Rhythm Planet is a VR rhythm game developed in 48 hours for Global Game Jam 2023. As you orbit a planet, little bubble stars will fly toward you to the beat of the music. Move your arms and catch them, and claim the best score in the cosmos!
Participation
Engineering - Designed and implemented the entire game, implementing FMOD and the Unity VR toolkit
Shaders - Some simple atlassing and optimization (mostly support for the other technical artist)
Asset Integration - All art assets and music (through FMOD)
VFX - All visual effects and particle systems
Animation - Some simple blobby star animations, and the implementation for those
Music - designed drum track for one of the core songs
3D art - Created the bubble stars and cleaned up/optimized several other meshes
Project management - I managed a team of 4 artists and a technical artist on this project while I coordinated the Global Game Jam site itself, featuring over 30 participants around the world.
My main role in this project was engineering. I did not intend for that to be the case, but sometimes the chips fall where they fall and you have to learn some very complicated timing-based engineering principles on a Saturday morning.
It is a relatively slim game that uses a series of scriptable objects and parsing JSON documents to generate "beat maps", which are displayed to the user in the game screen.
I implemented a generic service bus to handle games states, and handled most player interaction via an event publisher, allowing me to very quickly set up all the discrete systems for the game without needing to hook up references all over the place. This became especially useful when art assets started rolling in and the other technical artist started working in-engine in the game scenes.
I also made every song asset a scriptable object so it could be edited easily and quickly, and then added a "playlist" feature that contained selections of song assets. These were to be displayed in the game's UI as folders full of music.
Finally, I created scoring profiles to allow designers to quickly tune the game's difficulty, enabling me to continue working on other features once the game was functioning at a base level.
Since nobody on the team had time to use the track editor, I also built a feature for beat maps that filled them with dummy data. This created JSON files that were testable, if not "fun", and allowed me to better examine my code ecosystem as I was developing the functionality for timing and spawning notes.
3d art assets (other than bubble star) created by Justin Ethington. Planet and ring are procedural shaders by Luca Westland
The game is in its infancy, but I learned a lot about how rhythm games might work, and a lot more about how rhythm games definitely do not work. This is the value of a game jam, I think.
I would not say that the game is particularly original, or even fun beyond the simple joy of playing a rhythm game in VR. But the purpose of this jam was to learn about rhythm games, so it was a resounding success.
I was also teamed up with mostly people I had never met before, which is always a joy. I love to see people apply their skills to projects they're excited about, and the challenge of finding interesting work for them in my project was fulfilling in its own right, even if I didn't also have 2158 other things to do. Which, I can't say enough, I definitely did on this project.
Some bubbly star animation for you. Bubble and bubble texture are both animated via shader by Luca Westland.
