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.
It's been a few minutes but I've still been chipping away at this. I skeeted a quick GIF showing off the addition of the game's first animation . You can check it out here:
(Feel free to like the post and gimme a follow for updates over there too /shameless-plug)
Animations are triggered via MIDI. So what this means is, while right now there's just this looping guitar playing animation, that animation is called when a certain MIDI event is hit in the song. Animations will swap in and out based on the last called event, making it easy to author animation timelines using the same data that the song's note charts are also created from.
I've been doing some other work on this too, a lot of it behind-the-scenes stuff. I pivoted from a default Lua table for the in-game notes to a stack-based implementation. This has made it easier to trigger events (and check if notes are hit or missed) by using the peeking and popping mechanisms of a stack.
Oh, and there's some original music to play along to now too! I've got one song authored (the song used in this GIF), but two others composed and in need of charting too. I'd love to get some video of it to show, but I've been having a lot of issues with the mirror app, even using the official Playdate USB to USB-C chord and plugging directly into my Windows PC
I hope to make these posts a little more frequent moving forward but a lot of life stuff has happened the last couple months. That said, I put put a devlog on the brand new Itch page for the game. Plus, there's a new name: HYPER GROOVE AX.
Just posted a preview of an original song to Bluesky. Click through the linked post to check it out (and I'd love it if you liked and RTed to help spread the word about the game!)
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