Hello again. This week and the previous one seems to be loaded with rhythm game information around, including of ours of course. I hope ours are among the most exciting for you! Yesterday, we have posted the Press Kit. Have you looked through it? If you haven’t done so, here’s a reminder for you to read in the link below:

The press kit dumps a lot of lore… I mean information. But that aside, there are a lot of resources we have put for this, including artworks for the original songs revealed so far!

If you would like use the artworks as your profile picture, header, etc, feel free to do so! I believe that would be testament to the quality of said artworks. However, as we have written in pretty “big-big” words there, do not repost without credit and especially reselling it.

Having said that, let’s go through the most important presskit lore information dumps:

The Scheduled Release Date: Q2 2023

I believe this is a strategic time to release the game. In regards to content, 1.0 should be complete-able by the end of this year. I really don’t believe it will take an entire year to finish the progression system, but what about the stability, optimization, and everything else? Features can be added later, but stability, optimization and a good coding architecture are even more important.

Business Status: Free Download with IAPs

I suppose you can rejoice that the game is downloadable freely now. To add to this, the four original songs revealed in the press kit are playable for free as well!

The most significant of DLCs in a rhythm game is of course the songs. In my opinion, the first DLC available will be a very value-for-money one for you. However, that’s about all I will say for now. Stay tuned for incoming info on that as we draw closer to the release date!

The Screenshots

In the screenshots, there is a sort of “stealth announcement” for one of the songs in the game – that being Reku Mochizuki’s Ascend to Alpha, so let’s just announce it formally now!

• Music: Reku Mochizuki
• Art: Arane

We would also like to thank Oshiribeat for providing the license to the song.

There is also a screenshot of our story’s implementation – it’s the last one amongst the six. This will be one of our core pillars in order to attract new players. The story I think of is not one where we beat up monsters and dragons – if there are, most of them will be offscreen 🙂 Simply put, I don’t have the money to pay people to design that much…

Rather, I would like to explore the experiences of people who get to meet each other through an online game. Of course, the part where we beat up monsters and dragons can serve as vehicles to advance the story, but what I want to show is how the online world can change people – for better or worse.

The current implementation is still quite rough around the edges but as usual, when the time is right we definitely will show you!

Now that we have finished recapping the press kit, let’s move on to the posts we have made the day before as well – that being Light to Heed‘s animation loop and gameplay video.

Animation Loop

Much like our story implementation, this is one of the main features that we believe would allow us to stand out from other rhythm games! The artwork given by Mireille was done in a landscape format so of course, not every part of the artwork is visible in the song animation – especially when you consider there are different device aspect ratios.

However, the full artwork will not go to waste. In fact, I can say that I did put everything to the game!

The time will come in game where you can view the full artwork – and it’s not through a gallery page. Much like our story implementation, an explanation of our animations deserve its own blog post, so please stay tuned for it!

Gameplay Video

And finally we go to the juiciest part of a rhythm game… the rhythm game part itself! It may come off as a surprise that I am already dropping in a 900 note chart for starters, but take note that the mines (the red notes that you have to dodge) count towards the combo and scoring.

In regards to the difficulty, it is just right for me. If we were to tier this from the existing charts, it’d be on the middle end of 12s. There are some UX adjustments to the note logics I would like to make before the game’s release, but no further additions.

Ending the gameplay discussions here for now, I hope SparkLine’s gameplay is unique enough compared to everything else in the market that this experience is only obtained from this game!

Last but not least, special thanks to Shiyou and Jmak from Discord for helping out with the video editing! Also, feel free to ask questions to us whether in Twitter or in Discord. The next devblogs may include your questions and subsequently, our answers inside it.

And that’s it for now. It’s comparatively longer compared to the previous devblog, isn’t it? From this, there are a lot of ways to proceed for the next one. However, at the moment I am preparing the chart editor so that it can be used by more than one person (that one person being me) so let’s talk about that next week. In the meantime, I will be setting up even more resources for the website. Keep an eye for our next updates 🙂

Thank you for taking the time to read this.