Rhythm Doctor OST - Miracle Defibrillator

Composed by fizzd
Production by fizzd and Riya
Sampled from 'Sleepy Garden' by ‪@Aethoro‬
Sampled from 'Lo-fi Hip-Hop Beats To Treat Patients To' by Patriice

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fizzd notes:
Ending a game is hard. To make the final boss in Rhythm Doctor.. it felt like the final boss of RD's own development journey. The Act 5 update let us ignore that problem of tying the whole game together for a while, but now we had to face this beast!

A vague idea of a big remix of all the songs was in the cards since 2018. It’s the most obvious thing, like Rhythm Heaven Remix 10 right? At one point I thought we would make our trailer literally be this final remix level. (In the end rj lake (with finals) figured the trailer and the mashup idea much better!)

But if we were doing that remix idea, we still needed something more than just that. I’m a huge fan of OK Go’s videos and how they keep escalating the premise to heights you wouldn’t have even considered. How would we do that kind of thing with a remix?

The idea in the end was ‘mashups’. Two-way mashups to start, escalating and then twisting into a final new song that mashed up the vocals instead. Because it'd be a cool way to use multiple windows, and because RDs gameplay was built around multiple rhythms. Many of the earlier acts songs were written when i was much younger and really basic, but that actually came in useful because it made a lot of the songs easy to mash together. The 1-X / 2-X moment was something I couldn’t wait to try out! The 2-X rhythm variation here where it goes into a 3:4 rhythm was a random thing that came out of fiddling on the piano to find a rhythm for Cole’s Song. It felt so fun to play so I ended up putting it here.

I totally wanted an Act 5 mashup section as well but the song was getting really long already, so i left it to focus on Cole’s Song instead. Stay tuned for more on that!

Extra fact: Winston drew the Ian falling animation by accident when we asked for Cole falling.. but in the end Ian falling found its place. Morph needed to show Ian being abducted without any bespoke virus sprites, so he quickly did that camera-tilt moment with that Ian falling sprite LOL.

Real talk, I was so stressed about this level but seeing the music and VFX and dialogue and the window tech come together from the whole team, man, i almost cried from happiness. Shoutout to Riya for best guy to polish up all my janky stuff! My versions were mostly just the snippets of the original songs (or variations like with the Steinway one), all the extra sounds on top are thanks to him.

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Riya notes:
This is a mashup of music from the game! Since the basic structure was already established, I don't think I've changed much! Just like I did on "Welcome Back", I added drums, some synth layering, and some sound FX. That alone improved the song, and I also adjusted the mix a bit.

For the 1-X section, I used Native Instruments' "East Asia" Kontakt library. It's a library full of traditional Korean, Japanese, and Chinese instruments, and most of the sounds are from this library! Personally, my favorite part is the part where Cole runs to find Nicole, where Sweep is played with a trance gate effect :)

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finals notes (VFX lead):
Working on the VFX for this level, I was definitely feeling the pressure to make sure I didn't disappoint considering it's the grand finale (heh) of the story! Thankfully, I had everyone's support to fall back on.

This first part of 7-X, as you're aware if you've played the level, is a mashup of a bunch of the previous levels in the game. Thinking back, I can't help but feel that working on the release date trailer (which also featured this idea of a mashup of levels) was the perfect training arc to get used to this type of VFX HA! The main work on this level mainly consisted of mixing all the VFX into one file, adapting it to the new song's context, and, of course, adding window dance. I wanted to make sure the window movement generally matched the energy of the songs they corresponded to while playing around with how the windows behaved around each other. In the end, I think it turned out pretty alright!

Colon notes:
you know that impossible part at the end of the level where everyone starts singing over each other until it's impossible to win? someone had to chart that. that someone was me. riya sent me all the individual voice layers and i charted them one by one, rubbing my hands maniacally. i even asked for extra voices to be added since i didn't think it was chaotic enough. it was an honor contributing to this level but the voices won't go away.

i was also the one who really pushed for 7-x1 and 7-x2 to be separate levels, both were being worked on simultaneously and the plan was the merge them into one big file. but if there's one thing i learned from geometry dash collaborations, it's that merging sucks and if you already have a system in place to split a level across multiple files, you might as well take advantage of it.