KickBeat Never Ends! How to Make Your Own KickBeat Tracks

43 0
KickBeat Never Ends! How to Make Your Own KickBeat Tracks

In case you haven’t heard, KickBeat is coming out for PS Vita and PS3 on September 3 and supports Cross-Buy. If you are headed to PAX in a few weeks, make sure to stop by the PlayStation booth and play the game before it releases! HUGE thanks to Sony for having us in their booth at PAX!

One of the coolest things about KickBeat is that the game really never ends. Yes, we give you 18 licensed tracks in the single player campaign, but we thought that many of you would love to experiment with your own music and make your own KickBeat levels. If you really want to beat your enemies to the latest Bieber track, well, you can do that in the privacy of your own screen.

The process of creating your own KickBeat tracks is quite simple and we do 99% of the work for you. We made a nice little video outlining the process of using your own music to make KickBeat tracks:

We have been experimenting with many different kinds of music, ranging from classical to rap, dubstep and even metal. It’s really fun to see what kind of fight you end up with. Using the track generator to customize KickBeat is awesome and easy! What music do you plan on using?

Comments are closed.

43 Comments

  • *__* Bobby Loertscher <3 …. I´m your fan! <3

  • For some reason I thought there were more than 18 songs in the game. :( Nonetheless, it’s a great price, and the track generator is cool.

  • Avatar photo

    Neil from Zen here.

    During development, we came up with a list of dozens of songs that we’d like to have in the game. Of course, since it’s not a $60 game (the price of $9.99 was just officially announced!), and the game has only a T rating, we had to slim down the list…but that just means there are lots of great songs to import!

    Here are a few of the ones I thought fit well with the gameplay and fighting theme:
    “Sabotage” – Beastie Boys
    “Bring Da Ruckus” – Wu Tang Clan
    “Get Back” – Ludacris
    “Walk” – Pantera
    “Hurt Locker” – Xzibit
    “Symphony of Destruction” – Megadeth
    “Fight Music” – D12
    “Voodoo People (Pendulum remix)” – The Prodigy
    “Lose Yourself” – Eminem
    “Bawitdaba” – Kid Rock
    “Gangster’s Paradise” – Coolio
    “Push the Tempo” – Fatboy Slim
    “Insane in the Brain” – Cypress Hill
    “Dirt Off Your Shoulder / Lying From You” – Jay Z / Linkin Park
    “More Human Than Human” – White Zombie

    Also, pretty much anything by Blue Stahli, but we’ve got 3 of their tracks in the game already!

  • Green Day and Metallica will be awesome with this game! I’m definitely going to look into this game!

  • September 3 can’t come soon enough!

  • I wish we got this, this week instead of Divekick which I *thought* was this game until a couple days ago (which made me sad since I realized I have to wait now)

  • @Neil, What happened to Papa Roach’s Last Resort?????

    That’s what I played at GDC and it was perfect!

    I hope it’ll feel the same when I import it.

    • @xClayMeow It’s part of the official soundtrack. The songs I listed are ones that aren’t int he game but that would be good candidates for importing with the tool shown in the video.

  • Any planned DLC for this?

    • We didn’t make any plans for it, since we figured people would rather import songs for free than pay $1-2 each. But if people show up outside our office with pitchforks and torches demanding a DLC store, we’ll consider it!

  • Ooooo, gotcha. Sorry, didn’t realize that. Good to know :)

    • By the way, “Last Resort” is one of my favorite tracks in the game as well, especially on Expert/Master where the that main guitar riff is a frantic series of double-taps.

  • So colorful, so funny!
    It’s gonna be a great game not only on PS3 but on my Vita!

    Amazing work Neil!

    • Thanks! I hope it lives up to your expectations. I do want to point out that the large majority of the amazing work on KickBeat was not done by me but by the others on the development team who’ve spent 3+ years creating it.

  • Is that waterflame I hear at 1:25 in the video?

    • Yep. He also did the whole soundtrack for CastleStorm, another of our games that should make its way to PS3/Vita at some point.

  • Can you please tell us a bit more about the controls in the game? Is it controlled purely by way of the face buttons or are the d-pad/analog sticks thrown into the mix as well? Also, how would you categorize the difficulty (say, compared to other rhythm games)?

    • Sure. I described it in the earlier KickBeat entries on the PlayStation Blog this year as well ,unfortunately, the site’s Search doesn’t bring them up.

      The basic idea is that you attack in the directions that enemies are coming at you, right at the moment that they stop circling and move towards you. These moments are synced with the beat.

      You have 3 options for choosing those directions:face buttons, dpad, and screen tap. For example, to attack in the Up direction, you can press Triangle, dpad up, or tap the upper area of the screen. You can combine these in any way you like – I personally play with both left and right hands and tend to alternate between them for each enemy, so that one hand is acting and the other is preparing to act. And then on the red enemies (2-3 enemies simultaneously) I’ll use both hands at once. But some guys in the studio who’ve been playing the game for 3 years prefer to play with one hand.

    • I’d say that the difficulty starts off about the same as other rhythm games. You’ll probably fail the first song 2-3 times if you just jump right in without doing the tutorial as you get used to the timing and the way the action cues are presented (as 3D animated characters moving in an arc instead of abstract, linearly scrolling objects). The difficulty at the high end is going to be lower than something like Beatmania – it’s not a hardcore rhythm game. However, since we do provide lots of ways to optimize score, and perfect optimization is near impossible, competing for high scores with other players should provide plenty of long-term challenge.

  • So you can import any music you own into the game right? cause im a big anime fan and there are some songs that I would love to try out.

    • Yes, although there is a limit to song length. I believe it’s 6:00 for Vita. Have to check to see what it is for PS3. Though of course you can always split up the song into multiple parts and play it as a playlist.

  • I’m really looking forward to this now that I have a Vita. There’s a ton of tracks I’d like to try out. Too many to list here.

  • two more questions

    1:will there be a demo
    2:I see theres cross buy. So if I buy vita version I get the ps3 version as well it doesint have to be the other way around right?

  • @Souledge:

    1. Yes, there will be a demo
    2. Yes, it’s Cross-Buy

    Both questions were answered in the previous blog post.

    @Neil, that’s a good description of the controls based on what I played at GDC. I did play the tutorial first before hopping into Papa Roach and I’d say it almost demands playing the tutorial otherwise you’d be completely lost. It’s a lot different than other rhythm games, which is maybe how I fell in love with it despite generally hating the genre. lol.

    Also, something you didn’t touch upon that should be mentioned is that there are ways to earn bonus points (like chaining moves together), so although it may not become as difficult as other rhythm games, if you strive for “perfection” it can definitely get rather difficult (and insane).

    How are the trophies? Platinum?

    • I don’t think it has a Platinum trophy. We made the trophy list like 12+ months ago, back when we felt the game was getting close to done (oops!). And I don’t think Platinum trophies were on the menu for us then.

      Based on our focus testing, it’s possible to skip the tutorial and pick up the basics through trial and error, but you really do need it for things like chained enemies and powerups.

  • this game and divekick are only $8, thats awesome.

  • Kickbeat is looking like it could be an interesting game but I know for sure I will not buy the game before I try it. It seems that it could be one of those games that looks good from videos but after playing it than its not the same.

  • Very interesting indeed with the games coming out for PS Vita, originality is contagious yes.

  • I guess using Music Unlimited with this game is definitely not an option but would have been great. I now have a use for that 4GB Vita memory card I have. It will be completely for this game and the song I want to use in it… CAN NOT WAIT!

    • It’s only set up to use mp3-format files from your music library. 44.1kHz sample rate (48kHz won’t work properly) and any static bit rate, I believe.

  • I’ve been looking forward to Kickbeat for a very long time and glad to see it’s nearly out. Will it be launching the same week in the UK as the US?

  • yay !!! i can now import my own music :D
    but sadly no one else would be able to play it unless they had my songs :(

  • Thanks for putting this game out there for people to see who otherwise would not have. As well as showing us how to make some funky beats.

  • Oh, man! I’m so rhythmically challenged! I play rhythm games to feel like I have some. Maybe there’ll be an update to automatically sense the beat of an uploaded song? Please? Maybe? Initially, I was disappointed in the paltry track selection, thinking this’d be a DLC cash cow, but at least those fears have been assuaged. Now, the problem is making room on my memory card to allows for a proper amount of supplemental songs AND a diverse selection of games to play… too many coming out now and in the near future to keep them all on my card!

    C’mon Sony! Bigger memory, please? Or at least make it easy to switch between cards!

    • You can enter the beat info (bpm, beat start time) manually instead of using the included tool. So you can ask a friend, the KickBeat forum, etc. to help you out. If someone else has the same version of that track, they can just give you those two numbers. Then everything else is handled automatically.

  • Been waiting for this since last year! When will the demo be released? Also, will it also be released on the Singaporean PSN?

  • I have been looking forward to this game ever since I saw the first trailer. Can’t wait to be playing it on my Vita on the subway. 3 songs and I know I have to get off at my stop. Seems like a perfect on the go game. Perfect price, too. Definitely a day 1 buy at that price.

  • Physical or digital? (Please, please let there be a physical!)

Please enter your date of birth.

Date of birth fields