Heya everyone!

Progress has been fairly slow because I had to develop the tools to make songs on my own. And so I made a few iterations of picking up music for the song. 

First version was taking visualizer and whenever a beat was registered based of a bunch of different threshold stuff like volume and pitch variance from the previous step it would set a marker and store it in a text file for me to convert to a song. This version was slow to process, slow to modify and even slower to set up as notes for the song. It was way too repetitive for the number of notes that needed to be made per song. (BTW the first song has a total amount of notes nearing 450) and that took a long while to lay out and give a nice feel to the flow of notes. 

I also tried manual input where I wrote each note by hand for the first 25 seconds of the song and it became a slog because I had to keep replaying the song in an audio player. Making a note of the time in seconds. This was a failure because making the songs on a normal time scale would be impossible.

So the current version of song creation I run with is: I play through a song with a mouse recorder. It records the time and the angle of the button press. I then ran the text info I gathered into chatGPT to organize it into the list format you see below.

My general strategy for laying out notes for flow and ease of play is to make sure that each set of notes(like when a pattern or lead instrument plays a segment) are no more than 90 degrees to maintain the flow of notes. Or if it feels nice to alternate between the left and right sides. I also got a lot of complaints about notes coming from the top and bottom of the screen saying they didn't have enough time so I eliminated them from the game to make it a 6 track rhythm game.

What am I looking to add next? - New bullet types : This would be simple to add into the existing system since its prepared for multiple bullet type perfabs. - Menus : This will probably be the tougher of the editions that need to be added. - Functioning Scoring : I have no idea why it's not working in my current build, but I'm sure with enough slamming my head against the wall I'll find the bugs and squash 'em. - More songs! : I am still looking for one more song and AshenedHeart is creating a new song specifically for the game! That's super exciting!

Here is an example of the playable song!!!!

It feels so nice to finally be seeing the fruits of my labor coming together for form something close to my vision.

So I found out that by sheer coincidence I managed to develop RHJJ in a similar way to this article by Yu Chao! It's a super intersting read worth going through if you wanna learn more about the inner workings of rhythm games. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/music-syncing-in-rhythm-games