I've been working on a rhythm game for my Playdate. It's called HYPER GROOVE: Anniversary X Edition. It's a tenth anniversary remake of my senior thesis HYPER GROOVE. It's a beat-matching rhythm game (think something like DDR or Rock Band) where you switch between two "note highways" to complete songs and get a high score.
I'll use this thread to post development updates moving forward, but to begin check out this YouTube video where I reveal the game.
You can watch the whole video or check the comments for a timestamp for the Playdate game specifically. Pretty excited to keep working on it, I'm implementing sustain notes at the moment, then focused on loading in songs from a menu screen, improving the crank detection, and then polish - making the graphics a little more readable on the Playdate screen, adding some more visual feedback to gameplay, etc.
Hoping to have some more updates to share soon, working on getting sustain notes implemented - just gotta figure out why the sprites for the note "tails" aren't showing up.
Minor update here, but sustain notes are now in! If you're not familiar with games like DDR, Guitar Hero, or Rock Band these are notes that are longer than a standard quarter note, and so the player has to not only hit the note, but keep the button held down to earn points for the duration of the note.
Still gotta work on the visuals for it, but it's another core mechanic now implemented.
Here's a GIF showing off some sustain notes scrolling down the note highway:
I took a break while I awaited my replacement Playdate (and focused on a project for a Gamejam), but am back in the swing of development.
There's nothing terribly exciting to show from a visual perspective but some I've added a song selection menu that the user is sent to upon selecting "Play" from the main menu (now dubbed "The Hyper Hub"). This is important because it also means that songs are now loaded programmatically into the main game play scene, rather than just a string calling a directory. You can check it out (along with some early-stage menu design work) in the GIF below!
I still need to add a personal hi-score element to the song select as well, but that will be fairly doable with the framework now in place.
(And as a note, none of the songs you see will be in the final game, they're all test songs in their own way... including the one literally called "Test Song").
I posted a small update (including video of the game in action) over on Bluesky, give it a look - feel free to smash the like button on the skeet, and follow me if you're so inclined.
