Hey there! I felt like it was time for another devlog, it's been longer than usual I think. I felt it was less of a priority since I'd just shown off a gameplay preview, so my deepest apologies to all 7 dedicated devlog readers... Also, this is actually the first time I've tried posting a devlog on Steam, so we'll see how that goes! If you're on Steam and this is your first time reading one of my "Progress Checkups", it's just where I give a little insight on how progress is going with the development of Scratchin' Melodii.
First off, in case you missed it, Lucid Mode was shown off in a recent gameplay preview of Stir & Mix!
During stages, freestyling well enough on two consecutive lines will allow you to ascend into Lucid Mode, a state where there are no charts or suggestions to follow, just your own freestyles! Successfully completing the stage in Lucid will give you a special ending scene and an emblem on your rank as lasting proof of your success.
To answer a few questions about it I saw floating around:
Q: Does this mean the other parts of the song are gone?
A: No, going Lucid is something that only happens if you manage to activate it yourself. Otherwise, the song continues as normal.
Q: Can it be disabled?
A: Yep, if you're like really good at the game but don't wanna accidentally ascend into Lucid, there will be a toggle in the Options menu to enable/disable the ability for it to activate.
Q: Can this happen in every stage?
A: Probably! That's the plan, unless I find a rare reason it wouldn't work well for one.
In the preview, you can also see that Stir & Mix itself has been updated a bit in the vocal and artwork departments! Compared to the 2023 beta version's vocals, 2cada tuned them with a bit more stylization this time. In terms of artwork, the animations were redone in my current art style, as another step towards a consistent art style by release. In the process, I was able to make the animations much more fluid and expressive!
Little fun fact about that, Jamtine's hair actually used to cover up more of her eyes/eyebrows as if they were bangs of some sort, but I eventually moved it out the way so I could have more freedom with her expressions, which I found important for a character like her. An inverse of that philosophy would be Nami, who has her sunglasses and bangs cover up her eyes/eyebrows to give her a more mysterious feel. It's hard to tell what's going on in Nami's head! (If anything at all!)
Now, let's talk about the rhythm system and UI again. Here's a little quickfire of some changes I've made:
- The Next Line Tab has a "NEXT" text sign above it and will stay at the end of the Player's line to help with clarity
- The background bar of each line now adjusts to the line's length to also help with visual clarity
- When points are gained or deducted, it now briefly flashes over the score counter instead of having a separate bubble
- Holding the button on pow notes instead of tapping them will accumulate extra points until you either release it or reach the max amount. The more buttons you manage to hold at once, the more points you'll get!
- Landing notes on the later end of a beat marker without being off-beat can count as swing rhythm, adding extra points.
Overall, I'd say the new rhythm/scoring system is much more consistent, balanced, forgiving, and accurate to the game's inspirations compared to how it was in the beta demos.
As for future stuff I'm working on, I've been animating the Boss battle for Act 2. Not much I can really say about it atm, but the song's going for an electro-funk style. Pretty happy with how it's been turning out so far!
I've been redesigning the stage select screen to be easier to navigate and easier for me add more stages and acts to. This one's able to just pull the needed information from each song/act and arrange it all accordingly instead of me having to manually do it each time I add something. It's still very much a work in progress, but it's functional! I haven't gotten to drawing McWave's new icons yet... (Don't look too deep into the number of acts here btw, it just stops at 3 because that's as far as I've indexed it at the moment!)
I've also started working on a redesign for the results screen. Since the new scoring doesn't have equal spaces between the rank requirements, I decided to replace the linear rank meter with a more dial-like one that goes through a cycle per each rank threshold you pass. Along with it, I'll have to finally make new results screen animations for Melodii at some point. Not sure yet if the pose Melodii's doing in this concept sketch will be what I end up using, but I definitely will be letting them aura farm more.
To save the most boring for last, optimization. For the notes in stages, I've started using a method called "Object Pooling". (Which I actually hadn't heard of until recently.) It basically means note objects get recycled when possible instead of created/destroyed, which helps reduce memory usage. For materials, I've managed to up performance by using Texture Arrays and a pretty convoluted shader trick where I put the vertices of UV layers at specific coordinates, which are then decoded to be used as material info. (e.g. color, spec, emission) That way, more meshes can share materials while looking different instead of loading in separate ones. Not really sure how common this is, as I couldn't find much info on it, but it seems to be working pretty well so far! I was also able to cut performance costs in some areas by taking a screenshot of a background model and having the game render a flat image instead of the entire model. This works pretty well for shots where large background models are far away or when the camera angle stays static.
That's all for now! As always, thanks for reading.
-LJ