Into the Soundscape

Into the Soundscape is a Roguelike with rhythmic combat, where enemies act on time with the soundtrack and players are encouraged to attack on the beat. We aimed to fuse the rhythmic elements of Hi-Fi rush with the frenetic and responsive combat of Hades. Players advance through an enchanted forest, made of two different zones, choosing which room to visit from a deck of cards and picking the best options to personalize their experience.

Roles

Lead Designer

As the lead designer I had to ensure a coherent visions was kept throughout the project as we aimed for such a delicate balance between two genres. I also oversaw the design documentation, writing most of it and keeping it up to date.

Composer

For this project, it was fundamental that a person inside the team wrote the music as we needed complete control over its BPM and the emphasys on the rhythm. I wrote the music in layers that activate depending on gameplay events. For the final boss, I wrote the music in tandem with the design of the attacks to create an immersive experience.

Game Designer

As a game designer I went where the project needed me the most from moment to moment. I designed and oversaw the combat system, especially the rhythmic aspects. I designed most of the abilities and permanent upgrades as well as some of the enemies. Finally I created the final boss fight along with its level.

Economy Designer

As an economy designer on this project, I balanced the core gameplay, the progression through the world, the strenght of the enemies and the power-ups. This obviously required tuning fractions of a second as well as creating formulas and very big excel sheets to manage all the random aspects of a roguelike.

Designing a Rhythm-like

In this project we wanted to marry fast-paced and responsive combat of Hades with the rhythm action gameplay of Hi-Fi Rush. It was a hard challenge, that required careful balancing and consideration. We opted to make the game responsive by having all the actions start immediately after the player's input, rewarding attacks on the beat with extra damage and range. Enemies are instead forced to attack on beat as this didn't affect the responsivness of the game and encouraged dashing/acting on beat. Our desired feeling meant we had to renounce heavy attacks, that would have meant too long a delay between input and action. We compensated this lack of variety with the introduction of a ranged attack that can be mixed in combo with the melee attack.

2nd biome playthrough

Musical Boss-Fight

Boss fight with phase transition

For the final boss I wanted to really create an immersive experience, with music and gameplay going hand in hand for a spectacular climax of the game. I wrote 6 different tracks, each associated to a different attack. Each track has cue points that metasound can read to execute the attack so that by learning the melody players can guess when to dodge. The melodies go seamlessly into one another so the game can select 2 different random melodies to play each time. There is also a rest melody without attacks, at the end of which the boss possess another tree. For the second phase, all melodies are sped up by 20 BPM and a moving area damage appears to make everything even more fast-paced and challenging.

Lessons Learned - Combat

Combat design is a notoriously hard area to tackle, and I feel it's where I learned the most. In general I'm very satisfied with how the combat ended up, especially considering our level of expertise at the time. That said, there are somethings I would do differently if I had to start again.

First of all, I realized the importance of juicyness in a combat system. I was used to iterate with a back and forth between design and programming and then, when everything was set, implement VFX, animations and all the aestethic features. For this project, I realized the necessity to include 3D artists and tech artists much sooner to understand if the game could give the desired feel.

I wasn't really satisfied with the ranged attacks, that felt too disconnected with the melee ones and didn't allow for the mix-and-match feel we aimed for. Going back I would opt for soome kind of magical AOE attack, with a shorter range and longer and weighted animations, more similar to the melee attacks.

Finally, I think we should have thought about more ways to tie the elements of the level design with the combat, as they don't impact the gameplay enough.

Lessons Learned - Roguelikes

Roguelikes are so different from one another, that it's hard to find the right reference for your specific necessities. One of the earliest decision was the progression through the forest. We wanted to avoid backtracking or free roaming as we wanted to keep the pacing high: a rhythm game where you walk into empty rooms for 10 minutes simply stops being a rhythm game. On the other hand we wanted to keep an element of exploration and risk-reward typical of this genre (do I keep exploring to become stronger). In the end I feel we did a good job with the deck of cards, as it kept the action going while giving a lot of agency. We decided to further play on this element by having a room where the forest deck can be modified.

For the power-ups we were inspired by Hades boons but we designed them to be coherent with the rest of the game, tying their activation to on time actions. The abilites we designed are fun and play well but I feel they really lack in synergy among one another. Making a powerful build and exploring the combinations of abilities is one of the most fun things a roguelike can offer, and I was so disappointed that I started to study the subject and even wrote an article on the topic.