7 Things I Learned from the Rhythm Jam

1. Start slow

The first impressions are essential to engage players. Even if your goal is to make a challenging game, it's important to ensure the player can be comfortable with the basics. Take time to introduce the gameplay slowly and clearly. 

How would I change my game?
Make a dedicated tutorial level, removing all but the core gameplay elements. 

• Make the game automatically pause the song at the exact moment players are expected to morph shape to ensure they truly have time to understand the controls. 
• Hide the player score to alleviate pressure to perform well. Remove any other unnecessary UI elements.
• Clarify what the player has to do and how.

2. Use intuitive controls

The best games in the Rhythm jam have controls that closely mapped the physical position of buttons/keys to their physical representation in game. Games where players were expected to learn five or more buttons were generally a bit more frustrating to play from the start.

How would I change my game?
I was happy with how my game was set up for a PS4 controller but as the majority of players would have been using a keyboard/mouse it would have been worth putting more time into making those controls intuitive and memorable to the player. 

The order of the shapes on the keyboard and the logo  somewhat resemble the letters in the logo of the game, it would have been beter to make that clearer to players.

3. Balance visual intensity

Some of the most enjoyable rhythm games make good use of expressive animations, graphics, effects and sound to make the player excited to play whilst they're doing well. Games like Beat Saber use very clear visual gameplay elements, they are wild and exciting without being too visually overwhelming for most players. My favourite entry of the jam 'Guard Exempt' perfected this.

I found that games that used motion tracked to bezier curves were great at giving a sense of speed, but I often felt nauseous playing whilst trying to focus on the gameplay. This could have been solved by reducing the intensity, speed and frequency of motion.

How would I change my game?
Developing the game on my own, with limited skills in 3D modelling or illustration, I tried to make a game that had clear core gameplay elements. I decided to attempt a game with a 'cute' aesthetic that could be accessible to a lot of people. 

I was happy with the design for the most part but I would have liked to add more theming and character to the game as well as spending more time designing a more engaging UI. 

I designed a character called 'Tocky' who would keep track of time and give more feedback to the player based on performance but he didn't feature as heavily in the finished game as intended.

4. Give clear player feedback

How would I change my game?
One of the biggest issues of my game was the lack of feedback given to the player about their performance. The only feedback would be from the score increasing but it wouldn't always be clear to players how well they were doing or why what they were doing was going wrong.

• Make it really clear to the player when they are doing well. Use sound, animations and visual/textual feedback for positive/negative actions.
• It is more important that the player knows why they are doing something wrong rather than when they are doing something wrong. Add feedback to the player if the shaping morphing is on time, too early or too late. 

• Make it more intuitive to the player when to change based on the rhythm of the game.

5. Design an efficient workflow

About five years ago I had experimented with designing a rhythm game, I had designed a workflow to sync the shape changes to the beat of a song, it was extremely inefficient but I decided to re-use it for the game jam.

To create a new level in the game I would need to load a multi track MP3 in Adobe Audition, play the song placing markers at key points, export the markers as a CSV file, format the CSV in Excel to convert time in minutes/seconds to seconds, import the values into Unity using a custom scriptable wizard editor window and manually adjust each marker to different values (different shapes for my game).

I spent a large amount of the jam time working like this to create only two levels. The workflow was not flexible enough to allow for even small changes as I would have to go through all the previous steps. 

How would I change my game?
I would have liked to have spent more time working on this system to ease development and add flexibility. It would have helped to spend more time on a research stage before the jam to understand how other developers built similar systems. 

After the game jam, I created a dynamically generated visualisation of the levels to see how frequently markers would appear in the song and identify issues with timing and difficulty. This tool would have been helpful in the development stage to identify issues, particularly with parts of the song that had large pauses.

6. Balance scoring

How would I change my game?
The scoring was a very last minute addition to the game, which I didn't have much time to perfect.

• Make the scoring more fair and clear to players
• Use combination scoring to reward players who are consistent and add tension to gameplay.
• Consider adding an online leaderboard to make players more competitive and increase replayability.

7. Make it fun

One of my greatest concerns would be that players would not find the game enjoyable. 

How would I change my game?
Limiting game interaction to three buttons made it a bit more difficult to add variety to the game. As the player could only morph between three shapes and never using the same shape twice consecutively was a challenge to making the game fun. 

As I had a limited amount of time (and patience) to playtest the same songs over and over, I didn't feel I had spent enough time designing something that I truly enjoyed playing.

raphamakemusic who created the music was kind enough to send me the stems for the songs so that it would be easier for my to sync the beat of the music to the shape morphing, I also had intended to run all of these tracks through an audio mixer so that certain instruments would only be audible as the player built up a better combo.  

I would have liked to have added more visual rewards to players that were doing well.