In Steady the Drums! you play as a War Drummer tasked to lead the army to protect the city of Velaris from a onslaught of monsters.
Gameplay is mixture of a Tower-Defense Real-time Strategy and a Rhythm game, where your goal is to play Drum Patterns corresponding to different strategic commands, like Attack, Defend, Retreat.
We have continued to develop and improve the game and the latest version is available at the Meta Quest App Store, free of charge.
The game underwent numerous interations. We developed a educational research version of the game, designed to teach rhythmic skills to school-age children. With an extensive user study, we managed to show that it can be very useful for musical training of children. We published our results in Springer Virtual Reality, titled Enhancing music rhythmic perception and performance with a VR game.
In a later improvement of the game we added a story unfolding through the levels, to further engage the player.
In January 2025, we released the Latest Game update, which added the previously mentioned features and a lot of new additional content:
- New Winter Level: Velaris has been enshrouded in a grip of icey winter, but the evil wizard Amaranth, has found a way to continuoue its siege. Protect Velaris against new Monsters.
- New Study Gamemode: We have designed a new gamemode, where you can improve your rhytmic skill simple rhythmic tasks featuring varying Rhythmic Timings and Patterns.
- New Ability and Cavalry Unit: added a special ability to spawn Cannon Balls, with which you can reign the monsters down with Cannon Fire.