What’s taking so long?
You might be saying, “Brace Yourself Games, you already announced a delay last year. What’s going on? I want to play this game already!!!”
To that, I say, “same.” But let me give you a little insight into what we’ve been doing this last year, and why we need just a couple more months.
- “Impossible” Difficulty – The game was originally going to just have “Easy,” “Medium,” and “Hard,” but we decided to add a fourth difficulty level: “Impossible” (previously known as “Expert”). “Impossible” is uh… really hard. We want a little extra time to tune this so it’s not actually impossible, right? But it’s still going to be really hard.
- More Rhythm Rifts – We added even more Rhythm Rift beatmaps to songs like the boss battle tracks.
- Off-Beat Readability – The readability of off-beat monsters is probably our number one most received piece of feedback. We’ve been doing a lot of experimenting and playtesting to get this to a state we’re happy with.
- Custom Music Tools – Thanks to the help of the dev behind Crypt of the NecroDancer downloadable content “SYNCHRONY,” we did a full revamp of Rift‘s internal level editing tool. Not only that, but we’re preparing it to be released publicly at launch so you can all use this tool to create custom charts to custom songs.
- Remix Mode and Daily Challenges – Remix Mode started off as one of those “wouldn’t it be cool if…” ideas that ended up actually being really cool. The TL;DR of Remix Mode is that it throws a fresh chart your way every playthrough while retaining the original level’s rhythmic design. That makes Daily Challenges possible, by changing up the circumstances for each song. And we love Daily Challenges. We’d love to do a more in-depth blog about Remix Mode soon to talk about the nuances of developing Remix Mode!
- Tutorial and Practice Mode Improvements – We’ve made a lot of improvements to our tutorials and practice mode based on feedback we received from the demo. The tutorials are more comprehensive, and we also added in a highly request slowdown functionality (up to 50 percent) into practice mode to help you better parse difficult patterns in high beats per minute songs.
- Animation Clarity and Feel – We’ve gone through a bunch of iterations on character / monster animations throughout development. If you take a look at our very first trailer and compare it to the demo, you’ll see what a massive difference it is!
- Background Visualizers – Technically no one asked for this, but this is something that we really wanted to do, and we discovered it adds a lot more visual variety to each Rhythm Rift, which helps us and content creators make better videos.
- Boss Battle and Story Revamp – We felt there was room for improvement with the state of boss battles and story mode, so we decided to give these aspects a total facelift.
- Shine Factor – We’ve addressed the majority of our high-impact bugs, but we want to make sure this game is polished to a mirror sheen!
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