Developing Rhythm Rumble was the first time I made a project intended to actually be in the hands of consumers someday. I was the lead programmer and co-lead the whole team, and it was my job to oversee a majority of the game’s programming and development.

The final design of the game was largely group-conceived. I provided the team lots of references of other games so that we could take what worked well in those games without outright copying them, such as DDR and Friday Night Funkin’. I directed the team to focus on making the dancer avatars to be engaging to look at to attract new players to our showcase, but also made sure they were not too distracting to those currently playing.

I wrote the “beatmaps,” which is the list of step prompts the player receives, and I also coded the system to put them in the game. I built this as a system for Unity’s inspector in such a way that a designer with no knowledge of coding could go in and modify the beatmap by inputting the proper note objects and the time it needed to spawn throughout the song. Not only that, but I created a difficulty system, which allows for a player to select their difficulty mid-game and initiate different beatmaps to dance to.

The greatest challenge of getting this game to work was the unique input system. I learned how to code for step pads and work with different and obscure hardware to get the game working. I vigorously tested how the step pads worked, what they responded to, and how to best tailor the game experience to how users would naturally interact with the “controller.”