Rhythm Quest Devlog 36 — Level 3–2 Revisited
Despite my task tracker listing a lot of items having been accomplished this week, it still felt like another slow week for Rhythm Quest since I only made one new level. Here’s a video of that in action.
Level Order Restructuring
You’ve probably noticed that this is labeled as level 3–2, which I had already showed 4 devlogs ago, originally featuring the teal jump+attack enemies. After some feedback on the difficulty of this mechanic and further thought, I ended up deciding that I should postpone the introduction of the jump+attack combo enemies until world 5, where they can be introduced in various forms throughout that world.
That of course meant that level 3–2 needed to be changed entirely, as the old version I made was built specifically to highlight these combo enemies. The new track and chart is completely different, and focuses more on the spike enemies that were introduced in 3–1. There’s a small emphasis on patterns where spike enemies are intermixed with both grounded and flying enemies, including the “jump attack attack” pattern seen in this clip:
This also meant removing all of the teal combo enemies from the rest of worlds 3 and 4. Unfortunately, the old level 3–2 (despite being a good song and chart) probably can’t be reused in the main set of levels, since world 5 is going to have a completely different musical style. (It also introduces the combo enemies in a bit too many different forms at once) It’ll still probably get featured as a bonus level though.
The new planned breakdown for introducing mechanics throughout the worlds is as follows:
World 1 — Basic Attack/Jump, flying enemies, doublehit enemies
World 2 — Air jumps, flight paths (+ flying doublehit enemies)
World 3 — Spike enemies, ghost enemies
World 4 — Water zones
World 5 — Jump+Attack combo enemies
World 6 — Speed zones
Other Stuff
I updated the level metadata code to also parse “actions per second” for each individual checkpoint of a song rather than for the entire song. This lets me see at a glance (roughly) which sections are most difficult and what the overall difficulty looks like over the course of a son. The entire song metric was sometimes being thrown off balance by particularly light sections, so this should be a little more accurate as a numerical gauge of difficulty.
I’ve been enjoying the recently-released game Chiki’s Chase recently (highly recommended, go support!), which features a ton of small nifty features and polish (seriously, the main menu has a hint of parallax camera scrolling when you tilt your phone around…who does that??). This is the first time I’ve played a mobile game that effectively integrates haptic capabilities (short vibrations when you perform actions or click through dialogue), so on a whim I decided to see if I could hook up the native iOS/Android code for triggering haptic events in Rhythm Quest for mobile. That’s currently working, though I think I’ll need to play with it more before I give a verdict on whether to have it enabled or disabled by default. The game feels just fine without them, so I don’t want to add a feature that ends up gets annoying after a while.
In a similar vein, controller/gamepad rumble has been an interesting one to iterate on, as most of my attempts have resulted in either imprecise or way-too-aggressive rumble. Unity’s has built-in APIs for triggering rumble, but they’re a bit coarse-grained, so this week I also managed to hook into the native Switch rumble functionality, which lets you control the vibration values in a bit more detail. That seems to be working better, so I’ll have to continue to play around with that as well.
Wishlist Rhythm Quest on Steam today at https://store.steampowered.com/app/1635640/Rhythm_Quest/
