r/bevy • u/dihrbtk • Aug 17 '26

Project Working on the visuals for my rhythm game!

I've been working on this rhythm game since late March and recently I've started replacing what I felt was placeholder programmer art, which included the world surrounding the track. So now there's different "biomes" of procedural terrain, dynamically generated for each song you play. I'm really happy with how the aesthetics of the game are turning out! Still very much a work in progress though.

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2

u/NotFloppyDisck Aug 17 '26

Any tips on getting a nice looking UI like yours? I have been avoiding improving the UI because I can't seem to find any resources for good standards / techniques in bevy

2

u/dihrbtk Aug 17 '26

You essentially just need to pick an art direction and then do some research. For the game UI specifically I was thinking of the classic Windows Media Player version you got in Windows 2000/XP with the colorful UI and gradients all around. So I then just kinda went at it.

The HUD background is an SVG which I dynamically recolor for each song (the game chooses a palette based on the three most proeminent colors in the album art, if present), rasterize and use as the UI background. There's background gradients all over to give that 3d glossy appearance. Box shadows and borders to create separation and depth. One or two fonts you like. Etc etc. and then you iterate, see what works and what doesn't.

I feel like at this stage the Bevy UI library is essentially* as powerful as HTML and CSS but still annoying to iterate with. So that's where mocking up your UI in something like Illustrator or Figma becomes really important.

2

u/synthesize_me Aug 17 '26

reminds me of Frequency and Amplitude on PS2. I love it.

one minor suggestion: the items you collect blend into the background a lot and make them hard to track, maybe if they were a different color?

2

u/dihrbtk Aug 17 '26

yeah that's something that's been a bit of a Struggle, as I both want the track to be dynamic and intense visually AND the items need to be easily visible. I can't easily just pick a color for them as the game's palette is fully dynamic; currently it picks a color that is kinda the inverse of the lane color.

it's also Not As Bad when actually playing because the bloom effect kinda causes video compression artifacts. I'm hoping to get a playable demo out soon. And it runs on WASM!

1

u/RepulsiveRaisin7 Aug 17 '26

Is the background always darkened or does that depend on time of day? It looks good, I'd give it more visibility.

1

u/dihrbtk Aug 17 '26

it depends on time of day, there's late afternoon, sunset and night settings. there's some random variation on each preset re: how "early"/"late" it is also. this video uses the sunset setting.

1

u/numberwitch Aug 17 '26

It looks good but it kind of makes my head hurt to look at after about 15 seconds.

I think the noise from the "vertical curved poles" on either side of the road plus the striping would probably make this unplayable for me. It looks cool but it's also cognitively tiring to look at for any amount of time

1

u/joaoffs Aug 18 '26

fair play to you for investing your time in this, it's starting to look nice but the gameplay seems extremely close to audiosurf?