• Chapter 0: New ideas for Pushing It (Insight) and Downhill (Insight).
  
• Chapter 1: De-cheese Fire In The Sky and Orbital Drop.
  
• Chapter [-]: Buff Pushing It Phases.
  
• Chapter -1: Tiny-buff Uphill (Loop 2). De-cheese/new idea for Roommates (Loop 2). De-cheese Carrying It (Loop 2). Buff Tall (Loop 2). Buff Wall (Loop 2). New (Remix) for Wall (Loop 2) [VAR1]. Buff Pushing It (Loop 2) [VAR1] and its (Remix). Buff Orientation (Loop 2). New idea for Orientation (Loop 2) [VAR1] (Remix for the old idea). Buff Orientation (Loop 2) [VAR2].
  
• Slabdrill's World: Add Layer Gore.

💣 30% off everything!

Fixed several bugs.

Add the skill "Flying Immortal Step," which is a skill that uses dodge dice to attack.

Add unique items: Fire-resistant Cloak, Electric-resistant Cloak, Ice-resistant Cloak.

The B-level Electric-resistant Cloak can grant immunity to paralysis.

Slightly balance enemy groups.

Fix bugs related to individual skill icons appearing incorrectly.

各位好！给大家带来重大好消息！♪(´▽｀)🎉




游戏开发者越青老师和我们发行团队的小伙伴都超级开心！o((>ω< ))o
非常感谢每一位小伙伴，多亏大家的支持和喜爱，我们才能走到这一步，
也感谢主办方和各位评审，能够认可我们的游戏~


✨我们已将绝密珍贵获奖视频和我们的心得感想制作成视频，快来看看吧：
喜报！『买个可乐饼吧！』获得最佳叙事奖啦！！


为了庆祝游戏获奖，可乐饼的画师广廿尺老师绘制了全新的贺图！



『空杯与满杯的交替，偶然与必然的因果，他们最终走向何种命运？』

✨高清尺寸版本贺图可从我们的B站动态获取：高清贺图动态

再次感谢大家一直以来的支持~！



自游戏上线以来，我们收到了许多玩家的留言，希望能拥有《买个可乐饼吧！》的实体周边。
于是~锵锵锵！ 我们的可乐饼摊正式出摊啦！



我们已于本周开启在摩点平台的预热，正式周边通贩即将于12月6号晚18：00在摩点平台开始。
✨摩点传送门：线上实物周边通贩链接！

这次众筹，我们带来了充满游戏特色的周边，从温暖实用的小物件到可爱满分的收藏品，希望能将治愈与幸福传递给每一位小伙伴！


受到这次获奖的激励，我们也将努力推进更多游戏后续的计划！
我们正在招募本地化的参与成员！如果你有兴趣加入我们的英语&日语本地化工作，欢迎联系我们的专用邮箱：croquette0v0@163.com


✨详情可见我们的另一条公告：https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2167960/view/4462599937284113402

非常感谢每一位在展会现场与我们见面的朋友，也感谢所有线上支持我们的伙伴！
我们会不断前进，给大家带来更多好消息的~
敬请期待吧！💖

越青&梦结界工作室
2024.12.1

The Steam demo is live!

If you start the game and enter a level you may encounter a bug that effects FOV im working on a fix for it but to fix the issue in game just apply the FOV in the settings and it will fix it.

Hello everyone!

We are incredibly grateful to each of you! More than 500,000 people have played the KLETKA demo version, and without your support, feedback, and fan arts, the KLETKA would never have become the game it is now. Thank you!

We understand that this may be sad news for some of you, but we would like to inform you that the demo version on Steam will be closed on December 7th.
The singleplayer and LAN modes will remain available for free on itch.io in an updated form, starting on December 7.

Now we want to fully focus on developing the final version of the game. We can no longer keep the demo version up to date, and we also don't want to leave it in a form that does not reflect the real level of the product. Therefore, we are preparing a small farewell update before letting her go free.

Thanks to everyone who was with us, who shared ideas, bug reports and their creativity. We have traveled this path together, and it has become an incredible experience for us.

We will return on December 12th with a new KLETKA. See you!

— Callback, ln404

With this comes the Winter Season drops! 4 new Waifus to collect along with the very rare Reindeer Waifu!

We have more plans for the month of December, so keep an eye on the announcements!

We're into the start of the holiday season now! I could either take this opportunity to dive head-first into Rhythm Quest work, or I could instead take it as a chance to rest and recover before the start of the new year...knowing myself, I suspect it's going to be neither of those and I'm just going to continue onward at a slow and steady pace!


Unfortunately I don't have any sort of "Rhythm Quest is feature complete!" or even "I finished working on all of the main levels!" announcement for the end of the year. However! As a consolation prize, I do have a little upcoming holiday present for all of you, and that is the unveiling of the new difficulty selection feature:



This isn't live in the demo (yet!), but you can now select from Easy, Normal, and Hard difficulties when starting the game, right before the world select menu. While I have reservations about adding yet another screen that you need to get through before you're actually in-game, in this case I ultimately decided that the benefits seem to justify the cost in this case. I unfortunately didn't have enough screen real estate to show any fancy previews or graphics here, but I also didn't want to have a menu that was =just= text, so I added the little enemy icons some some cute little visual iconography (with beat-synced animations!).

The hope is that adding multiple difficulty options will let experienced rhythm game players feel less bored through the earlier part of the campaign, as well as offer a more lightweight version for people who want to experience all of the levels but without them getting too hard near the end. It also adds some amount of replay value for people who want to go back and replay the levels with some harder charts.

Picking a difficulty level isn't a commitment and doesn't "lock you in" -- you're free to change your mind at any time and each level will track your scores (and coin counts!) separately, so if you decide that the levels are getting a little too hard for you, you can always turn the difficulty down moving forward. This does mean that there are essentially triple the amount of available coins in the game, so you'll probably just end up with a bunch of extra ones after unlocking everything (or maybe I'll just make some expensive "stretch" purchases for show).

There have been some UI changes in various screens to accomodate the new feature. Here's the level select screen, for example, which has a new button for changing your selected difficulty without having to go back to the initial menu. Again, I dislike how this screen feels more cluttered than before, but it was the best solution I could come up with given the constraints, and committing to it also allowed me to fit an extra "Bonus Levels" button on the upper-left to make things all nice and symmetrical.



I've been thinking about this feature for a while and initially had some trepidation because one of the main strengths of Rhythm Quest is the tight and intentional mirroring between the charting and the music cues -- I was worried that recharting the same tracks would lead to a loss in that coherence. With a previous game, "Melody Muncher", I solved this by simply adding new melodies into the existing songs and exporting multiple mixes of them, but I wanted to avoid doing that this time around as that would triple the amount of audio content that needs to be authored and served with the game, which is undesirable (particularly on mobile devices).

After thinking about the tracks, however, I think I can manage to make it work, even reusing the same audio. Normal mode will still be presented as "Rhythm Quest as it was originally intended", so it will most likely have the best matching between charting and music, but I think there are plenty of good opportunities where I can take liberties in charting the same piece differently.

This does add quite a lot of additional charting work for me, as I've now got to re-chart all of the existing 29 songs for both Easy and Hard mode (some of the later Normal mode charts might even get toned down a bit), not to mention the bonus songs as well. But charting is not particularly "hard" work to do, as it's a very known quantity. It's just going to take time.

I do, however, intend to release the re-charted versions of the demo levels before the end of the year, so you can look forward to playing those soon! Consider them to be my holiday present to all of you who are patiently waiting for more progress to be made on the game...


Because the beginning of the game needs to ramp players up from essentially zero, the first few levels (the only ones I've worked on so far) won't have very significant charting differences between the three difficulties, but there will still be some.

The mechanics are still going to be introduced in the same levels throughout all difficulties, because I want players to be able to switch between difficulties at any time during their playthrough. However, the level of "rhythmic pattern" difficulty will increase at different rates. Here's an example of a snippet of level 1-2 to illustrate some of the minor differences:



Separating the easy and normal charts is actually fairly difficult early on and as a result they end up looking mostly the same (which is alright, for now, until we get to the later levels). I could just remove even more obstacles from the easy chart, but at a certain point that ceases to meaningfully make the chart easier, and can even make things =harder= as it's potentially more difficult to keep a steady beat in your head when the notes are too sparse. I briefly thought about increasing the number of checkpoints in the easy charts, but I decided against it as that would throw off a number of things (color palettes, too many screen flashes, etc).

The hard charting is a little more interesting to look at. Early on I need to strike a balance where I don't want to ramp up the difficulty too quickly, but I want to also make sure that players who "get" rhythm games are still always being engaged. I decided to allow for eighth-note basic enemy patterns in hard mode from the get-go, which really helps set apart the hard chart, but I'm still mostly holding off on more advanced rhythms involving off-beats and syncopation, except where it really flows in tune with the music in an obvious way.


Small (boring) technical note here on a change that's being made to the way levels are stored and loaded. Previously I had a "level baking" process where I ran the level generator code for each level ahead of time and then wrote the results out to disk as part of the build. The idea here was to (in theory) speed up the process of loading levels by precomputing all of that logic and just reading the fully-baked level from disk instead of instantiating all of the objects on the fly dynamically.

This is now more or less gone as part of the difficulty refactor. I didn't want to bake 3 different versions of every single level, and it's not actually even clear that this reduced loading times at all, as reading a million serialized objects from disk can potentially be slower than just instantiating them dynamically (this is the sort of thing that's hard to test outside of an actual build, and probably varies device to device). I still have a "level analysis" pass that needs to be run offline where the logic runs through every level to collect stats on it (notably, how many coins are in the level), but now I only save those numbers and not any of the actual level geometry.

I've mentioned before that I have an "object pooling" solution that's used in the level editor in order to reuse object instances every time the level is re-generated. I'm leaving this as a task for future me to talk about, but if I wanted to speed up level load times, I could actually persist the object pooling across different level loads -- that way, when you load a new level, it can just reuse the enemy/obstacle objects from the previous one you played instead of creating new ones from scratch (which is slower). So there's more optimizations that can be done if I put in the work to make it possible.


Besides supporting multiple difficulties, another work item on my by-end-of-year wishlist was building out a holistic "song select" menu that features all of the levels available in the game -- including the main campaign, the bonus levels, and custom levels, all in one big browser. I spent a good portion of this month working on that, and it's coming along pretty alright:



This looks pretty similar to the custom level browser that I implemented a while back, and a lot of the implementation is copied over, but in general things are more encapsulated / architected out a bit more robustly because I need to handle different types of content (i.e. many different button formats, instead of just one).

One new thing I coded up was a way to scroll the list via touch swipes, with scroll momentum and all that. This is only allowed on mobile devices, as on desktop / web / switch builds you have other better methods of navigating the list. It's a bit weird that this is the only UI in the game that uses this UI navigation paradigm, but I couldn't think of an elegant alternative for touchscreens that I was happy with and this is the only place in the game where the buttons need to be laid out in a really long dynamic list like this.



I had two options for implementing this -- use Unity's built-in scrollview logic, or just code and manage the scrolling inertia and clamping/snapping logic myself. Fortunately, I'm wiser than I once was, so I chose to just roll my own custom solution instead of even attempting to deal with Unity's this time. =P

Overall, it works pretty well! I had to iterate a little on exactly how much momentum to accumulate based on the movement of your intial touch/swipe, but fortunately it seems like my instincts were mostly on point and it feels natural for the most part.


Someone reported a bug where the water effect in level 1-3 wasn't stretching across the entire screen for certain resolution/zoom levels, so I took the opportunity to just revamp the entire effect altogether. Here's what it used to look like, just a flat rectangle with a render texture that's used to capture the "reflected" graphics and then apply some sine wave modulation to them:



And here's the new version:



Looking a lot nicer, I think! This is going to be one of (hopefully) many many improvements to help bring the visual quality of the earlier levels more in line with the later ones.

The different "wave" layers are actually all drawn in a single pass by the fragment shader here. There's no complicated water simulation going on (the movement doesn't need to react to anything dynamic anyways), it's just a bunch of sine waves blended together to make an undulating pattern. Combined with the parallax scrolling and layering (and the fact that it's now partially translucent), it all comes together to make a nice effect.

One interesting aspect of the implementation here was to clamp/filter the pixel rendering correctly. Without that, you get waves that are rendered smoothly at whatever your device's native resolution is, which doesn't match the pixel aesthetic of the rest of the level:



With the clamping, the water waves are "stepped" with the same pixel sizing as the rest of the level graphics.




That's it for this update! There's still a lot more work to be done on the song select menu (bringing back the left-hand panel, letting you change your selected difficulty, etc) as well as recharting all of the demo levels (which will be my priority for the remainder of the year!) as well as trying to think about what I want to do with the backdrop visuals for worlds 1-3. Hopefully you all have a nice end of year and here's hoping (once again) that the coming year is "the year" for Rhythm Quest!

Lamentations will be featured in INDIE Waves on Saturday, December 7th ,2024. The event is partnered with Steam, check it out!

Indie Live Expo YouTube Stream Link

Stay tuned here on Steam and on our Discord for all the latest news and updates regarding the game!

Discord Server Link