IGF Audience Award Finalists: Synaesthete
This describes the first boss in Rolling Without Slipping's Synaesthete, which you can download over at FileShack. It is one of the finalists for Independent Game Festival's Audience Award, to be presented during Game Developers Conference.
Synaesthete, clearly hugely influenced by Tetsuya Mizuguchi's Rez (coming soon to Xbox Live Arcade if you've never played it), attempts to combine straight-ahead rhythm games like Guitar Hero or the Bemani series--consisting of pressing specific sequences of buttons in time with music--with more traditional world-exploring gameplay. Essentially, you avoid enemies and control the movement of an avatar through a grid-like, luminescent, Rez-esque world with your left hand, while your right hand shoots those enemies by playing a rhythm game to trance and house music.
It is different from Rez and other Mizuguchi games, which make the rhythm part a subset of the more traditional gameplay; you simply play the game, and are rewarded if you are doing so rhythmically. In Synaesthete, the two components are more discrete. It is definitely an admirable goal. I've always felt there has to be a way to do something like this, making a game whose gameplay hinges around the rhythm game part but which is more structurally like a traditional game, rather than an abstract one like the "falling gems" rhythm games.
In this case, though, it is a bit disjointed. You end up mainly focusing on the rhythm game part, because it is more important than the movement, and it is difficult to focus on both at the same time. It would also be nice to have some actual audio feedback upon successful rhythm hits, but I fully recognize that was likely a time and budget issue for this student team. Though Synaesthete doesn't hit all the right notes (that's quality punning), it is a worthy effort and I hope the developers use what they've learned from this experience to keep working at bridging rhythm and non-rhythm games.
Also check out my impressions of Battleships Forever, another IGF Audience Award nominee. You can also browse FileShack's IGF directory, then vote for your favorite.
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a uberboy
replythis game is nice and makes me long for a proper sequel for frequency / amplitude.
that said since it's still a "falling gems" game, and the criticism that it's quite difficult to follow the faster more complex patterns and the character movement at the same time is quite correct.
the problem is that you need to internalize the beat patterns for this to work right, so that you can focus on the character movement and so that you only need to keep track of measure long beat patterns as they're dropping with your, for lack of a better way to describe it, peripheral vision. that way you can keep one pattern going looking 'through' the falling gems recognizing it as a complete pattern and relying on your sense of rhythm to correctly time the button presses rather than watching for when they line up with the bar.
the problem is that there really isn't enough time to figure out what the button pattern is in more complicated sections and fall into the grove before you need to start moving the character to dodge enemies.
on simpler patterns the game comes together and you can watch the field while repeating the button pattern 'groove' of the room on autopilot.
For something like this I wish the rhythm portion was more free form, where there were no falling blocks telling you what button to push but you had to rely instead on your own internal metronome and tap out some rhythmic pattern on the fly while the game figures out if your pattern is a percussively acceptable match to the music playing while rewarding complexity.
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Mega props to uberboy for figuring out the trick to playing Synaesthete like a pro. It's also important to keep in mind that you don't have to hit all of the notes. Don't forget, there's no penalty for not hitting a note, which means that you can focus on just one or two track(s) while moving your avatar around. In fact, most players usually get a higher score when playing like this, rather than trying to hit all three beat patterns at the same time.
Chris, it makes me ineffably happy that you realized the only reason we didn't have proper audio feedback was because of our time/budget issues. A lot of people have mentioned that, and it's definitely something we wanted to have in the game...we just didn't have the resources to do it properly. There was an attempt at playing audio feedback, but it's surprisingly difficult to make it sound /good/.
Lastly, I wanted to address uberboy's last point. Initially, that's exactly how Synaesthete played. There was no tracker, no indicator of beats - you just 'felt' the music and tapped to it. We quickly realized, after a little bit of focus testing, that most people like being able to see what beats are coming up. the problem is that although we, as rhythm game players, have relatively good internal metronomes, the majority of humans do not. One of our goals with Synaesthete was to draw in players who had never touched rhythm games before, but we also wanted to appeal to hardcore players at the same time. Believe me, we wrestled with the tracker interface for a long time, and only finalized it near the end of the project. I have a few ideas floating around in my head about how we'd do the tracker differently if given the chance. Maybe some day those will come to life.
Thanks, Chris, for checking out our game and putting up an honest review. Our first foray into the world of rhythm games was, admittedly, a bit rough in some places. But we all have a much better idea of what we're doing now - hopefully sometime in the future we'll have the chance to make a second attempt at it =)
Cheers,
~Zach Aikman
Producer / Programmer, Rolling w/o Slipping-
Zach,
Thanks for the response! Like I said, I think the approach you guys took is really interesting and I completely recognize the limitations you must have had given the circumstances under which the game was made. I do hope you guys keep working in that vein, and I'd be curious to see what else you come up with in the future.
Chris -
Just gotta say, great game. I'm a huge fan of the rythym game genre, but frankly it had started feeling a little stagnant recently despite notable standouts like Rock Band. I'm glad to see that there are still people out are working on moving the genre forward. I really liked the combination of a more traditional rythym game with a bit of old-school arcade mixed in, it was a nice change of pace.
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