Satoru Iwata's Hips Don't Lie

Hello to you all! Thank you so much for being among the first to follow this, our game, Satoru Iwata Saves the World.

I'm new to publishing on this Itch.io thingy so apologies if I get things wrong. My name is Matthew, aka Kotor, I'm the artist for Video Game Story Time the YouTube channel, and this game is my baby.

So the plan is to finish one "chapter" or level of this game, release it, see what people think, and then take things from there. To give you an idea of how far along this chapter is, today marks a momentous day: I finished the basic layout for the level design! Doot doo doot! I started it at the beginning of January, so it's been a slow process.

The remaining steps before the chapter will be ready for publishing:

• Polish level design to make it as satisfying as possible
• QA test the whole level to make sure players don't go tumbling through supposedly solid objects
• Add in audio - sound effects, ambience, and music (may also include re-recording some voiceover that's already in the game)
• Draw and insert a bunch of visual details in the background
• Add lighting effects and extra visual polish
• Optimise controls, including game pad support
• Add in a pause feature, an options menu, and a main menu screen
• Make some progress on laying out the next few levels, just so I can stay ahead of myself moving forward (researching additional chapters, etc)

All in all, there's still a lot to do! I don't want to release this until everything is as satisfying and enjoyable as possible - a big thing I'm aiming for is to make the game feel good to play, and that means giving it a really solid level of visual polish, as well as making sure the level design feels nice.

To that end, one of the first things I needed to do once the draft level design was finished was figure out the game's BPM - beats per minute. This is important for music (although that stage of the process is a long way away), but it's also important because there are timed platforms that disappear and reappear on a set schedule. I needed to find out how quickly they should disappear and reappear, and that meant I needed to get a sense of the speed with which the player character (Satoru Iwata) moves through the level.

How often does the player hit the jump button? What feels like the most satisying pace to set platforms so that it serves the feeling of bouncing through the terrain?

Logically, the best way to discover this was to record the sound of me playing through the level. Then, from listening back to the taps of the keyboard, I found the approximate rhythm of the game, and after some trial and error, I found the beats per minute that correlated with the speed at which I was tapping the keys.

This was about 100bpm, which is a shame, as if it had been 90bpm, it'd be a lot easier to figure things out for a 60fps game, but c'est la vie.

To test that I had the right speed, I used some 100bpm songs as scratch tracks for the game, playing in time to the music to see how it felt. The most useful song is Stevie Wonder's Superstition, as it has a nice, clear beat.

Another song that syncs up with the game, though, is Shakira's My Hips Don't Lie, which I just find very funny in this context.

So, TL;DR: I'm testing my game by getting Satoru Iwata to dance to My Hips Don't Lie.