Postmortem

The process for making a rhythm game for the first time was quite tough for me. With my little knowledge of code in general, the best I could do was rely on tutorials and try my best to understand what I am doing. Though I will say, making a rhythm game in Godot can apparently be a lot simpler than I expected when I was first thinking about this project! I am very glad that that was the case too, since I have loved rhythm games for a very long time and thought that making one myself would be really cool!

The biggest challenge for me was trying to add an end scene that displays the players final score, combo and grade. I looked into so many tutorials but just could not figure out how to implement the logic into my game. I ended up working on trying to achieve that for a pretty long time, only to be unable to do it after all. That part still feels quite disappointing to me.

I was also hoping to add a system that makes notes uninteractable before they reach a certain area on the screen, to prevent them from disappearing way too early. Similar to the final score display case, I was unable to figure this out even after trying for a long time.

I have noticed a pattern in how I make games, which is that I tend to spend a lot of time trying to add my own flare into my games without fully understanding the logics behind it. This always causes me to wasted a lot of time, since I end up only being able to do very little of what I want to get done in the end. This is something I hope to work on for future projects, although I am not too sure how. The time limit definitely makes this difficult to achieve, along with all my other personal and school work.

I don't believe that I am too interested in coding to be honest, but having a project made entirely by me does feel very nice for sure! I am mostly interested in asset creation, and the asset creation for this game was quite fun too! It is not often that I try to design UI, and a rhythm game definitely relies on UI a lot so this was a fun challenge for me.

For the actual gameplay interface design, I tried lots of things that did not feel right to me. I find it fun to explore ideas, but it definitely got a little frustrating at some point. My designs kept ending up either too intense, too basic or not detailed enough. In the end I mashed a bunch of my references together and came up with this final design! I really wish I could have added more drawings, especially of the singers of RPG, but unfortunately I ran out of time to do that. I could definitely try to implement that for this game in the future. The end result to me feels a little lacking still due to things I did not get to do on time, but I am still pretty happy with how it turned out overall.