A new challenge approaches

Today's post is going to divert a bit from the previous ones.

I have, together with two friends, a programmer and an animator, begun the process of trying to make a small demo of a game to put on Steam. Besides allowing us to gain more experience doing stuff within our specific realms, we also want to try to go through the process of what it’s like to get a game on the platform without just letting someone else handle that part.

As a chosen genre/type of game, we have settled on a rhythm runner style game, partly because this allowed us to split the game up in levels, as well as build it in a way that is expandable, just in the eventuality of the game suddenly taking off on the platform.

We are still at the early development and prototyping stage, focusing on making an mvp version where we can test the barebones. For my part, I have been writing a short music piece for the initial level as well as looking at and analyzing the games already out there in that genre.

Games like Geometry dash, Rayman Legends, Bit-Runner, etc.

Part of my role will be to plan and develop how playing a level can make the player quickly enter a flow-like state while playing, and try to keep them there even when they start hitting the obstacles. This entering of the flow-state seems to me, after analyzing games in the genre, to be one of the things that really separate the good games from the less good ones, and I find this to be an interesting challenge from a game design point of view, as it incorporates making audio, graphics and gameplay all come together to such a degree that this becomes achievable.

This is of course not to try and say that is not important for other games. But for rhythm games this seems to be paramount.