Hello to everyone reading this! There have been several new faces around the Discord lately, so I’m curious what the size of our audience is now. Five people? Ten people? I have absolutely no idea.
We’re pushing hard to try and have a playable demo ready soon, which means a lot of the “we’ll get around to it” stuff now needs to get done. For me, a big open question mark has been “how can we make the rhythm game part of this game actually work properly?” There have been a lot of experiments. We have maybe half a dozen small areas now, all of them trying out one thing or another. The video attached below was my most recent one.
The goal was to make a puzzle where the solution was to jump on the beat. There are a lot of rhythm games out there where the level moves on the beat, but that means the player has to move between the beats. In my opinion that defeats the point of being a rhythm platformer. The player should be the one who gets to move on the beat, and the level should adjust its motion to match that. This is a very simple puzzle, but I found jumping on the beat to feel very satisfying. It made me want to do a lot more of these.
It took a ton of tweaking and planning to get this simple four-jump puzzle to work out. I’ve done it once now, though, so the next trick is figuring out how to automate it. The way the level looks here is really just placeholder art, by the way. We can lay out blocky platforming puzzles like you see here pretty quickly. The decorated, multi-layer look of the final game takes a long time to lay out, so we’re trying to nail down the platforms, obstacles, and gameplay before we get to the tedious work of making the levels beautiful.
Leave a Reply