Editor’s note: This post is mostly in the style of a post-mortem. If you would like to see our future plans for this game, please skip to the section titled “The Future”

There’s something about game jams that keep reeling me back in every so often that I haven’t really been able to nail down until this specific jam, Brackey's 2021.2. I had considered maybe it’s the challenge of a tight deadline, or the unique experimentation that only works in smaller games/experiences (see my detective game Criminal Consequences, made in 72 hrs). And while this certainly may be the case, I think the primary reason is that at the end of a week, weekend, or some other period of time, I have an experience that I get to share with friends, family, and (if I’m lucky) a few strangers on the internet.

This year, Brackey's game jam 2021.2 gave me an experience that I’ve been missing out on since my days in the Khan Academy programming community: feedback. I’ve gotten a lot of constructive feedback about my game, Rhythm Gambit, and I found this feedback interesting enough that I wanted to give some commentary about the design philosophy of the project, what did and didn’t work, and some of my thoughts about the future of this game specifically.

The Good Stuff

The inspiration for Rhythm Gambit came from a personal love of mine for two games: Chess, and BPM: Bullets per Minute. My goal with Rhythm Gambit was to combine the movement rules of chess pieces with the rhythmic gameplay and punishing randomized dungeons of BPM (there was little to no inspiration from Crypt of the Necrodancer, although I’m sure it’s a great game). 

There are many interesting consequences of combining a game built on 2000 years of balancing with fast-paced move-to-the-rhythm style gameplay. For example, just like in chess, pawns are more powerful when chained together, rooks are weak to the diagonals, and bishops are a nightmare to code properly. It also turned out a little less chaotic than expected, with large difficulty spikes the more pieces were added to the mix.

The inclusion of music in a real time chess game turned out to be vital. This is because the beat signals the move turns and really makes the game really satisfying to play. Without the music, say if I did a turn-based strategy game, well that’s just normal chess. Also, the music is a bop (#33 audio let's go)! Please start a cult around my friend Sawyer so I can convince him to start posting his work online.

I also like the art style. While the pixel art is simple, the shapes are well defined and the color palette is very clean (good job Johnathan). Furthermore, the miniature animations went well with the pixel art. I am a personal fan of pixel art that isn’t confined to pixels, and is free to rotate, translate, scale, and otherwise behave as normal high-res graphics. Especially for this game jam, I really wanted to work on the smoothness and animation of the sprites, and I think that paid off in the numerous animations that the player may only notice subconsciously (For example, whenever you land on a piece, it falls over on its side before disappearing).

Game feel is extremely important for any game, and really this game is one of the best feeling games I’ve coded. I’m really proud of the player movement controller. Half way through development, I scrapped the movement controller I was using because it felt clunky. This turned out to be an excellent decision, as the new movement controller is very intuitive and responsive. Granted, it’s not perfect, but I do think that the responsive movement controls really helped make this game accessible to the people who played it, and not a single person has complained about the movement controls yet, which is a win in my book.

Also in terms of game feel, whenever the player moves a high hat plays, and whenever the player captures a piece, a bassy kick plays. I could have done this for all actions, but limited myself to just the player for time and to maintain the music track’s integrity (and not to overwhelm your ears, you’re welcome).

Room for Growth, and Feedback

Having such a large pool of feedback from this game jam has been super instructive to me about how people interact with the game. There is something really amazing about the raw feedback of random strangers on the internet which provides a lot more insight than your friends who want to be on your “good side”. It’s for that reason that I’m pleasantly surprised by the amount of positive feedback that I’ve gotten on Rhythm Gambit, including people who think this is the best game submitted to the Brackey’s Jam (to which I, and the results, respectfully disagree).

Constructive feedback is also very valuable, but it’s very important to parse such feedback properly since player-bases, while excellent at finding things that they dislike, are not quite as good at finding solutions that fit the creator’s vision (and don’t break things). So, after careful review of the feedback that the game has received and some personal testing, I have identified a few rough edges where the game could be improved.

The game currently has some pretty glaring balancing issues. Knights are way too overpowered compared to the rest of the cast. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to be changed, but maybe some of the other pieces could be buffed. For example, maybe the rooks should move twice as often or the bishops should fire projectiles more often. Obviously more testing is needed to maintain a good balance.

In a similar balancing vein, the way that enemies populate rooms in this game is a little bit wrong. This can create rooms that are way too difficult or rooms that are way too easy. I wanted players to encounter more difficult rooms as they get further into the dungeon, but currently the difficulty generation for that is questionable at best.

While I like the way that the game introduces the core gameplay with an implicit tutorial, I’m less of a fan of the lack of an explanation of the gem mechanics. It was pointed out by a user that the game feels like a waste of time because the game “could use some more of an underlying objective”. Of course, there is in fact an underlying objective (and a pretty good payoff for completion of the game if you haven’t done that yet), but admittedly until you stumble across the first gem room you don’t have any indication that there even could be an underlying objective. I was thinking maybe an intro cutscene could help, but that gets into the expansion of the game (see The Future).

It’s very easy to get lost in the maze of tunnels in the game, so I’ve decided to add a minimap that keeps track of all the areas you have been to and all the areas that you have yet to explore. This should help players in case they get to a point of, for example, only having one gem left to find and not sure which door it is behind.

I've also received some feedback that the game would feel a lot better as a strategy-style with a slowed down and move definitive movement system. In this version, projectiles would be stuck to specific squares on the grid instead of moving slowly and steadily. I'm not sure how that version of the game will feel, but I plan to prototype it at the least.

The Future

Where to go from here? I really enjoyed making Rhythm Gambit, and the reception has been incredibly positive! I have been trying to decide whether to continue development on this game, since I am already a college student who’s working part time, but I think I could find some time over the semesters to continue building this game as a hobby. I have also talked with my teammates, and we all are on board to make this game even bigger and better. However, since all of us have lives outside of Rhythm Gambit, expect any progress to be slow (but steady).

First off, I have released a post-jam version which I call the “Free Juicer” update. It includes some visual updates, minimap, a brand new settings menu + pause menu, controller support, a few bug fixes, and some QoL improvements to the codebase (game jams are notorious for spaghetti code). This version is currently live on itch.io if you want to play it.

Obviously, the jam version of the game isn’t as far as this project can go. While the end goal of this project is not set in stone (I very much follow the guidance of designers much more experienced than I who say to let the game tell you who it wants to be) I envision a game that follows something like this:

The game is divided into multiple, smaller dungeons, each with its own sick backing track (of increasing bpm and larger enemy count) and tileset. Each dungeon acts as a “checkpoint” where dying in a dungeon resets you to the beginning of that dungeon. Each time you spawn into the dungeon, it randomizes so you have to quickly figure out the layout. There also could be some items you can collect in the dungeon to make your life easier, although I would have to determine what those items would be. Each time you enter a new dungeon, a cutscene plays, progressing the main storyline and keeping the player invested. After defeating, say, 5-10 dungeons (depending on how long each dungeon is, again not set in stone) you finally can reach the dark king and his army and defeat him once and for all (the good ending), or fail at the last hurdle (the bad ending).

There is also potential for more unlockable modes, which would be called variants. I haven’t explored this idea too deeply, but imagine a crazyhouse variant of this game and how cool that would be. Or maybe that could be an item? Food for thought; it might not make the cut.

Parting Thoughts

I would like to thank everyone who downloaded, played, and/or reviewed Rhythm Gambit. Thank you so much! If you want to keep supporting the game, stay tuned for occasional devlogs, they’ll be posted to my youtube here: (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_SUwWI8uNGzBEix11psu-w/videos)

Also, if you haven’t yet, please do check out some of the other Brackey’s Game Jam submissions. Necromansion is a personal favorite of mine if you need a place to get started, but any of the top voted entries are probably pretty good. Congrats to everyone who submitted a project to Brackey’s!