Project Magnet - Devlog

Project Magnet was my first time making a rhythm game, so this is my process:

10/08

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to make a traditional rhythm game to complete the sound prompt, as I love rhythm games. Goin into it, I knew there would be a lot of challenges, but I was determined. Working with my artist, Misha, we decided to make a vocaloid fangame based off of Minato's Magnet.

10/15

This day, I began coding. I started by researching a way to time inputs with the rhythm of a song. I knew it would likely relate to using the bpm of a song, but wasn't sure how to implement it. I used b3agz's "SYNC YOUR UNITY GAME TO THE BEAT" tutorial on YouTube as my basis for it.  His beatmanager script and pulsetobeat script end up being key components of my game.

From there, I decided on how the gameplay would work; a concept similar to taiko, but simpler: notes spawn, and you press spacebar to the beat. Using that concept, I made a way to spawn notes according to the beat, that would move towards a judgement line.

10/21 - 10/25

These days were spent focusing on creating a beatmap for the song itself. I did this using prefabs. The beatmap was a prefab with separate notespawners that would spawn every beat. The notespawner would spawn the amount of notes needed on each beat. That way, I could spawn different note speeds. Once the beatmap itself worked, it was just a matter of listening to the song, putting down notes, and then testing.

Once the beatmap was done, I added a way to see your current combo, and a score feature, which were values that got updated when you hit or missed a note.

10/26 - 10/28

This was where things came together. Misha had finished the art, and I began putting it into the game.  I fiddled around with animations and a specific plugin that I will mention in the postmortem.

In this time, I also implemented the other scenes: the main menu, credits, and end scene.

I did struggle a bit with the scoring screen, and getting animations to play in a certain sequence. This was because of the way I used lerps; what I had done meant my animation would (mathematically) never reach the end, so once I understood why that happened and understood how lerps actually work, I was able to fix the issue.