OVERVIEW
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Parse-O-Rhythm is a rhythm game on Steam where you control an AI with your mouse, using left and right click to slash errors as they come down the screen. It's been colloquially described as "Beat Saber, but 2-D". The full version features seven different albums (and seven different artists, some of which had to be contacted), a robust character creator, and lots and lots of accessibility/visual flare to boot.
This game is being made with the Flowlab game engine, and while the game is released, I'm still working on it and release a development log for it almost every week! Our small team's ultimate goal is to add hold notes, a robust level editor and some other features before development for the game concludes.
Release trailer from the end of August 2024
STATISTICS
My role: Almost everything outside of Audio (extremely important for this kind of game!)
Team size: 5
NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENTS:
-1st place winner of Winter Flowjam 2024
-Most played game on Flowlab.io for 2024
-100% positive Steam reviews (14)
-200+ copies sold on Steam
THE JOURNEY
GAME JAM PERIOD (WINTER '24)
Development for the game kicked off with the start of the Winter Flowjam 2024 in January. The Flowjam is a bi-annual event hosted by Flowlab.io, a website that facilitates an online, visual scripting based game engine. It also runs for two weeks.
Prior to the theme being announced ("unintended consequences"), I already had an idea for some kind of mouse controlled rhythm game where the player swats notes away as the notes come down the screen. I got in discussion with my talented composer and good friend Logan Kinoshita, whom I make almost all of my Flowlab projects with, to begin drafting ideas after the theme's announcement. After settling on something coding themed, about two days passed before we had our very first "playable" prototype.
2023-12-29 20-55-01 - Trim.mp4Playable video of some of the first recorded footage. It features the prototype theme for 53-Bit, one of the four songs in the completed jam version.
The completed version submitted to the Winter Flowjam 2024.
One thing that made producing this particularly challenging was that, for around half of the jam time, my winter break was up and I was back at Michigan State University for my second semester. My friend, Logan, was also on a trip to Hawaii. We were both forced to balance the game's development with needing to be in other spaces at the same time. Despite all of this, we narrowly managed to finish the game after lots of hurdles, overhauls and building a jury-rigged level editor to build the levels.
Despite a couple minor bugs and issues, the game's response was explosively positive. Logan and I had been known to deliver quality among the community, but the reaction to this project was something else. People could not stop raving about how much fun the game was, and it was kind of jarring. The game ended up winning the jam by a bit of a landslide.
FREE & DEMO PERIOD (WINTER & SPRING '24)
Throughout the rest of my second semester at Michigan State, I went on to develop various updates to the game to add much needed features and juice the game. The plan was to add lots of features to improve the game without actually adding any content to get the game ready for a Steam demo and so people still had a compelling reason to buy the full Steam version.
A leaderboard, brand new UI and backgrounds, overhauled note slashing mechanics and vastly expanded settings are a couple notable features that were made during this period. As the academic year ended, I also began doing weekly Sunday devlogs for the game, which ran for over a year (more on that later). These major updates to the web version ended and development of the full version started with "Update C" in June 2024.
Update C brought dramatic changes to the game's visuals over the game jam version.
FULL VERSION PERIOD (SUMMER '24)
During Update C's development, two additional talented composers known as "thatboxlion" and "Om 'Prism4ticturtle' Patel" were quietly brought onto the project, expanding the team to four.
As work was done on calibration and a character creator, the new songs made by these talented artists were slowly implemented into the game leading up to release. At this time, the Steam demo was also offered to some YouTubers and promoted on the internet. All the while this was going on, I was reaching out to music artists I was a fan of to get their music in the game. In the end, four artists had their music featured: Ghostfeeder, Ko0x, Mordi & Kry.exe.
However, one of the biggest deterrents to finishing the game was actually assembling the levels.
Because of how the game's note spawning system works, the only reasonable way to edit levels without making an entire program for it was an Excel document. This was the method to make the original four levels from the game jam version, and it was excruciating. You had to listen to the song and mentally line up the beats to it, hoping the notes lined up, exporting the level as a CSV and pasting it into the engine. It sounds like something you'd have to do on a computer in the 1980s, not 2024!
Nearly every level for the entire game, game jam and full version, required 10-20 CSV exports to develop an entire level this way. It's for this reason that a level editor for the game will be made before any more official levels. Ironically, assembling levels for the game was infinitely less fun than actually playing them. After all that though, playing the new songs was well worth the slog and I procrastinated working on my own game by playing it, which is a good sign, right?
The game released right as I returned to Michigan State for my third semester - on August 19, 2024. It was timed like this because a Steam event called the "Steam Rhythm Fest" also happened at this time, and I figured that a Steam fest would be a great way to attract initial attention. This method ended up working, and the game popped up in many different YouTube videos!
The next couple weeks saw me fixing lots of bugs and smaller issues. Watching so many people on YouTube enjoy the game was immensely rewarding, but I knew that for the game to further take off, more polish would need to be done as well as a level editor. Level editors are a big deal in rhythm games, so that became the next long term goal.
PRE-EDITOR PERIOD (FALL '24 - SPRING '25)
The release of the full version was never planned to be the end of the game, and it wasn't - since then, construction of advanced features like full controller support, vastly improved level select & progression, Steam achievements, input system improvements, pausing, Discord integration & more were all done as foundational work for the level editor that began work in Summer 2025!
Development during this period was slower than usual due to handling ramping up school & life in tandem with the project, but we managed to finish all of the aforementioned features by the time summer '25 rolled around! We also put the game's soundtrack on Steam!
This clip has developer-enabled "controller cursor hitboxes" that aren't visible on a normal version of the game!
LEVEL EDITOR PERIOD (SUMMER '25 - PRESENT)
..And that brings us to the present! Since summer '25 began, we've been slowly working on the systems to get the editor to function. During this period, we also brought on a fifth team member, "Rezarg", who had already made many excellent tools that allow the game to have things like Steam achievements. At the time of writing, the editor is around 50% done, and all basic functionality is implemented!
I also decided that, after 53 Sunday devlogs, it was time to try something new - so short-form videos are posted every other week to Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram to get more eyes on the game! I'm still quite new to this and I have a lot to learn, but the videos are getting much more attention than the written devlogs did, which is really nice to see.
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