Hello and welcome to the first devlog for Agents of Groove! I am @wildbat and in this first episode (of many? Hopefully at least a few) I wanted to talk about our team, how the game came about, and explain a bit about what we’re seeing in the teaser trailer we’ve unveiled on May 1. If you haven’t seen the teaser yet, now is a good time! You can find it below.

If you’re reading this, you likely already know that Agents of Groove is a rhythm game in development for Playdate, in which the player joins the titular secret agents of the G.R.O.O.V.E. agency in an effort to stop a global conspiracy (sometimes despite their best efforts). The tools that will aid them in their mission are: dancing, hi-tech equipment that helps them harness the power of rhythm, incredible amounts of style, and more dancing.

The team

This is the first game that we (as Synaptic Sugar) have announced and are planning on releasing. We’re currently a team of two people with some previous experience working at game companies and game-adjacent tech companies since 2008; after a long time spent wanting to make our own games (and after several prototypes made only for fun) we finally decided to metaphorically take the plunge and make some games we can actually publish. Perhaps there are others out there who might like the same types of games we like to make!

We’re interested in experimenting with original concepts, humorous stories and innovative game mechanics, mainly for two reasons. The first: indie games have a huge opportunity to explore far and wide, get weird, and offer something new to talk about. That’s when indie games are at their best! Why not see what we can find during that exploration? The second reason: we have kids, and would like them to be able to play and like the games we make. That doesn’t mean we plan on making games for children, but rather on creating stories using themes and gameplay that can be enjoyed by most ages. And we want to do all of this while using more sustainable production processes, far from the crunch and instability of parts of the games industry that are presently continuing to lay off people by the hundreds.

The game

In this view, when the Playdate was announced, it sounded like the perfect platform for our first game. Its friendly character, calling back to the older days of the Game & Watch and Gameboy but using modern technology, a beautiful screen, and a crank as controller (what!?) was an instant hit for us. We were prototyping a PC game at the time (more on that much later on… maybe!) but we quickly decided we wanted to make a Playdate game first. Besides, one or a few smaller games, within certain well-known technical guardrails, would also help us get our processes in order for whatever might come next.

After a few iterations on ideas, Agents of Groove was born. Even though Panic also provided Pulp, and Pulp was from the start a very promising tool, I chose to work with the Lua SDK because the game was already too ambitious even in its early concept, and being a programmer I tend to default to the path of most resistance anyway. The Playdate SDK is fortunately very approachable, but there was still a lot to learn since the early stages of prototyping. For one, despite my game industry experience my pre-existing knowledge of Lua had come mostly from working on an open source project with friends some twenty years ago (!), then later from making some minor World of Warcraft mods, and more recently from working on various Redis scripts; nothing at the scale of a full videogame, however, so learning the idiosyncrasies of Lua at this scale has been an interesting experience to say the least. With Agents of Groove now being at the stage where it could have a teaser trailer, I feel that by this point the major hurdles in that area are past.

For this game I’m doing programming but also doing design, writing and music composition, at least for now. I enjoy music, and there are some core connections between gameplay and music in this game that I needed to figure out very early in development (more on this probably later on) and still continue to iterate on, so it made sense for me to start out being hands on in all those areas. @nethercatt on the other hand, who is the other person in Synaptic Sugar, is making all the beautiful art and animation, plus our logos and the graphic design for our website. It’s that same game art that we see throughout the teaser trailer.

The first trailer

The teaser trailer is entirely composed of gameplay recorded on an actual Playdate via Mirror at 2x zoom. I prefer to show as much of the gameplay as I can, rather than text summaries or art that will not be released as part of the game; so what you see there is what, in fact, is in the game (at the time of editing the trailer, anyway). The individual clips are edited together with the excellent DaVinci Resolve software over the soundtrack, with only some contrast adjustments made during color grading (we’re on a 1-bit black and white system after all). From there the trailer is only a master export and final transcoding away (though I did that last step using Handbrake).

The trailer opens with a classically flamboyant entrance from none other than legendary agent of G.R.O.O.V.E. Daley Bellbottoms. Daley appears a lot in the trailer, and in fact he is one of the characters that appear the most in game too. However, the player in this game does not play as Daley but rather as themselves, helping out the agents level after level and participating in conversations when needed. The entrance we see and subsequent countdown is a typical way for a level to begin.

We then move to an indoors scene in which a number of characters are dancing, while Playdate button prompts slide at the bottom of the screen. We’re seeing one of the main gameplay mechanics, where players have to match the button prompts shown at the right time, sometimes using other inputs as well. Doing well increases the score, fills up the bar on the left side of the screen, and causes the music track to expand. The dancing characters look… confused? Only to appear again a bit later, but faring visibly better. Perhaps the explanation for that behavior is best left for a future story devlog or trailer.

Here and there we see also some conversation bits, like the one with G.R.O.O.V.E. information expert Melody Handler, and the current UI for selecting responses. During these moments we get to see some of the gorgeous character portraits painstakingly drawn for this game. Technically none of the UI here (or any other UI elements for that matter) are final at this stage, including the fonts, but I like how clean and readable things are now, so my goal is to keep these traits even if the general presentation may change during development.

The situation appears to get heated as Daley takes the stage again and declares a dance off! Mechanically this is a variation on the button matching we’ve seen earlier, but there are a few twists related to making mistakes, and additional things that may happen during this type of one-on-one confrontation. Generally, we’re hoping to let the levels have enough variations, so they don’t all feel the same. The setting shown in the trailer is one of my favorites so far.

Next, we see a bold claim from Daley about being a master of disguise, followed by an example in the field. This doesn’t follow directly from the previous scene, rather it’s a disconnected example from another part of the game. We mentioned on our website that Agents of Groove intends to have four different level types and this is one of the other ones, where we can move freely but have to do so at specific intervals, sneaking past guards that appear to be moving in rhythm. A few levels similar to this are planned at the moment, but we’ll see how well all the levels gel as things develop.

One more gameplay sequence with Daley dancing solo on a luxurious dance floor that lights up as he goes along. The disco ball here, like in the previous dance sequence, responds to the player’s crank movement, and here we are showing what the UI looks like for button inputs that need to be held for a certain amount of time. With the art in general we’re trying to maintain a link to the Game & Watch and Gameboy inspiration for the Playdate, not trying to replicate the look of those games exactly, but still incorporating the spirit of some of the technical limitations of the time, in the way we remember it. You may have noticed some of this, for example, in the discrete poses used for the characters seen up to this point.

We end the trailer with a rapid fire carousel of other locations and characters. We’ve gone fast but we’ve seen quite a bit. Pirates? Robots? Mysterious figures? Well, why not? There’s a story that connects all of this, and hopefully it’ll all make sense in the end.

We’ve reached the end of the teaser trailer, and it feels like a good stopping point for this devlog as well. I hope this helped give some context to what we’re doing with Agents of Groove, and if there’s interest we might be back with more on other technical aspects, tools we’re using, or characters and story. In the meantime check out our other venues: our website, Bluesky, Mastodon or Twitter account. Or follow us here on itch.io, that is also a groovy idea!

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