Project Overview
The video above is from an early playtest session, before multiplayer, juicing and the revolutionary idea of using carrots or cucumbers as drum sticks.
I developed Fruit Drummer together with my friend and classmate David Löving. As part of one of our courses we were tasked to make a prototype soley focused on "fun". After studying Ralph Koster's theory on fun we together came up
with the idea of just allowing the player to unleash themselves on a bunch of fruit to the ryhtm of "We will rock you".
The game is inspired by the Guitar and Band Hero games. The game's main mechanic is simple, there are "notes" falling down a grid and you hit the corresponding fruit when the note is in the target area. The novelty comes from our controllers. Where Guitar and Band Hero used realistic depictions of instruments to create novelty with their controllers, we did something similar. Instead of the setting being a band on stage we thought about something more familiar, just drumming along to your favorite beats in the kitchen, using any fruits or pots and pans you might find.
Design Choices
Very quickly, we realized that playing the same beat in a realistic way for several minutes would not be fun enough. Especially not for simple beats like those in "Seven Nation Army" and "We will rock you".
So we decided to sprinkle in variations and randomisation. We didn't change the beat, but changed which fruits represented what instrument. The watermelon would go from being played as the kick drum to the snare instead,
and the banana would now be the kick drum. This kept the players engaged and the switches kept refreshing the madness by tossing in confusion.
We also decided to implement a local multiplayer mode, where two players would battle it out to see who is the best fruit drummer. To introduce player interatction in this mode we also introduced two new mechanics, "rotten fruit" and the "mushroom".
Whenever a player would go on a combo streak, the opposite player would have some of their notes replaced by "rotten fruit" notes that they are not supposed to hit. This breaks up the ryhtm of the beat and
demands more attention from the player. As a catch up mechanic avoiding rotten fruit granted more points than hitting ripe fruit. This is in my opinion the best mechanic in the game.
The mushroom was a shared button that either player could press and prompt a bonus timeframe to start. All points would be doubled, but at the cost of visual distortion, mainly warping and chromatic offsets.
The mushroom could be used to throw your opponent off or to try and push a lead if your combo multiplier was higher than your opponent's.
Lessons learned
This project really allowed me to explore what "fun" means, and excersied thinking outside the box to create novel and memorable experiences. While shipping a game with fruit isn't realistic, the practice of not defaulting to keyboard and mouse is a valuable experience that I will use to further surprise people and let them create fun memories.