This rhythm game looks so simple, but it will surprise you

Last week we happened upon a pretty amazing one-button browser game called Rhythm Doctor. The player is a doctor who has to solve a myriad of patient ailments by tapping the spacebar in time to the beat. Completing a song unlocks the next patient, along with a tougher “night shift” mode for the song. Visually, the pixel art game is as colorful as it gets.

Rhythm Doctor is miles beyond some of the indie offerings we see out there on the app stores. It has been featured on IndieGames, Eurogamer, and Destructoid, and was a finalist at the Independent Games Festival 2014.

It turns out that the game was made by two 23-year-old Malaysian university students studying in the UK. Developer duo Hafiz Azman (programming and design) and Winston Lee (artwork) say that their original plan for Rhythm Doctor was for it to be just a “little web game.” That was before it blew up on the internet, of course.

Hafiz says the main idea behind the game is polyrhythms. In his first year of university, he dabbled in street dance and music composition. And somewhere in the middle of his lectures and counting dance tracks, he says, “The idea came up to have a game in which the main point was to keep track of different rhythms at the same time.” Hafiz explains it like this to his friends:

So imagine I have quavers on my left hand, right, and like crotchets on my right. And then it goes like, untz untz untz untz… but you need to hit it on the seventh beat of each hand!

He adds that the origins of the medical theme started with realizing the similarity between moving beats and heartbeats on an electrocardiogram. “From then on it was just expanding on that idea,” Hafiz says.

Rhythm Doctor is heavily inspired by the Rhythm Heaven game on the Nintendo DS, and it even says so on its page. Hafiz says Rhythm Heaven is one of his favorite games of all time, and he learned a lot from the game’s design. However, his most important takeaway from the game was its philosophy.

In other rhythm games, the main draw always seemed to be performing things that looked incredibly difficult, with songs with thousands of notes raining down on you. In other words, it looked menacing and was difficult. Rhythm Heaven on the other hand looks ridiculously easy but is actually ridiculously difficult! They have notes coming at you with a simple rhythm, most often a call-and-response thing where they play a cue and you hit a rhythmic response. You’d look at it and think ‘I can do that!’, and then you’d play it and find yourself missing everything because the strict margin of error completely takes you by surprise.

Hafiz believes Rhythm Doctor following this philosophy was the reason the game was nominated over 300 other entries for the student category at IGF 2014. He also says that many people who play only the first level or two of Rhythm Doctor are underwhelmed by it and perhaps dismiss it as something that could be cloned in a couple of weeks.