Agents of Groove: a story-driven rhythm game for Playdate

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.

Dance club

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.

It's really not quite done yet, but there's for now a teaser trailer: Agents Of Groove Teaser Trailer

The game can also be found on its own web page: Agents of Groove · Synaptic Sugar
and on itch.io: Agents of Groove by Synaptic Sugar

I hope to be able to post some devlogs as development continues and to share more soon!

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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!

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Thank you! :pray: I'll be sure to update here too!

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Looks like a perfect rhythm game for the Playdate. It's so different. Groove on.

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Thank you, the support means a lot :pray:

This looks amazing. Just went and followed you on itch.

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Thank you for the compliment and the follow!

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 :man_dancing:

Here are also two more pieces of current art that we highlighted recently but I didn't get to post here yet:



Thanks for reading! :mirror_ball:

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I wrote another devlog about some of the work that went into Agents of Groove :mirror_ball: 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.

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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.

So we complemented our first announcement teaser with a new story teaser on the joyous occasion of today's Playdate Community Direct!

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 :slight_smile:

Follow the next stages of development on the AoG homepage
and on the itch.io page :man_dancing: :mirror_ball: :robot: :pirate_flag: :playdate: :heart: