And even ignoring all that, it’s just difficult to design in general due to the marriage of gameplay and music. It’s one thing to ask players to match button presses to timing but quite another to also account for latency on screen, latency on speakers, on button inputs, and all of that within very strict timing windows on countless different machines. Huynh has a guess as to why – it’s very hard to make a rhythm game with the level of precision players expect from a Rhythm Heaven-like. In our interview, I noted that while there are certainly other games that have copied the Rhythm Heaven formula out there, they are few and far between. However, that wasn’t an easy task for Huynh. So he ditched the WarioWare bits and began working to innovate off of Rhythm Heaven entirely.

But because just regurgitating WarioWare didn’t feel original enough, he began adding more Rhythm Heaven-like elements to the minigames…only to find that the rhythm games were his favorite parts. Because Huynh was new to programming, he found that making simple, short minigames was more within his then-skillset than making something continuous and complex. It started out as more of a WarioWare situation, a minigame collection of sorts. Melatonin wasn’t always a Rhythm Heaven-like, either. Huynh thought Melatonin would take him roughly a year to finish – it took him three. Still, Huynh wasn’t discouraged – he had a lot of savings and was inspired by stories he had read about game development from sources like the book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels. One of his colleagues quit with him, intending to do the art for the project, but dropped out just a few weeks in.

Hobbyist game making quickly turned into a career as he quit his job near the end of 2019 to work on Melatonin. I want to try this out, so I started making games as a hobby maybe around early 2019.” “But I don't know, at some point, I just got really burnt out of work and I decided who cares if my entire day is focused on games and stuff. “I intentionally wanted to keep my work stuff away from games since I already spent so much of my day listening to podcasts and reading reviews and stuff like that,” Huynh says. While he was always a gamer, he explicitly didn’t want to get into game design at first.

Huynh’s educational background is in general design – graphic, audio, UI, architecture, the works.

Interview minigame rhythm heaven