Devlog 77 - More and More Bonus Levels
Published: April 27, 2025
Everyone's favorite thing to see (?) -- new levels! I had a bunch of different life things to tend to this past month (and the rest of Spring is going to be no different...) but I managed to crank out some more charts while in the midst of travelling. Here's a video of those in action:
Scherzo of Magical Science is a whimsical song initially released as part of the Hero Hours Contract OST. At 155 BPM, it's quick, but not blazing fast.
There's a really distinctive 16th note pattern (using a whole-tone scale) at the beginning of the main musical riff. It's too fast for my tastes to chart each of those notes (at least for an official chart), so I ended up using the green attack+jump combo enemies along with flight paths to accentuate that rhythm instead.
Claustrophobia is a song off of the Nyamo's Adventure OST. It's written at 90 BPM, but charted at 180, making it the fastest chart I've made so far.
Again, there are actually some 16th note patterns in the music that you could theoretically add here, but I'm pretty committed to making sure that extremely quick double-taps are not required for any of my charts. Those become more doable when using multiple keybinds/buttons for attacking, but that's just not something I want to get into.
The Warrior Wakes in the Sunrise Dawn is a guzheng piece that I made in an hour, featured in the All in a Day's Work 5 album. This one had to be edited to get rid of the freeform solo portion in the middle, but the rhythms in the rest of the song still feel nice to play through.
The hard version of the chart features some speed zone runs that are difficult but satisfying to pull off. I've had some mixed feelings about the speed zones from time to time because their design space is a little limited, but using them sparingly for fills like this seems to work really well.
Along with the new charts, I spent some time finally pushing out a new release of the demo, which includes most of the new functionality I've been working on in the past months, such as the level browser menu, the new tutorial, and the big scene/level loading refactor. Unfortunately, between the new tutorial and the level load rework there were a big batch of bugs that I didn't catch. Turns out testing the behavior of re-used object instances requires you to actually play through more than just one level at a time, whoops!
I've also added the option to display the diamond-shaped offbeat markers (or downbeat markers, if you configure them that way) on enemies as well as winged jumps, in case that ends up being helpful. I don't think I'm a big fan of having these on everything as a default, so the initial setting is just to have it on wings that are on offbeats. As I said in a previous devlog, these are honestly primarily intended to help with level 2-1, so if they don't end up doing that job, I might end up having to come up with a different solution.
There's still some bugfixes to be ironed out here and there, but besides that I don't have any big aspirations for the next month given my busy schedule outside of Rhythm Quest. Just working on =something= is going to be enough for me to call it a success, I think, but I guess there are one or two specifics that I might try to complete...