Progress Report

In this week's devlog I'd like to share the new stuff I've been adding to the game in the past 2 weeks:

Custom Cursor

To make the game more Riri-themed I added a custom cursor: Derpy Snek! This character is based on Ririsya's coat and was created by Hebi Megane. https://twitter.com/HebiMegane2/status/1371485751825862659

Socials Icons

One of my main motivations to make this game was to promote Ririsya's music, so it makes sense to add links to her YouTube channel, Twitter and Spotify. Of course, since there's space down there I added links to my own as well. ;-)

Localization

It makes sense to try to make the game accessible to as many people as possible, and adding multiple language translations is a step in that direction.

Since the game doesn't have a ton of text to translate, I went a bit further than my first game (which supports 3 languages) and added 11 supported languages to Riri Rhythm: English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Thai and Bahasa Indonesia.

I relied heavily on Google Translate to do most of the translation work since I'm not fluent in most of these languages. XVII KNIGHT from the Ririsya Discord helped me with the translation checking for Thai, but I still need to do the same for the rest of the other languages.

Animated Buttons

Following last week's showcase of the evolution of the game visual elements and user interface, I went one step further with the buttons and added animations to make them stand out even more. (Watch the video at the end of the post to see them in action)

Controls rebinding

For this project I decided to use Unity's new Input System, which provides a more intuitive way to setup the control schemes for the game. However, there's a learning curve I had to go through and honestly I feel I spent way more time than I should to get the key rebinding screen working properly.

I definitely learned a lot from this experience, but at the same time I felt so frustrated because I was stuck on the same issue for multiple days. (Watch the video at the end of the post to see this in action)

Dynamic Game Layout

Made it possible to change the game layout in the game settings.

For now, I've only implemented the vertical orientation lane swapping, so that the player can choose to have the notes falling on the left or right side of the screen, while projectiles fall in the opposite side. Once I've finished implementing some more features, I'll go for the horizontal orientation.

Bombs and Bonus items

Added a special type of note that must be skipped by the player or it will cause damage and break the combo chain.

Also added a bonus point item (bonus orb) that spawns in the projectiles lane and that can be picked up by the little arrow on top of Ririsya's head to gain additional points.

Missing these bonus items doesn't have a penalty, so they are only there for those aiming to get the top score.

Here's a short video showing all the new stuff:

My main focus for the next week is going to be to have at least ONE song map completed.

This is the first time I've worked on a rhythm game and didn't realize until now how much work is required to fine tune this core element of the game!

Thank you for reading!

If you like what I do, please consider sending a donation, I'd really appreciate it: https://ko-fi.com/softdevwu

See you next week!