As a group of 8 UCI collegiate students, inspired greatly by Vocaloid and multiplayer-offering Rhythm Games like Guitar Hero's Face-Off or Battle Mode, The Cheat Code to Happiness Is... is a passionate experimental game project pitched to VGDC. Our team consisted of a Game Designer, a UI/UX designer, 3 Programmers, a Sound Designer, and a 2D Artist.

Once we had our core game mechanic down, I started to look at how our game would control. Initially, I had inspiration from Hatsune Miku: Project Diva, and thought of having all the face buttons on a controller be our source of playing notes to gain points. 

However, I always found that pressing buttons for rhythm games proved very difficult, not only cuz I sucked at them, but especially when I have to follow ambiguous button presses that play a random note. I knew how to do rhythm, I can play piano, and I can hum and sing songs correctly. Something was missing from button based rhythm games for me. 

And so, I thought of finger-drumming to the beat of a song. I wondered, "How can I get that same sort of feeling?" Once I picked up my PS5 controller and started playing with the analog sticks, it hit me. Why not flick the analog sticks?

It became more and more apparent how fun it ended up being as I played this way to my favorite songs. I started doing patterns that felt good to play. And the flicking "sounded" good, too! After that, everything followed suit. With Unity's new control system it allowed me to implement it all. And soon, when I made the beatmap charts for the game, the patterns that felt good to play were implemented into them as well.

Still, there was a problem, how would it be conveyed to the player which notes to play according to analog flicking? A regular note highway game has four lanes: left, up, down, right –all labeled through designated arrows. What kinds of "lanes" should this game follow? 

After playing around, I thought it would be best to split the four-lane highway in half, making the inputs be: left analog up and left analog down for one half, and right analog down, right analog up for the other half.

I went through multiple prototypes in designing how the game screen would look. Through the help of my Lead and UI/UX Artists, I was able to go back and forth with them to create a striking color map, and in turn, our initial note highway –split right down the middle. 

One noticeable change from the start of the game's development to the final product was the look of the note highway, each individual lane was spread out and clearly separate on screen. After some playtesting we soon squished the lanes together, had the lane pulse when flicking, and changed the outer two lane's note orientation for player readability.

My first initial description of this multiplayer rhythm game, boiled down to be a mind vs. body situation.

I was inspired by Guitar Hero's "Face-off" or battle-mode, and fully intended to have it act that way as a message of mental health. Character models/sprites of the body and mind would show feedback of missing/hitting a note by cringing or getting hurt, and they would go against each other. Much like the world of Guitar Hero with the audience booing, and the guitar twanging harshly. 

As such I thought of a collection of power-ups that would hurt or even help the other player. Which makes you think, why would you wanna help the other player that you were against? 

I was going to make it the player's choice whether to beat the other player, or work together to get the highest total score, to showcase the mind and body at war, or at peace together.

This didn't end up being implemented, as this ended up being the idea that took too long of a discussion with the team. However, you could see that the foundations of this are there in the sprite work and in the end results screen having both the individual player's score and the total score, for the existing multiplayer mode of the game.