HiFiRush Game Director John Johanas breaks down Tango Gameworks' more accessible approach to the rhythm genre.
I’ve never played a rhythm game that keeps me on beat as well as Hi-Fi Rush. While I’m a musically inclined person who fronts his own band, even I have trouble keeping time in music games. I’ll inevitably start to drag behind notes and then speed up too much to overcompensate. Sometimes I lose the music altogether and need to stop clicking entirely just to rediscover the beat.
Building a rockstar fantasy When Johanas originally dreamed up the basic premise of Hi-Fi Rush, his goal was to bring the “kinetic energy of live performance” to a Dreamcast-style action game. A musician himself, Johanas wanted to capture the highs and lows of that experience and place them into a succinct experience that wouldn’t overstay its welcome. He compares the game to a good 10- to 12-track album where every song is high-quality and nothing drags down the run time .
As the project became a reality, the team would start to realize the challenges of making an action game that encourages players to battle in time with music. The more complicated the rhythmic patterns, the more Tango would risk alienating players. To solve that, Johanas would have to take a step back from his musician mindset and think about what an average, less musically-inclined player might be capable of: clapping along to the music.
Creating an easy-to-grasp attack system was only one piece of the puzzle, though. The team would extend that thinking to every aspect of the game, pushing back against rules established in other popular rhythm-action hybrids. Johanas specifically cites Crypt of the Necrodancer as a game that guided the project, though he notes that even its simple beat-matching setup felt a little too restrictive for the broader audience he hoped to reach.
“Early on, we thought there was one solution for understanding where the music was,” Johanas says. “The more people we internally got to play, the more we found that people see beats in different ways, so we knew that we had to go all out in that sense. Even in the first UI, we had that it was going to the beat and would react if you pressed it correctly. And then we look at how else we could support this.
“We were thinking of more technical action games,” he says. “We always found that we were never able to actually remember the combos. You’d find one or two that you’d get into the groove of and you’d just use those for the game. They’re almost made for those who really want to memorize a fighting game level of putting in the effort. I thought that by distilling it to the beat, it was almost easier for people to understand the concepts that were in those games.
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