Suffice to say, not every requested track made the final product. But we did have a general idea for where we wanted to use licensed music… we had the genre and the theoretical song that we wanted to use, then we just had to pray the song we go through (laugh)." Sometimes, the game will slow things right down with brilliant Simon Says sections. We knew we couldn't start creating parts of the game before we actually had the song. I made a playlist of licensed tracks that we’d like to use (and you never know if you’ll be able to use them or not because licensing music is a literal hellhole of talking to lawyers, conversations, and iceberg-paced negotiations). That's why the fights are called choruses in-game." The stage has an intro, the first verse is traversing the level, and the first fight is the first chorus. "For original tracks, levels were made in graph form and structured like a song. This obviously applies to cinematics too!īut starting with the musical rock fantasy and working backwards brings its own set of challenges do you figure the tracks out first, are the BPM and tempo of the levels figured out afterwards? Or are all the stages built around the songs? It turns out it all depends on one factor: was the music liscened or not. You can see it in game with lights pop up on the ground, the UI flashing, and the audio going yeah!" Bosses are where Hi-Fi Rush gets to turn this aspect up to 11. "But we also wanted to reward players for actually playing on the beat, and it sounds obvious in hindsight, but we added lots of responses for when you do actually press buttons on the beat. So in a weird way, you’re never punished for playing off the beat.” We learned we had to interpolate animations so that depending on when you do an attack, it will always end on a beat. In a rhythm game the moment you press a button a sound is played and you get that instant gratification. “The tricky bit was figuring out where to press the button. Because that feels good! When the punch or kick lands on the beat that feels good, and we’ll have a sound effect that’ll play there to make it feel like it was all on queue.” We didn't start there - we started with the idea that the attack will hit on the beat. “When a lot of people think of rhythm games they think ‘press the button to the music’. Johanas explains that the trick to getting the feel right was working from the end result, backwards. Once polished, Tango could begin building the game proper. The attacks, background, UI: all on beat. Once approved and pushed into the prototype stage, Johanas states that his team were surpisingly clsoe to nailing that feel on the first try. This spawned the idea of an "over the top action game like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta," but one where everything synced up to the music. Anyone who has played the cafeteria fight knows. Throughout all his work Johanes says that aligning music with gameplay is something that's "in my DNA", and with Hi Fi Rush he wanted to create a game where the player actually performs the actions along with the music, something he beleives is lacking from many rhythm games. It's this feeling that inspried the initial concept of Hi Fi Rush. Even if you’re in a crowd and jumping with everyone, there’s an energy there.” There’s a visceral feeling to playing a live show, or seeing a live band, where you hear music and the soundwave hits you. "I liked playing music when I was growing up. “It’s an idea that I’ve always had," Johanas states. Hi-Fi Rush was a surpirse game from Tango Gameworks - it was even the core of one of our podcast episodes! To find out more about the process of getting the flow and the feel of interactive rhythm right (where numerious other games have fumbled the concept), I sat down and had a chat with game director John Johanas about all things musical in Hi-Fi Rush, and asked about the challenges and triumphs of getting a high score to work in this infamously difficult genre. A true rhythm game that goes beyond slapping notes on queue and forcing you to jab at the buttons in 4/4 time. It's not just a soundtrack it's core to the game. If there's on thing that's on repeat in my head even now, it's the amazing work the ensemble at Tango Gameworks did when it comes down to the game's relationship with music. Back then, Alex Donaldson stated it could be one of the best games of the year. Consider it a brief follow up to our initial impressions piece from earlier this year.
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