and I’ve been running a game development studio Cocodrilo Dog since 2011 along with my partner Marge Torres (@marge_torres), a lawyer, game designer and tech lover.

I have believed for a long time that music can be an interactive experience and specially I think that it can be enjoyed inside video games. I grew up when the people used to purchase physical CDs in physical stores with physical money and then you could spend all your afternoon listening to it in a non-interrupted session accompanied with beautiful artwork and lyrics from the album’s books. Now I feel that part of that has been lost. I wouldn’t know what part of it exactly, but I think it is something between the immersive experience, the visual aspect and the capacity of the listener to focus a 100% in the experience.

In Cocodrilo Dog we have been working in music games since the beginning and every new project we create my belief becomes stronger. As game designers, we want to create a game format where you can connect deeply with the music. A game that is a result of the music and not the music as something that is secondary. But at the same time we don’t want a game explicitly themed for musicians, like the games that have plastic instruments and are about being rockstars. We want to create characters, stories and action, and mix them with music mechanics like rhythm, tone, composition, etc.