zeta0134
a day ago
Yes, fellow rhythm-based dungeon crawlers unite! This looks great fun, the tiny resolution is such a fun artistic constraint.
I love the way you describe the time travel aspect. My own project has to run on an NES, and memory constraints mean I can't actually store a previous game state entirely, so there are endless hacks and cheats to "rewrite history" after resolving most of the enemies in advance, to account for the player's actions at the last moment before display.
I can't cheat the beat timing though (drawing is way too slow) so I've got the beat judgement tuned to look less awful while being reasonably forgiving about late inputs. To compensate, I stretch out the animation timing on the following beat, so the early cels aren't weirdly bunched up after late inputs. It works well enough given the constraints.
It's fun seeing all the different approaches to this problem in the rhythm game sphere! It's way more complicated than you'd initially think, and games have all sorts of tricks up there sleeve to deal with it.
jgalecki
17 hours ago
Love the 'old console' dev scenes - the ways people deal with the hardware constraints are always so interesting. Making a rhythm game there sounds like a tricky problem. I'm not sure what audio demons you had to exorcise to get it working, but I hope it was more fun than frustrating. I think Crypt of the Necrodancer also lerps enemy animations after post-beat player input, but that wasn't an option for my tiny resolution.
For more fun takes on rhythm games, check out this Roguelike Celebration talk from last year - some people in the Necrodancer community got together and added synchronous networked multiplayer (!!!) to the game. Black magic, haha, and it was a great reference when I was starting this project up.