How to make a rhythm game for people who have no rhythm

polygon.com:

My entire life, I have experienced one crucial block to fully enjoying rhythm games: I have no rhythm. That hasn’t stopped me from giving it the old college try, though. For years, I’ve suffered through subpar Guitar Hero performances and B-rank scores on Dance Dance Revolutiongames. Enter Hi-Fi Rush, a game that blends the hacking and slashing of a 3D action game with rhythmic fighting. Hi-Fi Rush is fun regardless of how attuned your internal metronome is. I sat down withHi-Fi Rush director John Johanas to ask him: Just exactly how do you make a rhythm game for those who have no rhythm?

Johanas told me that the team at Tango Gameworks always imaginedHi-Fi Rush as a rhythm game. In the game, you play as Chai, a plucky young man who dreams of becoming a rock star. After a lab accident, he gets an iPod implanted in his chest, and he becomes attuned to the beat of the world around him. It’s up to Chai to fight his way out of the surrounding world of Vandelay Technologies. As he hacks and slashes, the fights pulse to the beat of rock tracks from artists like Nine Inch Nails, The Black Keys, and The Prodigy.

When I asked Johanas how the idea came to be, he said, “Surprisingly, it was relatively unchanged from the original pitch. And while a lot of the team members were like, Is this really going to work? they were supportive in at least giving it a try.”

The challenge became how to blend the two genres — rhythm game and action-adventure — and keep it playable. “The first thing that we did was make a system where no matter what you did, everything would sync up so it would land on the beat,” Johanas said. From there, the team implemented a system where failing to hit everything perfectly wouldn’t punish you — even if you