Hello and well met! Several months have passed since the last devlog, and it’s high time to share what’s been going on with our Playdate rhythm game Agents of Groove. Last time we met on these pages we were very close to calling the game feature complete, and were still in the process of verifying some gameplay assumptions; a lot has happened since then. In an interview from August published in issue #5 of Uncrank’d Magazine I mentioned that we were planning to release Agents of Groove by the end of 2024, but unfortunately a number of unexpected life events derailed our planned timeline and pushed our release to 2025. We continued making progress on the game as we could, and by this point we can say that it’s not only feature complete, but very close to being content complete as well.

Dancing our way to the present

We’ve been working on Agents of Groove for well over two years now (not including the very early prototyping with the Playdate SDK), and to get to this point we had to make some decisions regarding what would make sense to keep in the game and what would have to go. Ultimately, of the original 24 levels we were planning when we pitched this game at the beginning of 2023, 20 made the cut first, and finally the current 15. Over that time period the game got more complex, not so much because of scope creep (though there was some of that as well) but more because we consciously tried to make a more interesting and complete game: one that you could still pick up and play for a few minutes at a time, as is common for Playdate games, but also one that would hopefully offer a more well-rounded experience with a compelling and funny story that is an inextricable part of the game itself. I feel that in the current state both the conversations that happen between levels and the gameplay itself serve to tell the story in their own way; I hope others will feel the same.

Games evolve during development in small and big ways. The game we originally pitched was not only less ambitious, but also had a different name: it was known as Crank It Up!. By the time we were ready to announce it broadly (which ended up being May 1, 2024), plenty of other Playdate games were making crank-related puns in their title (as one would expect), and I felt that the name was no longer descriptive enough for what was, at that point, the story of a group of undercover dancers “in a world where music and rhythm have real power”, who find themselves entangled in a sinister plot hatched by a rival organization and put their best foot forward to stop it. So what we announced with a simple teaser trailer ended up being called Agents of Groove, and offered the first glimpse of characters like Daley Bellbottoms and Melody Handler, robots, pirates, and more.

All the things we showed in that first teaser trailer are still in the game, though they’ve gone through a lot of polish, some of which was already evident in the story teaser trailer we showed last October. But now, those teasers feel quite out of date because there’s a whole lot more in the game. Since the last teaser even more polish went in, and we were able to complete gameplay and art for all of the planned levels, as well as finish the writing and the main music tracks (multi-track instrumentals that play during gameplay and expand or contract based on player performance – there’s still a lot of music to add to accompany conversations). The 15 levels, divided among the 4 types of gameplay I described in previous devlogs (all focused around rhythm matching), now can be tackled choosing among 3 difficulty levels with 3 additional major modifiers, and include a ton of painstakingly handmade 1-bit art, 12 original musical compositions, over 12,000 words of dialogue, and even 10 micro-sized cutscenes.

I need to stress that there are still just two of us on the development side of this, so while I sincerely hope our unique game will resonate with someone else in the end, doing all of this ourselves despite the numerous hurdles was a major milestone in itself! Could we have contracted out some of the work to others? We simply didn’t have the budget for it, and as I mentioned in the Uncrank’d interview we had framed this from the start as a project that we would attempt to use for our own learning. This is, after all, our first Playdate game; too ambitious for our situation, granted, but there’s certainly been no shortage of learning during this process. Perhaps we’ll be able to collaborate with others on the development of a future game.

Polish, rework, and additions

So what are some things that we added or polished in the last few months? Some of the following art, shown in no particular order, you may have already seen either here on itch.io or on the Synaptic Sugar website, as I tried to keep screenshots up to date as much as possible.

All the levels we already had art for got a big update, for example Daley’s office in Training Facility 34A7, which as part of the revamp added some new and better-looking furniture:

Compared to before:

The docks got a a big facelift, and so did Daley’s masterful disguise:

This is what it looked like early on:

The DJ consoles that are seen in most levels were completely redone, looking crisper and more detailed now, and we added more alternative versions themed after some of the levels where they’re found, for example:

Some levels we simply didn’t have yet, and being of the traversal types they required a lot more art and animation, plus some gameplay additions, so took a longer time to make than others. You may have come across these fun gifs on Bluesky or Mastodon where Daley moves from hiding spot to hiding spot:

Or where Daley stumbles on one of the hazards on his way to the end:

We also continued iterating on all parts of the UI (an area of work where we’re definitely not done yet), starting from the highlighting of button prompts with flashing rings or stars instead of the previous (less readable in our opinion) flames, depending on the player’s timing with the rhythm matching:

We improved a number of locations as part of a general pass that is still ongoing:

In September we went to PAX West and were able to show a then-current build of the game to a few very helpful people. The feedback was invaluable, as it helped to both validate design choices and inform future development. With that in hand I took a good look at the game systems we had had in place up until that point, and decided to rewrite a number of them to leverage my increased experience with the Playdate SDK and generally make the various cogs fit better and run smoother in the engine that I built pretty much from scratch for this game. Some things that should’ve been time-based were still frame-based from the early experiments, and I hadn’t had a chance yet to revisit them; I needed to implement better resource management and generally memory management to avoid fragmentation and improve load times (hopefully a topic to discuss in more detail later); I was struggling a bit with doing everything with MIDI sequences, due to my limited experience in the field and the limitations of the tools I had available, but had persisted in that direction since the beginning. Those were my main areas of focus, and I’m pleased to say that the current state of things is a big improvement. Performance is already good throughout the game (even with some optimizations still to implement), music sync is much sharper, there are a good number of difficulty settings and accessibility features (perhaps the subject of a later devlog) and the game overall feels a lot better than it did at PAX time.

In regard to music, my initial instinct had been to stick to MIDI for everything and process all music through sample-based synthesizers via the Playdate SDK. That’s how I built the musical foundation for Agents of Groove from the start, I had some cool gameplay and effects prototyped that dealt with processing or modifying MIDI data on the fly in ways that were novel and exciting to me, and I was delighted at the idea of keeping the final game build relatively small as a bonus (as the only thing bringing the size up would have been audio samples). Unfortunately I was never really satisfied with the level of quality I was able to reach on device in this way, bumping against my own limits more than those of the hardware itself, and along the way I had to wade through a number of SDK/OS bugs that took quite a bit of work to track down, isolate repro steps for, and find workarounds for. While most of the bugs I reported are now fixed or will be addressed in the future, eventually I made the call to cut my losses and switched to the more battle-tested ADPCM Wave format, so that we could get back on track faster. The main features are still there (chiefly changing the number of instruments playing dynamically depending on how the player is doing), and so far I’m getting better results in terms of quality, but the build size is inevitably a lot larger. For now this’ll have to do, and perhaps we’ll reuse some of the knowledge gained through this process for a future game.

Remaining work

All very exciting! We still have work to do on the UI side of things, add conversation music, sound effects in many places, and continue to balance and polish, but it really feels like the game is coming together now. We’re continuing to get feedback from friends and family who are trying out the game and are essential for learning what works and what doesn’t in the current setup, and we’re updating the full game experience based on that. It will undoubtedly be a lot better because of it, but I think in terms of the overall structure there will be fewer changes from this point forward. I would’ve liked to have more levels, develop the characters more, introduce more twists, but Agents of Groove, like many indie games tend to be, has been an enormous amount of work already, and we really want to ship it in a somewhat reasonable amount of time. I feel the game holds true to the intention we wrote on our website of wanting to create “Artisanal, small batch, mindful videogames made with love”; we’re doing what we can, and we hope you’ll like it.

– @wildbat

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