Welcome to 2025! Hopefully this year brings a bunch of more exciting progress on Rhythm Quest...we're going to kick things off with a new bonus level -- this one is called "Bottled Up"! This is actually a song I made all the way back in 2019 for an as-of-yet-unreleased album...unfortunately some of my other music projects have had to take a backseat to Rhythm Quest development, but hey, it's cool that I unexpectedly get to bring this song out in a different way. Here's the playthrough video:

Bottled Up

This song was really fun to chart -- I'm glad I ended up choosing it to bring into the game! I'm really enjoying furthering my exploration of charting as I grow alongside the game and work with different types of patterns. I'm also trying to make sure that I add in more songs like this that differ from my usual "9-bit" tracks, to showcase a variety of music styles within the game.

Having multiple difficulties planned also lets me feel more free when I'm charting -- I no longer have to worry about whether I'm having a good spread of easy, medium, and hard levels since I'll have three different charts for each one! For the hard chart here, I'm leaning into 16th note rhythms to provide some nice bursts of action, but since the song is relatively quick, I'm being careful to avoid too many repeated presses, as personally I don't think constant jackhammers of the same key at high speed are very fun:

The slow "breakdown" section of the song features a long underwater section. Here you can see another little tweak I made while I was working on this song -- Princess's spiky balls now move slower underwater (just like your jumps!):

The contrast between the slow, drawn out underwater phrase and the next section works really well, you get slammed into the action with some yellow ghost combo rhythms:

The last section of the song is completely in triplet meter! This was my first test to see whether I could make that work using the existing speed zones mechanic. The speed zones are a little bit limited in that I have to keep patterns simple for the aid of readability (more jumps than enemies, as they're easier to read at high speeds), but it manages to work out:

You can see another addition here that I made while working on this song: because the beat markers are a little confusing within speed zones, I tried to add little vertical lines that pulse with the beat and delineate both full beats as well as the triplet markers. Hopefully I can land on the right balance where these add a little bit of liveliness and information to the speed zones without making it look overly noisy.

Level Browser Work

The other thing I was focusing on for most of this past month (besides recovering from Covid...) was continuing to work on the level browser (formerly "song select") menu, which is now much more fully fleshed out. This is the main way to browse all of the bonus and custom levels that you have available, but you can use it to select and play the main levels, too. Here's a full video of that in action:

You'll notice to the left that in addition to the stats display that I built a while back for custom levels, and the new difficulty selector button, I've also ditched the old 1-99 numeric difficulty display for a new fancy density chart:

Hopefully this is both a more representative and more interesting-looking representation of the difficulty level of songs, as well as being clear that it's only charting out note density and not making any claims about how hard the rhythms are to decipher or read. (As before, simultaneous attack+jump presses count as 1.5 actions for this chart) The calculations are a little bit more complicated than before as I have a rolling window that I use to track the density of the actions over time, but I've tweaked it to a point where I'm relatively happy with the results.

The chart itself is rendered dynamically (using parallelization!) to a texture, in much the same way as the waveform display UI that I implemented a while ago for the custom level editor. Besides the colored line itself, there's min and max labels on the chart, which serve as a more quantitative measure of how sparse or dense the chart gets. The color-coding I think really ties everything together (currently it goes from green at 100 notes/minute, to yellow at 200 notes/minute, to red at 300 notes/minute), as it provides an at-a-glance rough indication of overall difficulty without having to rely on parsing raw numbers.

I also now have a fully-working purchase flow for bonus songs, which replaces the old level shop (which was hopelessly outdated). I also support short descriptions of each song, which I'll try to backfill for all of the existing bonus levels.

I still have to get the custom levels working in this view again, but I also want to include this UI (along with all of the song previews) in the demo! I still have a bit more work to do before that will be fully functional (need to hook it up to the "not available in demo" overlay screen), but this will hopefully be a nice way of showing off all of the content that's going to be in the full game in a way that will get people hyped up for what they can expect when they make the full purchase. (I mean, it was already pretty satisfying for me to browse the levels and listen to all the music previews!)