[before i start, i just wanted to give a heads up - some of the videos linked here absolutely feature flashing lights! warning every one would be counterintuitive so i'll just give a general heads up. watch at your own risk.]

hey! so i don't really know what to talk about here. i figured i'd start by just rambling off about something that is massively responsible for why i started working to improve at art.

you probably noticed that a lot of my characters have shape heads. and some of my characters...are just shapes. that guy in the bottom right? he's a shape. and also a LOT of my art is tagged with #projectarrhythmia. what the heck is that thing? how does heart disease relate to any of these characters?

the game

project arrhythmia. first i should explain what it is, probably. put simply, it's a bullet hell game where everything that wants to kill you moves to the music. bullets? they fire out to the beat. giant lasers? on the beat, baby. it gets more complicated than those two things, but everything goes on the beat.

if this sounds at all familiar to you, then you've probably heard of just shapes and beats. yes, it's pretty much the same thing. but both games were made without knowing about each other, and project arrhythmia has many distinguishing features. the game's story is told through a sort of computery visual novel - it all takes place within a supercomputer working to find a cure for a deadly virus. you play as a nanobot, and the levels are simulations training these nanobots to fight the disease. the two "main" characters are A-Tan and PA-MCP-02 (who A-Tan nicknames "Hal" because she's a NERD), who both exist virtually within the supercomputer.

but there's another big thing that sets it apart -

the editor

project arrhythmia has a level editor, and god damn it sure as hell does.
it's an interesting thing. functionally, it's a lot like an animation program. you use keyframes to move around objects. these objects can be "parented" to other objects, which makes them follow their parent. you can add some randomization to objects. groups of objects can be collected into a "prefab" that can be easily pasted a bunch of places, with the ability to update all instances at once. and seperate from obejcts is an "events" panel of keyframes that control camera movement and some post-processing effects.

project arrhythmia's community is one of the most talented and creative i have ever seen.

the stuff people make with this is unbelievable. sometimes it falls together like a beautiful music video. other times levels have such colorful variety that you become lost in it. maybe other times its used to show an epic battle with you caught in the center. levels in this game can be emotional. they can be terrifying. they can be groovy. they can be anything, and it is truly rare to have a game with as much variety as this.

people have been making levels since the game first came around. even as old creators leave, new ones come in to deliver bangers. and the levels have only become more fun as time has gone on. and even now, with the game sort of having quieted down...the community still hasn't stopped doing great.

the stories

now i sort of didnt mention something about the story mode earlier. yeah, this is kind of important. for the majority of the game's lifespan, it hasn't been out. like, nothing. there's a few demo levels in game, but they're really just community levels that the developer originally bought to stick in game as side missions later. and they don't have story attached.

by the way, this game has been in development for nearly a decade. which is nuts. but surely all its fans would get tired of such a long wait, right? why would anyone stick around over 9 years for a $15 game? it went years without updates for some time. well, i did mention the level editor. i did mention that people are really talented and really awesome. what if i told you that people have used it to tell stories of their own?

storylines are practically a tradition in the project arrhythmia community at this point. a series of levels, chained together by an overarching narrative. usually they feature boss fights which introduce new characters. a lot of them give the player different roles, some even give the player dialogue. some storylines even go as far as taking advantage of the music, working in the song titles to the story context.

so naturally, when i started using the editor i wanted to make my own storyline.

finding my place

i joined the project arrhythmia community sometime around 2020. i made a level, it had a boss fight against a sun. it was the start of a story - and i never would've known it would get popular eventually. i've made levels since - pretty inconsistently nowadays, mind you, but i still do it.
a lot of my characters from this game i still do stuff with both in and out of it. this game is directly responsible for me becoming more interested in worldbuilding and art. i got a lot of fanart actually, which actually served as a huge inspiration for me to improve even if only a little. not to mention the large amount of artists in the community in general who were awesome to look up to!

i really do hold this game close to...well, my heart. it's special, it's one of i'd say two communities that's massively shaped what and how i create. so i do hope that i can at least get more people a little bit interested in it through the stuff i do with my characters i made for it.

that's all for now, i might explain the stories i did and still do in another blog post. i'll see you all around, if anyone's reading this at all. and if nobody is? well, i really just wrote this all to write it out anyways. just for fun. and it was fun.

<3