I'm working on a rhythm game called Agents of Groove, with different level types that generally see the player matching the rhythm of a music track with the Playdate buttons and crank, but that can also reveal an occasional twist.
As the game progresses, the player joins a group of undercover dancers that stumble on a global conspiracy (and attempt to stop it), and helps tell their story through both rhythm-based gameplay and conversation.
The gameplot sounds really nice! I'll be following not only to get to know more about the game if you share devlogs, but also to play it once it's available!
Hello again! I published a first introductory devlog on itch.io in which I wrote some words about our two-person team, and explained some things about the teaser trailer that may not be obvious to all viewers. I originally intended this to come out sooner and be sort of a companion to the announcement, but plans don't always go the way they're... planned? At least, that's what legendary agent of G.R.O.O.V.E. Daley Bellbottoms would say. Hope this is at least of some interest
Here are also two more pieces of current art that we highlighted recently but I didn't get to post here yet:
I wrote another devlog about some of the work that went into Agents of Groove the last couple months, and that brought it very close to being feature complete.
We spent time iterating more on gameplay and identifying what could work best in an additional level type that I hoped to add to the game for variety. To do this more efficiently, I first quickly put together a level editor in Python that lets us arrange game objects and set their properties visually, then we evaluated several variations of gameplay until we landed on something that we thought could work reasonably well.
We also began revamping a lot of the art and created more placeholders to support the gameplay features we need, worked on different possible looks for conversations and did another round of font evaluation (that will continue through the later stages), and finally implemented new game modes and settings for accessibility.
There's still a lot to do but we're making good progress. The devlog is over on itch.io if you'd like to learn more, and I hope to go into more detail about the tools and more technical matters in the future if there's enough interest.
I haven't posted a devlog for Agents of Groove in a while, but I thought the improvements we made to art and gameplay (those that are visible anyway, as opposed to under-the-hood code) in the last few months should be incorporated in a trailer as well.
While we consider the game feature complete now, this is not yet a full, comprehensive trailer. I think however that it helps shed a bit of light on the story premise for the game, even though there are several twists and turns that hopefully will keep things interesting.
Next we'll be creating the remaining levels, cutscenes and music tracks, and it'll take a while, but if all goes well this should be one of the fun parts
We're still working on Agents of Groove! Despite various life events derailing our schedule and preventing us from finishing the game last year, the two of us continued to make progress as much as we could, with additional level types, music, writing, difficulty and accessibility settings, and a lot of polish. This is still a story-driven rhythm matching game, but we're trying to make it as polished and well-rounded an experience as we can
This is our first Playdate game. We worked on this game for over two years, and we consider it now almost content complete. I'm a programmer by trade but wanted to use this opportunity to go deeper into design, writing and making music. Nethercat, who's the other half of this endeavor, explored instead the rabbit holes of 1-bit art and animation.
It's been a long journey fraught with obstacles, but we did what we could, and we now have 15 levels across 4 level types, 12 original music tracks over different genres, a story that unfolds via gameplay and more than 12,000 words of dialogue, and 11 micro-cutscenes. For the two of us, this is already a big milestone!
I wrote another devlog which I named "Drawing the rest of the owl", summing up what we've been up to over the past few months, with examples of the improvements we were able to make and what remains to do. If you're interested, please take a look!
I'll be sure to update here too!
