Pocket Beats

iOS & Android (Coming Soon)

SOLO DEVELOPMENT

Introduction

Introducing Pocket Beats: The Ultimate Portable Beat-Making Experience.

Pocket Beats revolutionizes the world of mobile music production by transforming your device into a sophisticated drum machine and sequencer. Designed with both novices and seasoned musicians in mind, this app empowers users to effortlessly craft beats anytime, anywhere!

--Intuitive Interface--

Pocket Beats boasts a user-friendly interface that simplifies beat creation. Whether you're new to music production or a seasoned pro, you'll find the process seamless and engaging.

--Innovative Design--

Merging the fun of a mobile game with the precision of professional equipment, Pocket Beats offers an unmatched beat-making experience that is both entertaining and effective.

--Empower Your Creativity--

Pocket Beats invites users of all musical backgrounds to dive into the world of rhythm and beat creation. Our app is not just about making music; it's about unleashing your creative potential in the most convenient and enjoyable way possible.

Experience the future of beat-making with Pocket Beats – where professional-grade music production fits right in your pocket ;)

Gameplay

Inspiration

I've been having loads of fun making beats and patterns in Ableton, I was inspired by old school sequencers that allows you to make beats by placing notes in a sequence. The idea of combining beat making with game making is absolutely fascinating.

The initial idea for this game is a singing city, where you can drag notes to create a city that sings, here is the first conceptual demo:

I loved how wacky it was, but wondered if I could make it more functional instead of just gimmicky, so I turned the city to a sequence machine, like this:

I really wanted to develop more of the idea of having these characters each being their own instrument, similar to the idea of My Singing Monsters but with a lot more customization. But to avoid the pitfall of being a solo developer and having a complex idea without having the time and resources to finish it, I decided to prioritize creating something small, minimal and deliverable as a first product of the sequencing series, then build more complexity on top of it later on.

So for now, I decided to make this game to a fun sequencer first, before implementing characters, stories, new instruments, artistic environments, and all other possibilities. The goal is to make music making into a game, and build the most minimal version of this vision, and that concept became Beat Buddy— a sequencer in your pocket.

Prototypes

Here are some twitter posts of various forms of prototypes of this game:

Visual Style

The visual style of the game draws inspiration from many well established sequencers, such as the Native Instrument Maschine series, the classic Roland TR 808, Teenage Engineering and Hapax by Squarb.

Because of the digital nature of the game, sound effects and instruments can be represented in abstract ways that hardware synthesizers are limited to, so I decided to draw inspirations from Y2K-alike abstract visual UI design elements.

I wanted to bring vibrant colors and the retro-synth art style into one imagery, here are some inspo generated with MidJourney.

Prototype of the synth design in progress:

As I ported this design into Unity, I realized that the colors together are too distracting, it is very difficult to tell what elements are active, buttons that are not being used are using too much vibrancy to capture unnecessary attention, so I decided to keep vibrant colors for only active elements, and dim out everything else.

UX

UX is crucial in terms of creating a comfortable, intuitive experience. The goal is to make this experience as self-explanatory as possible, I decided to have the left hand area being pads to toggle patterns, bottom right area to toggle play and other necessary functions, and center area for beat making. The less frequently used buttons such as bpm & time signature adjustment are left closer to lower center, where it's slightly less convenient to reach.