When I say Rhythm Heaven, what mini-game instantly comes to mind? Is that the karate guy hitting the flower pots? The trio of children from the choir who sings? Pluck hairs from vegetables? For me, it’s the interview of the wrestler in Ringside.
Whatever it is, it’s undeniable that there’s something deeply memorable and satisfying about these fast-paced minigames, which is why I was immediately drawn to Melatonin. It’s a new indie release from developer Half Asleep that successfully replicates (so ironically, given the sleepy theme) those serotonin hits of the perfect landing in a Rhythm Heaven mini-game. Set in the mind of a very sleepy person, Melatonin’s rhythm games are all loosely themed around their fantasy dreams of mundane activities: food, shopping, exercise, work, games, etc. It’s a soothing, pastel backdrop for the enjoyable audio and visual call-and-response gameplay that I’ve sorely missed since the days of the Nintendo DS.
And, like many of the games I’ve covered in this series, it’s mostly the idea of one person: David Huynh, the founder and sole member of Half Asleep. Melatonin is his first game, an important first step in a career path he has only recently begun to consider for himself.
Huynh’s background is in general design – graphics, audio, user interface, architecture, works. While he was always a player, he explicitly doesn’t want to get into game design first.
“I intentionally wanted to keep my work stuff away from games since I was already spending a lot of my day listening to podcasts and reading reviews and stuff like that,” Huynh says. “But I don’t know, at some point I got really exhausted at work and decided it doesn’t matter if my whole day was focused on games and stuff. I want to try that, so I started making games as a hobby maybe around the start of 2019.”
Creating amateur games quickly turned into a career when he quit his job towards the end of 2019 to work on melatonin. A colleague of his quit with him, intending to do the art for the project, but dropped out a few weeks later. Still, Huynh wasn’t discouraged – he had plenty of savings and was inspired by stories he had read about game development from sources like the book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels.
Huynh thought Melatonin would take her about a year to complete – it took her three.
Melatonin hasn’t always been Rhythm Heaven-like either. It started out as a WarioWare situation, sort of a collection of minigames. Because Huynh was new to programming, he found that creating simple, short minigames was more his skill set than creating something continuous and complex. But because just regurgitating WarioWare didn’t feel original enough, it started adding more Rhythm Heaven-like elements to minigames…only to find that rhythm games were its favorite part. So he ditched the WarioWare bits and started working on innovating entirely from Rhythm Heaven.
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However, it was not an easy task for Huynh. In our interview, I noted that while there are certainly other games that have copied the Rhythm Heaven formula, they are rare. Huynh has an idea why – it’s very difficult to create a rhythm game with the level of precision players expect from a Rhythm Heaven-like. It’s one thing to ask players to match button presses to timing, but it’s another thing to also factor in screen latency, speaker latency, inputs buttons, and all within very strict synchronization windows on countless different machines. And even ignoring all that, it’s just hard to conceive in general because of the marriage of gameplay and music. The two elements had to match throughout development, but whenever Huynh wanted to make the slightest change to a level’s design, he had to contact the composer of the song in question and get them to change that too – a change that could eventually cascade and affect the whole level.
“Some of the songs at the beginning of the game, the music is really aligned with the gameplay, like the level of shopping for example,” says Huynh. But it was really hard to keep that because it was hard to be flexible. [If] I need to change this little thing… I need to remix the music or ask some people I work with for music to rewrite a section just for this little [change]. And then I could change it again.
So it’s hard to make the gameplay feel like it flows with the music. You have to do a ton of work and re-edit things. Later in the game, it’s a bit smoother; the music has a lot more loops. It still feels good and I was really happy about it. And there were still a few levels where even the sound effects matched the notes of the music. But it’s really difficult to continue like this.
Huynh didn’t want melatonin to be a total Rhythm Heaven clone, of course. And one of his biggest issues with Rhythm Heaven was the level of precision players required to get a “Perfect!” It loosened the melatonin window a bit and also added hints for players to know if they tapped sooner or later, so they can improve.
But he was also inspired by the design of Rhythm Heaven to create his own games. He says that since most games only use one enter key, the key to good, memorable minigame pacing is to make that single action really, really satisfying. Something like swinging a bat and hitting something, or (ala Rhythm Heaven) stabbing a pea with a fork.
“When you hit the pea with the fork, even that feels good because it’s like a ‘smoosh’.” There’s always an onomatopoeia that you can have in your head every time you do these actions. And it fits well with the sound design. So towards the end, that’s kind of what I’ve always paid attention to is that if we do an action, it has to feel like it really pops up and has some power behind it she.
This is probably why I myself fell in love with melatonin so quickly, right from the first level, where the action is eating. The satisfying “brp” of the box opening up and throwing a pizza, burger or donut into my mouth and the guttural nibble The sound of eating it as I pressed the button just in time has been stuck in my head and fingers for days now. While I was playing on PC, the Switch version was simultaneously announced and launched today – so I’m doubly excited to continue playing this homage to a series that has yet to find love on the Switch. With enough practice, I’ll eventually land those parfaits.
Rebekah Valentine is a reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.
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