Developing 'Hi-Fi RUSH' Backwards and Finding Our Positive Gameplay Loop

[Music] hi everyone um today I'm here to talk about this game we made Hi-Fi rush and more specifically how we went about designing it and our methods for iterating on our gameplay Loop to reach the result that we wanted for the project uh so as most of you know this was a new challenge for us at the studio and we knew that we would be doing a lot of learning while developing but I think the biggest thing we came away with was how we basically compl completely re-approach development in order to design elements to make the game that we wanted to make work so looking back it's strange but we developed in a way that I would call backwards hence the title of this presentation and just for reference there are some musical terminology uh being used in here but I don't think anything's too complicated um but before I get into this let me just give you a quick overview over who I am um so my name is John Johannes and I've been working at Tango Gameworks as a game designer for about 13 years now um I

joined when the studio started and I had no prior game design or development experience so for me everything was learning while doing and the projects I worked on this before um were The Evil Within which I did game and level design um after that I worked on both story DLCs we did for the game the assignment and the consequence where I was not only director on the projects but I did story and script writing and then following that I was the director on the SQL The Evil Within 2 and when that that wrapped up I began working on a project um that we should be familiar with as Hi-Fi Rush um which I was the director on this title as well and to clear up what a director does at Tango since depending on the studio um director might mean a lot of things um for us it really means a game director and a creative director all in one role now that being said I was pretty Hands-On for this project for a long time since we were uh quite a small team until the sort of the end part of development um so I did things again

like I I created the story and wrote the script um I assisted in level design even gray boxing things sometimes um putting together things in engine um I had my hands in all parts of the game design with the game design team including about half the game's boss fights and um again we were a small team for a while and because of the nature of this game which I'll go into later it required everyone to be extra Hands-On and wear many hats so it wasn't just myself most of the team members had their hands in multiple features sometimes outside of their skill set so a quick look at what I want to talk about today uh the first is I want to go over how this project started um how are we kind of came with our initial pitch and then how we started developing it and determining our approach to developing the full game and then from that approach I'll go over the what we called positive gameplay Loop that we discovered and how we iterated on it to match our image of how the game game should play ideally to

the vision of that we had in our heads then I'd like to show how we took those early learnings from the project this sort of working backwards idea and incorporated into almost all aspects of the game development in our workflow um they'll be examples from just general gameplay there'll be level design and the sequences that we made around licensed music choices um and how we had to essentially reverse engineer those from what we would call our musical impact and then I have some takeaways um while you know a lot of the methods on this project are very bespoke and unique to the type of game that this is I think a lot of learnings that we took away from it are applicable to any project that's probably trying something new or outside of your sort of safety zone and so for the first section I'll kind of jump into how this project high-fi Rush all started and our goals for the project kind of just beginning with the pitch so this is uh quite a bridged but

um I initially brought this game idea to the table after finishing the evil within two as a non-traditional game from our studio we knew that we were working on ghostwire Tokyo next which is in the same sort of thread um and we're kind of being solidified as a horror studio so I pitched a concept that I was personally very passionate about it was very different and I'd been planning it in my mind for a while and obviously it was like nothing we had developed before and I pitched something that I said was a colorful stylish action game combining music describing it specifically as a 3D action game where everything in the world including your actions syns to the music creating the feeling of a music video being edited around you and um probably as surprised as uh most of you would be um the initial reaction to me pitching this was actually positive I expected them to walk out of the room laughing um but that didn't happen um however there were a bit of concerns about the project

um while we as a studio thought it was cool we did have no experience at all in this type of genre and obviously it was the complete opposite of everything that we had done before so we had our studio image like I mentioned before that was focusing on horror um as well as the games that Bethesda at that point was known for um so just sort of pitching it on paper we thought would be an extremely difficult sell but we thought it had promise we thought it was a cool idea and we thought it had potential and we wanted to try something new and it was a good opportunity for us at the studio at the time so we decided to prototype the idea uh we wanted to prove the concept and if we can nail it we could use it to kind of push the idea internally with less friction um and if we did a good job it could be the groundwork for when we actually started develop developing the project to kind of hit the ground running so when I pitched the game I defined the gameplay as Rhythm action and I immediately got a lot of questions asking what that meant

was it a rhythm game was it an action game and I had an image of what I meant with rhythm action and I usually explained it by comparing it to both genres individually so to explain this I kind of put both genres on a spectrum both Rhythm games and action games uh on one hand we have rhythm games and this is a very general and extreme statement but I defined it as where the gameplay is strictly matching your your gameplay to an existing song so there would be low player freedom and limitations to gameplay since essentially you're just matching to a music track but on the other hand we had action games and again this is very extreme but these usually would normally be considered having a high level of player freedom and few to almost no restrictions to gameplay and for HiFi rush I imagine it much closer to action games I wanted there to be a freedom of choosing your actions and that free flowing action gameplay you expect from these character action games but there was a musicality to your actions in this case literally um is everything I wanted to be tied to

the music and for that I wanted specifically there to be no UI telling you where to play um there would have to be a natural Cadence to gameplay where everything would just work in tandem with the music the goal being that music coordination wouldn't feel restrictive but actually enhance the action elements so um we went into this prototype phase and I set the goal of the prototype to Define that ideal form of Rhythm action make it not just that concept that I put on that chart but actually a playable actuality so people could understand what um the game was supposed to be and so quick rundown of what we did to make this work um we basically just had a team of two people um it was myself and our lead programmer and we had some Assist work from action uh sorry animation sound and V effects at various points and the whole Dev time we took about N9 months with to come up with a 10 to 15 minute playable demo which fleshed out the core concept focusing focusing mainly on combat but included

some touches on the general tone of the game and visual nuances like how the world would react to the music but an important thing that we decided very on was that we intentionally included no art in this prototype um so we can focus purely on this gameplay experience the music and gameplay combination um and actually uh this was hugely successful for us as it did prove the initial concept of Rhythm action into a fun understandable playable experience and helped us to get the the the project fully green lit but it also did what I hoped it would do which is kind of set up the fundamentals of how we could approach designing the full game and I have a short video here kind of showing you a little bit of what that prototype was so let's take a look at that [Music]

yay [Music] [Music] okay so as you can see and if you play the game you know that this is actually

extremely extremely close to how the final project was in terms of Direction and functionality in the game play so I'm going to jump back a little bit of talking about the sort of design fundamentals that we had when we were kind of planning out this prototype and then going into the full game um so of course what what I imagine Rhythm action to be was having gameplay AC actions synchronize their impact with the music beat um and when I say beat in musical terms I mean a quarter note interval so in my mind this made sense having the impact land with the music as it would basically make the impact feel stronger but not only that um having that uh the beat interact with the impact as well would also reinforce synchronization with the music and honestly I just thought this would feel really good in general um the core idea was that you were the star of a music video and if you look at any music video or movie or trailer that's edited to the music or does something similar it all they always do it where the of the action lands with the music giving it

that extra power but we had a problem because we weren't making a video or a music video or anything like that we're making a game and in action terms um gameplay specifically you know technical action gameplay we really kind of think of of the gameplay in terms of your input and the gameplay response is usually the result of that and I was I was always looking at the result that sort of impact of synchronization of music and action um is something that I wanted the player to feel and we had to figure out a way to make a game that somehow give the player that feeling so what I designed with our programmer was the Proto in the Prototype phase was the foundation for the game the sort of work backwards approach so basically we started with what we wanted and then just figured out how to get there um the solution we came up with was to interpolate all aspects of gameplay regardless of when the player inputed their actions to synchronize with the music we use the sound system wise to take the music data playing in the game

um we then converted the BPM or the speed of the song into a tick um that would the game we used to define where the Beats or quarter note intervals were and then we would interpolate animation and actions to run in coordination with that tick which was again generally in quarter notes to drive all aspects of the game and we called this uh for us we called it the Rhythm Synchro system or RSS which basically meant you know hey don't worry where the beat is we'll find it for you and we'll make it sync up for you so as developers we're assuming that the player will not press the buttons on the beat and create it and create a system that works backwards to ensure that we cover for player error so that they get the desired impact no matter how they play and I'll kind of show you how this works with an example um that example being the player's onebeat light attack the basic attack that you do in the game so this is an an attack that takes one quarter note or beat from inputting the attack to landing on the next following beat uh the goal being that no matter where the player inputs their action um the attack

will always land on a quarter note interval so here's an extremely crude timeline for quarter notes and their subdivision and eighth note and in this situation which I'm going to show you we have just timing which is what the attack was based around One Beat from input to impact so in this case ideally the player would input their attack on the beat and the impact would be on the next beat and we don't need to do anything because it's there's no interpolation it's exactly as planned this is fantastic but we knew that this would never never be the case because people will miss this or not play with the beat sometimes so let's say the player inputs their beat late or sorry inputs their input late which would be a little bit after the beat timing in this case we speed up the animation so the impact will still land in the same place the animation is the same it's just slightly sped up the same goes for if the player is pressing their input early um the animation would be extended to land on the beat but again the impact time is always the

same and this process of looking for players inputs and assigning the correct impact timing was constantly happening on the back end with our RSS system and this logic even worked for Passive inputs like the player just pressing the stick and having the player's foot uh footsteps interact with the beat like running okay so we had our basic kind of logic with this RSS system and the and the underlying systems that we developed but now I just want to talk about how this kind of worked in our favor to finding our key core game Loop and then how we expanded on it to hit the intended player reaction that we wanted so the great part about having actions impact on the beat is that with our logic we had actually inadvertently created what we called our positive feedback loop uh within the system that we made um so this helped players play to the music even without UI telling them to do so and again uh we wanted to create a game that had natural flowing action without gameplay telling the player when they should play um with UI

so how did this work um and I will use combat again as an example um and it all starts with the input so the player is going to input something and in this case it'll be an attack which just for the case of of this graph we're going to assume it to be perfect timing if input on beat um but again we're not going to force that on the player they can press up the button whenever they want we only guide them to that so again if they press an action whenever input the next the action will impact on beat and if you do combos by linking attacks and the impact is on Beat by just attacking again when the attack hits it will then have the player responding in perfect timing to continue attacking and if the player somehow gets offbeat let's say they Button Mash or they miss something they just need to look at their next action or attack to get back on and continue playing in Rhythm so at its core again we essentially created a self-servicing cycle which we called our positive gameplay

Loop so we had that philosophy that was working out great for us the general systems were working together to support the player playing to the music but we wanted it to feel even more special because the idea is we wanted you to feel like a rock star so part of that approach that we took uh was focusing on these points um the first being we wanted you to have a positive reaction when playing to the music to encourage that type of Rhythm action gameplay that we uh ideally hoped you to play with but at the same time we wanted to not punish the player for messing up or not always attacking in Rhythm the key goal was that this would be an accessible experience to those without a musical background and that was constantly providing the player with a positive feeling and to do that we need to figure out ways to inform the player how to play that they're playing well and also not discourage them if they weren't and um for you to be able to play in like a rockstar without having without playing musically uh without

having musical experience you may notice this directly correlates to our protagonist and the narrative um who himself doesn't have a musical background so this is all sort of coalescing in this sort of a full pack package experience as we expanded on this so the main approach we used was making a clear when you succeeded but downplaying if you didn't perform perfectly um one of the basics of of successfully playing in perfect timing was that we would have an audio response and try to make your actions feel more like part of the song So if you were to attack on beat um if you play the game you know there's a vocalized hey or yeah that has an immediate response and in game it looked and sounded like this which you probably done another example would be if the player was dashing um it had a normal sound effect with it but when done in Rhythm we would add a drum high hat to it to add to a music IAL element to the dash

effect so subtle but um these small things kind of added up to just sort of make it feel like more part of the music um but we didn't stop there uh we had a lot of UI also respond to just timing attacks to give the player more feedback as if they were playing to the music so we had a visualization of just timing around the player with a note mark as well as added VFX around your metronome like hovering cat companion 808 um we also had the health and score meter reacts similarly with Vivid colors flashing when actions are timed correctly um and of course we did things like include physical feedback with the controller Rumble when things were timed perfectly and then we had our score ranking system which along with indicating just timing like I showed you previously Al also adjusted its rank dynamically increasing more when the player played with better Rhythm um with

bonuses and and scores um but the score system didn't penalize you for not playing in time it just adjusted with the way the meter changed and then there was more of a secret element um but we added damage bonuses to just timing attacks which made battles quicker when played in time and we specifically didn't show damage points in game to not make you feel like you're doing less damage so it's more of a subtle hidden feature where you just tend to feel like you're playing better when you're playing in rhythm and on the opposite if you didn't play in time we just didn't have any of these features show so the thing is that the UI didn't have additional effects you wouldn't get that sound feedback and the score system wouldn't have those bonuses along with your damage being its normal level but your attacks still landed with the music no matter what and our sound design had hits always play with musical audio all the time as well so overall not having these extras didn't feel like a failure and wouldn't distract you when playing

the only obvious thing was after battle we would give you a rank that reflected your performance to show where you needed Improvement but we didn't want to discourage you during combat however there was there were clear game elements um that when they were explicitly tied with a very specific timing um we were we did use UI to show the player how they were performing um we did want you to know where there was room for improvement when it really mattered in gameplay the most obvious version of this being um the combo finishers which we call beat hits um so looking at from the uh the perfect version on the left um this game in the game they have an explicit countdown so performing in perfect timing we're going to acknowledge that timing we show you specifically the word perfect will appear on the screen and you can even see some screen effects come in to sort of support that as well to make it feel like you did a great job as well as you can see the follow-up attack that the sort of two bursts of energy that appear on the ground

now if the player performed what we would consider a good timing not quite perfect um we would still count it as a success and the attack will play out as normal but um we do we do let you know that it wasn't perfect of course um you can see the good instead of perfect good is being shown and if you notice there's even those sort of elements the screen elements of uh the sort of lines coming in on the side those are not there um again not too distracting that you wouldn't notice that they weren't there but again not as intense as if they were perfect um and in this case we actually do have a failure State it's technically a Miss um but the character still proceedes with their final attack but they don't have that sort of bonus attack of those two energy uh things that are coming out after them and so while this is technically a failure um the final attack does play out normally and the player doesn't stall or feel like you can't attack so it doesn't feel terrible um and we try to downplay failure as much as possible you'll notice there's no negative UI we don't tell you miss on the screen um and the center two circles just sort of Fade to Red instead of just

feeling like like it maybe put an x on it to make you feel like you you missed your timing or things like that so clear enough so that the player could understand that the attack didn't proceed but not enough to be discouraging was what we what we thought and again uh when there was a key timing element that alters gameplay we want to make sure that we were clear with UI information we decided to do this with some special attacks which had rhythm game like UI or a rhythm Parry system which visualizes a call and repeat pattern since again these were specific Musical games with a success and failure rate and we didn't want the player to guess on how their performance was when they were playing these sections so that combat system which I just been talking about was arguably our biggest challenge but also our greatest strength as it was our key gameplay mechanic um the iteration in small touches all added up to a positive experience for players that we felt and even got feedback that was informative on how to play but not overbearing which

which was great for us but as we fleshed out how to make the rest of the game we needed to take our learnings that were the foundation that led us to finding that core gameplay that's sort of working backwards from the impact idea and ingrain it in everything else with the rest of the game so going forward I'll use the word impact again but you should think of it less of a physical hit and more of about the combination of a feature and Music Experience intersecting together so we had a system that helped things arrive at our impact points with the RSS system um but as developers we kind of needed to adjust our approach to make sure we knew what we were designing towards and to do that we had to start essentially thinking backwards adjusting our workflow so when designing every part of the game I instructed the team to think of every aspect of the game as something that contributes to a world that is synchronized with the music supporting the player experience we learned early in the Prototype phase is that designing a feature then adding in musicality

afterwards didn't work to make the experience feel coherent instead it kind of made it feel tacked on or sometimes even dissonant with the music so we appli the approach of thinking from the desired impact and then working backwards with the intended musicality um and a much simpler version of this uh to explain it is uh we would just basically think of where every action should hit ideally musically and then we would create features leading into that timing so the music or beat would continue regardless of what the player can would do um obviously we can't change music we can't change the we can't just stop the music and and restart it when the player wants to do what they want to do that's going to continue regardless but um we can change uh how the player could interact with the music so to do this we had to kind of rethink how we would design features in the game and adjust our workflow so every aspect of the game was

synchronized to the music and we needed to know what musical timing we wanted to hit sometimes it would be a single beat sometimes it was the B beginning of a measure of a a part of the song and sometimes it was a specific part of a song like a guitar solo or a or or the chor kicks in or something like that so everything in the game had an ideal timing of when it would occur so if the game is always Ming moving with the music and this was a constant sort of just a timeline that was always proceeding um we would basically identify what's the ideal timing for the features impact the combination of of the of the result with the music and then with that in mind we then work backwards to know when things needed to start to get that desired result naturally in gameplay and just like in the combat example since the user defines the initial interaction we also need to know how to adjust or interpolate each feature to make it work so I showed you some very big things like the whole combat mechanics um but even very small things in the game were designed with this in mind for example

um something that all developers can relate to is doors um so for our game doors not not not only just need to open which is the ideal thing that we want doors to do but they needed to sync up with the music opening on beat based off proximity with the player um so that it worked with the musicality of the world and I'm going to show you a video and it's going to seem very very subtle but you can see that we the speed this door opening of depending on when the player interacts with it will either be faster or slower um depending on when the player interacts with it um and that's so it hits its ideal musical timing which is that the door should always open on beat to support the music of the game [Music] [Music]

okay very very subtle um but you also may have noticed we have a debug menu on the bottom and that helped us sort of see the game in a musical View and tell and see is that impact timing where we ideally would uh want things to occur happening where it's intended to be and we would always check to make sure things were working correctly um so that was a very uh that was something that we used throughout the entire game the doors were used in multiple levels and things like that but we also had more unique experiences and we call these kind of unique events or bespoke events and this one actually is another door fantastically um and this is one that we needed to sync to the first speed of a measure to transition musical tracks and I'll kind of let this video play and then I'll talk about [Music] it okay so in this case we don't know when the player is going to hit that button to to open the door um we know

that the final action will be on a beat but we don't know what beat it'll be um so we we did things like create an an initial Loop state after it activated to basically wait until the next measure would occur where then we can then do the opening animation that transitioned with the musical element so that it would transition correctly into the next musical section um and this all worked from again working backwards from when the song should change to when the door door should open to what what happens when the player interacts with it always thinking backwards from there so these were small details for the levels um but on the macro scale the level design itself was also based around musicality um our approach to level design um structure focused did focused on musical Peaks and valleys which was a starting point before we even went into gray boxing levels and I have a video uh sorry a an image of what our game design document looked like um and I apologize for it being in Japanese I just wanted to show you the original documentation but basically this is a

the initial draft of a level design document for our game um we had story beats and event beats that coincided with musical points we wanted to impact together in the level um we would often model them around song structure for example courses were fights and verses were the in between platforming and these were kind of like mood graphs um that gave us the sort of impact points in our level goals which then we would lock in and work backwards from before we even started laying out the levels physically so all these features both large and small were designed in a fairly similar fashion we would plan them out making a detailed timeline of how things would occur on paper in a way we could we could see things musically and gameplay-wise making sense then we would build them out in a prototype or gray box form this was very important for us but in this phase we would focus on getting all the key elements especially sound design um in and functional as soon as possible to ensure that the prop osed idea was working as intended so I'll come back to

this in the takeaways but this approach was immensely helpful in identifying what worked quickly and what needed to be adjusted so if adjustments were needed depending on the severity we would adjust them right there in the Prototype phase until we got them to where we wanted them to be or if they didn't work we basically returned and rethought the whole plan but if the early version was clearly the right step we would lock in the timing and feature set and then build them out with everyone on the team it was important that we didn't leave features dangling if they would work on later if they would work out later on um we wanted to identify those impact points that they that they were working correctly early and then we could spend more time iterating and improving the quality of them and so those were just some uh some some ways that we approached uh the workflow but then we had a very extreme version of this and this was any time that we were using the licens music in the game and this was because of uh my stance using the licensed music was that I wanted to pay tribute to the songs

that we were using and not just use them as background music so these sections were essentially reverse engineered around the song so that the gameplay would sync up with it in all aspects we had boss fights where phases and actions were determined by the structure as well as specific rhythmic patterns of the songs dictating attacks or move sets and then we had full stages which were again made completely around the structure of the song and these were by far the most complicated thing that we had to do in this game um I have examples from both of these sections to give you a rundown on kind of how we made them work and the challenges that we had with them um but first again when I say pay tribute to the songs what do I mean um it really means that we would literally design the entire selection these entire sections around the song as if they were music video we would break apart the song We would analyze it and bring gameplay and event beats into the song and this required an even more intense production and pre-production timeline and uh for a detailed example I'll use the first boss of the game against a

robot named QA 1 mil which we use the license song 1 million by 9in snails so we always started with a general image or idea of what the boss fight would entail including story beats a visual the type of fight we want to have um but once we knew what song we were putting it towards we followed these steps um the first being is that we would take the song and we would break it apart we would identify its structure and just kind of lay it all out um we'd identify parts of the songs that could theoretically be looped which meant longer gameplay opportunities and parts that could not and then we would put all in a timeline and start assigning where we think gameplay would be um where ingame events could occur and things like that and we took our initial ideas for the fight you know like General attack ideas and phases and how we could match how the song feels at certain intervals um cutcenes and story beats were tied in with the music to not only be fun of course but um to reinforce the

connection with the song and make sure that they're musically connected and after we had that General layout defin we were then go to the specifics of each section um creating cutcenes was comparatively easy because we were setting the mostly to establish Lanes of songs but it was the playable portions that had to be broken down to ensure that the song was always sinking appropriately to how you played so here's a visual breakdown again sorry for the Japanese but this is how we just kind of wanted to show you the original documentation um where we created a flowchart based off how the music should change based off the player's progress um to prevent the song from awkwardly changing we identified sections that needed to play out like the lyrical sections we didn't want to cut those off Midway through a through a a lyric so we did things like adjust the boss's HP so the song structure would be kept if the player was playing too well um the opposite was if the player was taking too long we factor that in with looping SE to keep the song in the consistent phase without making it feel

awkward or feeling like a broken record and this page is just a visualization of how we broke down the lyrics and looping sections of one phase of one boss fight um each boss fight and each phase and each song was different so they each kind of require their own unique take on how they would work so we need to break down each one individually so then once we had this kind of overall uh structure done we would comb through the the actual musical audio data or what we call stems looking for rhythms that can be used for certain movements or attacks so at this point we had General attack ideas for how the bosses would fight but it's now when we would kind of finalize the Rhythm that these attacks would come up with so in general we follow the approach that anytime an attack would be specifically tied to a musical part of the song they should happen exactly when that section happens in the music and we would do that by dictating it by with CU set up in the auto uh in the audio data and then also

determined by the enemy AI based how the player was playing and a good example um is a video I'm going to show you here but um because of cool U music licensing restrictions I can't actually play you the song um but I can play the sound effects uh so it's close enough but and I think it kind of gives the it helps with understanding what I'm talking about so let's check this out okay so if you play the game you probably know this section and the song but this boss uses obviously uses his lasers as of his hand as a sort of gameplay mechanic that we wanted to do but it it obviously has a musicality to it with this guitar Rift that's included this da da da da and if you play that song If you play the game and you know that song that that guitar riff is constantly happening in the background and so we made it that obviously we want the player to experience this sort of attack as as a way to play the play the fight but that

we made sure that that attack was always happening in tandem with when that part of the song was playing so that was just one example of one attack sort of syncing up with the music and then once we had sort of the gameplay aspect done we would then turn to non-gameplay related elements to tie to the song We would look at the environment design and start breaking apart we would identify things that could be that could pulse to match the song's BPM or spe or maybe there were things that we could flash or move spe to specific Melodies to make it feel like it's part of the song um and then depending on the songs change in mood or volume we maybe would change the colors of objects or the way things move just to match that and there were a lot of other things that just kind of tied to specific ways that the player interacted with the boss things that the player could do special attacks that the boss can do um and this all was basically around the same concept right if we were making a music video we needed everything in the game to sync up so

everything felt synchronized so that was our very basic approach some stuff worked and some didn't and we were constantly iterating to find what matched the song times and expressions perfectly one thing that we kind of kept consistent was we rarely have ever changed the initial structure and this was just based off what I talked about before is we were building it from an existing song we were we not going to change that song but that final step steps of adjusting the rules of each gameplay section creating and adjusting actions and attacks to the movement and adjusting the environment were always to get it as close to the song as possible and this was constant even to the end of development um so realistically it felt like it never ended there was never a clearcut okay it's good enough um probably one of the final things we did before even finishing sending this the game off was adjusting the way lights flash during boss fights and things like that um and while it was a lot of work I would say that it wasn't that bad

because um the stages that we set to licensed music were much much harder to do um the idea here was that we wanted you of course to play to the music but we wanted to keep the freedom of how you played and not feel like you were just on a linear path um so to do this we had to find lots of ways to make the stages sync up with your actions sometimes this required thinking of unique solutions for every section the way that the level transitioned um an example I have is is a sequence very early in the game of an escape sequence in in the level um where we had to think of multiple ways for the player to resync with a song transition of how they based off how they encountered it so they can change cleanly into the chorus of or a battle portion of the stage in so the song didn't feel like it was changing awkwardly so remember that we always wanted the player to feel like these sections worked even if they were playing in a non-perfect way um and I have videos of this and again I

can't play the original license song um but I can use the unique version we made for players who stream the game which follows the same structure and gives that point across so for now I just want you to see how the section plays through um but setting it up if you haven't played the game but player is running through a level that they're kind of free to sort of move around and and do some actions based off you know how they feel about doing them um but they're leaving this area and we want them to transition to battle which acts as a chorus and we want that transition to be very clean and match with how the song is supposed to play and the player is going to transition using these grappling or magnet points to eventually transition to a fight sequence so this is the official correct timing that I'm going to show [Music] you okay so that should have sounded I could match to the music so the issue here is we don't know

when the player will start the sequence of events because they're free to play in this section but we wanted to transition correctly to again match the song again we knew our desired impact point but we needed to work backwards to figure out how the player experiences it correctly and adjusts for their play style so for that part we took two sections we could adjust to make sure you can match up with a song transition that being the magnet points and the landing animation so so depending on how on what beat you grabbed the first magnet and how many beats were left until the song needed to naturally change over we would adjust how many magnets you had to grab and how long the land Landing animation was and there were lots of mixes and matches um for example five magnets or one beat animation or four magnets or two beats of Landing animation um and I think there were up to 18 different combinations in this case of how this can play out and all of this effort ideally you would never notice um and it would just work um but to show you that I'm not making this up I will show you

what some of these variations look like so this is a version where there's three magnets and you'll have the longest a three beat Landing animation to [Music] connect okay so that should still sound like it works right and for this version it's when the game determines you need five magnets and the shortest of onebeat Landing animation to sync [Music] up all right and this was just one small part of a big sequence with a bunch of these type of situations um there wasn't one answer that solved every problem and we needed to approach each each situation with a unique angle but the

development logic realistically was always the same we were always working backwards from the impact of when the player should land to start the course for this fight for example so realistically it was a lot of hard work and clever engineering um but the end goal was the same we just wanted the player to feel like they were playing correctly no matter how they played even if technically the last two example I showed were theoretically wrong okay so so those are some very specific things showing how our workflow changed and how we approach design from a musical perspective but as I spoke before this extended to almost every section of our team so each section had their own unique adjustments to coordinate their approach which required section leads to rethink their methods and when they should get involved in features the clear the most obvious example is Something Like Music and Sound they had to completely overhaul the work timeline to assist in features at a very early State instead of coming in later in development to finish polishing things and all of this was on top of all

the other challenges we had like art attempted a new art style that required animation art teams and cut scene production to use all new you to learn all new techniques but in the end you know sort of clearly deciding the Direction having the whole team Buy in early to the concept and always reinforcing it from myself and section leads kept the team focused on what we were making and so now some takeaways and again you may not all be making a rhythm action game like this but some ways we approach this new challenge may work for you if you are thinking of branching into something that you or your team isn't quite familiar with and I'll preface this by saying that I I realized this when I was writing it that a lot of this seems like very basic common sense um but it is frightening surprisingly how easy it is to forget these things when you're struggling to make sense of a brand new concept and figuring things out as you go even for an experienced team so that being said one of the biggest takeaways that'll Echo throughout the section is that we

spent a good deal of time early on the project finding a process in workflow that worked for The Unique challenges that making this game required and a lot of these methods were almost the opposite of how we approach things on previous projects so realigning the team was both difficult as well as actually eye opening since the techniques mentioned here we can see ourselves using on future projects going forward regardless of the content of the game so first for high rush we always had a final goal that was communicated to the team members giving us a blueprint to work backwards from right from the start it's often in game development you have members working forward without a clear image of of where things end you have things like scope creep but here instead of making things abstract we tried to make that goalpost clear to avoid confusion as multiple sections work together to build features in scope to a Finish Line the next is that thing is that I I discussed this earlier but with our blueprint we f Focus first on getting everything in and playable especially

our key features which in our case were our impact points and how they work with the music the goal here was taking anything conceptual um which can be confusing and in high-fi Russia's case um musicality sometimes is and making it real so any lingering questions from the team could be answered in a gameplay form and this led to our next Point um that by having an early version running with temporary yet directionally closed assets iteration was much quicker and allowed us to adjust scope um as we locked in ideas polishing was easier to see and focus on and Direction was less likely to be misinterpreted but all this really meant was that the images the image of what the final product would be became clear to the teams at a much earlier State this was in stark contrast to our previous projects um that finally the vision was kind of coalescing and seen at the end so here we were able to in some ways reverse that late Dev worry of is this all going to come together and instead just worry at the beginning of how complicated it was going to

be and while we learned a lot and had a lot of great success with this project um it did not come without its caveats and challenges um for example there was this big production timeline before starting to dive in and make anything as you saw the licensed music sessions were even the the most extreme example of this another was that um when the game was kind of close to complete it was hard or next to impossible to make big sweeping changes is because of how closely com combined gameplay and music was which B basically meant you would have to redo everything another thing that was uh that almost every part of the game even reused asset had to be custom tailored to each section of the game so BPM changes song nuances those all kind of con changed even uh things that we assumed would be reused um and that required a lot of hand adjustment so players had to uh G developers had to go back and constantly reiterate on things that they that theoretically were working but not

perfect and this is something similar but that there was just just an insane amount of detail management making sure that everything in this game moved to the music and felt correct and felt is kind of like a theoretical thing um because obviously we did have things program on a program side automatically listening to the music sometimes music isn't always logical and balancing gameplay and music required combing through every part of the game to find- tune details to match with the music because the reality was that if it wasn't perfect the game just wouldn't feel synchronized and the perception of you know this world being set to the music would be broken so how do we handle this um well here's the thing and I think this is an important point that we often forget um just because we have challenges during development doesn't mean that everything needs to be fixed um instead it just needs to be recognized so any developer will tell you that there is no perfect way to make a game um so we learned early that making this type of game was going to be a difficult and B really annoying um

even though we knew it would be fun as well um so all those key issues that I showed you before that we that we knew would come up with development we basically just acknowledged them early and planned around them um we could have spent time trying to fix trying to find a fix for everything but in a way accepting the challenge and all the caveats let us focus on just making the content and quality of the game so all those challenges we faced we knew that they were inherent to the game that we were making and we kind of prepared ourselves for them picking our battles based off how what our team could do because again we weren't a big team and couldn't solve every issue that we would come up with but outside of the important lesson we learned about accepting the difficulty of the project there's some strong points that I think applies to any project trying something new which we learned during development of Hi-Fi Rush again all this sounds very basic but it's amazing that even a professional team can forget these points the first is you want approach your challenge like what it is something you were unfamiliar with um for this

title we basically told ourselves we need to relearn how to make a game we worked on horror titles for so long that we had to put all of that knowhow aside and just focus on work for what Hi-Fi Rush was supposed to be um we couldn't be overconfident and we actually had to Humble ourselves um and we used all of our learn knowledge as reference um and this helped us prevent um the game losing its sort of originality and identity in exchange for a safe and known experience by just relying on sort of our what we thought game design should be the next lesson was getting things running as soon as possible um once we planned everything out and the team was kind of aligned on goals um getting it running and playable while executing on the core idea allows for the team to align quicker on that final goal um this provides everyone with a good way to give good feedback which uh by good I consider constructive feedback that leads to achieving the goal of the game rather than just a personal

opinion and then for my final obvious Point um but for Hi-Fi rush we took the time of really figuring out what the core of the game is and understanding what's necessary to build it um we obviously had our core pillars as a project um and we acknowledged the difficulties and we decided to work around them instead of fixing everything um since there is no correct way of making a game it really is about finding a process that works for you and what your team is capable of doing but most importantly of what the game itself requires to be made so whatever it is if the what you want to do is find that early and stick with it um warts and all because it's immensely important to realizing your vision um just like we had to learn as we were doing it that sometimes to get to the end we had to work backwards from it and that's it all right so thank you uh for listening uh thank you

yeah I hope this was useful and enlightening uh for you and um if there are any questions we do have some Q&A time I I manag finish in time but I must remind you you must fill out the survey for this talk they actually won't let you leave if you're if you're letting people you can't leave in f a survey sorry um that is very important I was told so hi uh I just want to say I love the game um so so what was the process for deciding which license tracks to use and like for which sequences so like one example I really like the use of The Prodigy track in like one of the later kind of big fights and so like what was the process for deciding which songs you wanted and when to kind of use them for which sequences okay uh the process for choosing licensing music license music was uh purely I just chose what I like and then I put it in um but uh I got some feedback from Members about stuff that hey wouldn't it be cool if that

worked here or that it doesn't work as well and then we adjusted some stuff for example The Prodigy section was something that was we we that situation was made but actually wasn't actually tied to the prodigy song and then a team member came back and said what if we co coordinate to that section and then we decided to make that that sequence happen like that thanks thank you thanks so much for the talk uh I was really impressed about how y all you know made something new when unique that you've never done before uh you know in your talk you said you spent about nine months in the Prototype phase uh but with it being something you've never done before how did you side on on that timeline to be able to make a prototype uh well the 9month timeline was actually just sort of a what we were told it's like you got nine months um so we uh it was there was a lot of panic but realistically I think probably the first six months or so was like us figuring out actually this was our first time using Unreal as well so we were figuring out how to make things work as a game in general and then figuring out what we can do um but a lot

of it was playing around like all the stuff you saw with like the environment moving to the beat it was just me playing around with hey hey look I made this this cube move to the music that's cool and we just made it a feature um but yeah it was really just playing around until probably the final three months where we we figured out what the gameplay was like and then we just got everything in and figuring out that that Loop and supporting it and working from there awesome sounds tough but thanks for your hard work awesome hi there love the game thanks um one of the key mechanics of the game is being able to summon other characters to do like assist attacks and ties into combat and also the music what was the development process on that like and how did that affect the work backwards mentality okay so the uh questions about the partner tax and how that the working backwards work there um so that was the partner tax was just mainly uh came from when we were kind of expanding on G gamepl ideas as well as story ideas of working as like a team and and uh more

ways to sort of add depth to the combat um but we for those we decided okay how how can these attacks work from a musical angle as well as a gameplay angle so for example like the the peppermint character we said it's hard for the player to play in triplets what if we had an assist character do that and add their own musicality to that so we decided okay so that should be the timing whenever you summon the in when should those triplets happen and it's kind of reverse engineered from that and each kind of character had their own sort of uh timing for that but it was all sort of based off the same concept you know if you're pressing a button that's on the beat um they'll come in on the next following beat it's the the lessons we learned by just creating a Syle light attack with chai we just kind of Applied them to all the other characters as well all right cool thank you very much thank you hi um naturally some people have bad or no rhythm at all was that ever an

issue in development or was it just something that you guys kind of overcame yeah so if the the question is uh in development if people didn't have rhythm what were the issues um that was a massive issue uh I I the biggest the funniest example being the original prototype was made with two people myself and our lead programmer um our lead programmer had no musical knowledge um so basically I was there instructing him I was like this is a Beat this is a quarter note and um I'd write all these diagrams and do all this stuff and then um as people join the team some were more musically inclined which you didn't have to speak to them a good example is our lead animator I still think to this day um does not quite understand some of the musicality stuff um which is always fun um but uh it's kind of interesting to see how people just naturally got into it but it did help us a lot early on when we were talking about making an accessible experience if we it was two people making this game who are very very musically Orient oriented we probably would have made a game that was

not accessible um I was giving out ideas early on and our lead programmer was putting them in and playing them and he's like this I can't play this game well to me it made sense um so that was kind of another eye openening experience of okay we need to take this down a level so that even if my lead programmer can play it then it's more accessible to other people does that play into the optional toggle uh UI for the the Rhythm mechanic oh so the optional UI toggle for rhythm was actually one of the final things we implemented as uh something that I was adamant about not doing um but um we realized that people did need that assist and so we put it as an option for them yes cool thank you hi you mentioned haptic feedback and I was wondering if you had any specific challenges with like controller Rumble especially spinning motor style Rumble that takes time to spin up before you feel it and and syncing that with the music yeah um controller Rumble in general um

since we were designing it with a traditional Rumble um there were problems with that uh we tried to tile lot a lot of stuff to to to do these like quick quick beats and things like that and that was not working um so that's why I think one of the first things we tried which people still ask us why did you not make the controller Rumble With Every Beat is because realistically it would never stop um rumbling because it's constantly going to be revving that wheel so we decided to time it only to the beats the the impact beats um uh yeah so that's one of those things that we just kind of through trial and error figured out there was no specific um uh kind of final ideal goal for that we just figured out what worked thanks awesome thing hey as an animator I did not use the UI toggle I got used to the Rhythm and it was really nice playing the game uh so my question is were there any specific challenges when you know you face with the animation team in in particular with respect to the gameplay Loops the language in the language with the animation team as an animator you know with not a lot of musical knowledge

and stuff oh the animation yeah okay so um that's like a whole another presentation to be honest um of how the animation had to be done but basically the animation team needed to instead of just animating cool animations they need to divide their animations into 15 frame intervals because 15 frames was the idea of one beat so everything no matter what they made was made with beat intervals in their in their animation timeline and so we said okay if attack is here how do we make it so it lead every 15 frame interval you have a feeling of a beat or an impact in the animation that makes it feel musical without making it feeling feeling stilted um so it was very very challenging but it also kind of in a way helped because they knew their limitations of how they built out animation okay and this this was decided in the Prototype phase right the in the Prototype phase even yeah that's what we figured out yeah yeah thank you yeah hey thank you for your talk um I guess yeah my question I mean I I may have missed this because I showed up a little late but what motivated the overall game design

decision to make it so even if the player doesn't time in action specifically to the beat chai himself always moves in time yeah essentially like no matter no matter what the player does the game State more or less always stays synchronized and I guess I'm curious what motivated that um the motivation for just uh you know making sure it automatically synced to the beat was um was kind of that initial idea that I just had in my head I love those character action games um anything that I saw that was a was a rhythm game you you have an immediate reaction it's the moment you press the button the action comes out but if you want to have things like a windup or something that makes it feels like you're hitting a character um you had to have wanted to keep that in and so when we were iterating on the idea of how do we keep that in but keep the Rhythm applied um the idea of interpolating it so you still got the the sort of the wind up or the or the intro to the attack and then having a land with the beat just made it feel much more like a traditional action game

but keeping those Rhythm elements but it also in in in that way helped us Define uh so you weren't if you you couldn't be offbeat we could make sure that it always worked right there was like a feeling of consistency regardless maybe of your input which might go back to being more forgiving of the player's timing and so forth and yeah puning yes awesome thank you thank you hi thank you for the talk um my question was was you said that you planned as much as you could and then you started implementing early did you ever find yourself in a situation where something that you had implemented early had to be revised and how did you deal with it if you had to uh yes there was one stage um I think it's the stage uh right before you fight the boss Corsica where you're climbing a tower where we realize that this stage is just way way too long and we basically already finished it and we um had to figure out there was only one point in the level we can we can cut it to keep the music consistent so we uh

it's we we did it so no one actually noticed this but we did it so it's it's when you're like doing one of those Rhythm jumps we we actually secretly warp you to a we skip an entire stage that we built and we finished and Polished and everything like that and we skipped it but otherwise there were no other sections that could be cleanly cut so we said that's the only that's the only way we can do it and everything else we just had we just left it in so some of the criticisms we got that the stages were a little bit too long could have been worse really nothing we can do with it uh that's at the macro level was there anything at the micro level that had the same experience at that point surprisingly no um a lot of that stuff was figured out very early and I don't think anything later was cut just outside of or adjusted outside of just chunks of the game that can clearly be just sort of removed but um no features or gameplay features were kind of cut later in the game they were kind of locked in early so yeah all right thank you so much yeah and I'm being like waved at so that our time is up but I can answer questions apparently uh in something called an Al

Cove that's on the other side of the the uh Pavilion or west what what what is it West Pavilion somewhere over there that's exactly correct I will proceed over there if if if you want to continue asking questions I'll I'll stick around for a little bit but thank you again for sh up [Music]