Hi again!
Roughly around this time, one year ago, Parse-O-Rhythm began development for the Winter Flowjam 2024. It was made in the span of two weeks for the jam, and despite blatantly ignoring the jam theme, the game was beloved by the community, rocketed to first place, and became the most played game on Flowlab.io (the site it is made on) for 2024, as well as the most played and liked Encabulated Games title ever in the ~4 years of our existence.
Despite sub-par sales, egregious engine limitations, murky marketing and relentlessly slow game updates, I've come to remind myself this Christmas that even though we didn't make as much of a splash as we wanted to on Steam (so far), we still ended up putting together one hell of a game. One year ago we were just mobile game makers, and the year before that we were naught but feeble webgame developers. We've come a long way and have learned a lot, and we aren't done with Parse-O-Rhythm yet or for a long time, which is something to celebrate!
Let's Try Something Different
All of that mushy stuff aside, let's recap the first two weeks of development of the game. Before the devlogs began, and before "Parse-O-Rhythm" was even decided as a name. Let's go all the way back, one year ago...
The initial concept
Before the two week game jam even started, we wanted to make some kind of rhythm game where you hit things that come from the top of the screen using the mouse. A week prior, I put together a quick prototype to make sure that the idea was enjoyable. By the time the jam kicked off. We had a really basic character movement and falling note framework to work with.
The first picture of the game, taken from the dev channel
One of the first things we needed to quickly figure out was what our game was going to look like and be themed around. I asked Logan (Bean) if he wanted to make any kind of music in particular, and after a short conversation we decided that a game themed around programming/hacking with edm/techno music would be the way to go. Music samples were shared, and a small illustration of what the game may be was sketched up.
Testing out the randomized characters & colored "errors"
Beginning construction
One part of the Encabulated Games workflow that is a bit uncommon for a game jam is that art and code are worked on in parallel. There's this psychological motivation I get while building a game that only triggers when I can actually see something coming to life, so throughout the first two days, visual effects were created as the note slashing system got more fleshed out, and the sprites for the main game were drawn and decided upon.
These flashy effects, and later most of the other colors in the whole game, were done using a rendering effect called "color dodge". It basically gives colors luminosity, which is great for lighting effects for any game or art project.
The style of the player was formed very quickly and wasn't changed much throughout development.
Problems Start Arising
Now, the engine we use, Flowlab, is a remarkable engine for making something quickly. However, it's only used to a couple dozen to a couple hundred objects to keep track of and simulate. While the engine got a big performance update this year, at the time, the engine was more limited. We had songs set up where all the notes were pre-placed in scene, and would fall down via the physics system. It worked, but hundreds of physics objects was hard for the game to handle.
Notes used to look like this in the scene editor.
To get around this, we had to make an entire new system for the notes. This new system would read a number list and "print" them on the screen to the same BPM of the music. The technical details are a little much, but safe to say that it left my brain sufficiently cooked. Fortunately, this reduced the amount of objects in a scene from ~2400 to ~200, significantly improving performance and allowing the game to run on nearly all machines.
In addition, the slashing system used to be more primitive, and you could actually hit multiple close notes with the same slash. Unfortunately though, the game actually finished the game jam with this issue still present, because work on the actual levels and all of the UI still urgently needed work.
The ancient, forbidden multi-error slash.
The Rush
The Encabulated Games fashion of cooking so late that the barrier between late at night and early in the morning is shattered like a pane of glass.
The second week of the jam was much less interesting than the first.. to write about. The middle of the jam crept up to us, and with barely fleshed out UI and songs still to map, week two was a turbo-rush to finish the game, at the same time I was going back to college and Logan was going on a short trip.
The (frankly overcomplicated) level select kept getting re-dos and more and more polish, which took a lot of framework to get right.
As I slaved away in Google Sheets making the levels, and Logan slaved away in Logic Pro making the other 60% of the soundtrack, it often looked like we would be unable to deliver four songs and the full game on time.
..especially as I started to get so distracted by the game itself that I wasn't building the actual levels
However, through those hellish past few days of basically no breaks aside from when absolutely necessary ("eating", sleeping, and going to class), we did eventually deliver Parse-O-Rhythm, albeit with a couple bugs like the multi-error slash issue and a weird framerate dropping problem. And then, well, the rest was history.
Future Of The Game
Heading into the new year, Parse-O-Rhythm is going to remain our main game! The Winter Flowjam 2025 is currently in session for the next two weeks, so we are working on our submission to it for those next two weeks. The only thing you should expect during these next two weeks is the announcement of the soundtrack release, which is imminent to come this week! After these two weeks are over, work will resume on Parse-O-Rhythm again.
I would like to also note: on the discord, a poll is being hosted this week on if Sunday devlogs should continue as weekly events, or if they should be bi-weekly or monthly. We don't want to spam up the Steam page too much, so let us know what you think about all that on the discord!
With achievements, controller support (so sorry ;-;), and custom levels on the horizon for 2025, this next year is going to be one hell of a year for the game in brand new ways. Thank you for being part of the journey so far. We made a post on the discord already about it, but making games would be pointless if no one got to enjoy them. And once custom levels are out, I'm certain that many more will be able to enjoy our Parse-O-Rhythm in brand new and awesome ways.
See you in the next devlog!
-Encabulated Games
