Making Requiem for a Dance: Rotoscoping, music and video in Godot

I recently finished another game jam game with my wife Brena! The game was Requiem for a Dance, for the Wild Godot Jam #97. The theme of the Jam was "Imminent Doom", which is kind of depressing if taken at face value, so we decided to create something a bit more experimental and music-related.

Spoilers ahead I guess? The game experience is quite short (and it's a web game), so it's worth trying it out if you want to read ahead.

I'm an ape-coder by trade, and Brena is an amazing UI/UX artist, so we decided upon ourselves to experiment a couple of things in this Jam:

• I'd create the game soundtrack and the game mechanics would reflect the different sections of the music.
• My wife would create the rotoscoping effect of the characters.
• We'd add a real video at the end of the gameplay.

In particular, the video was a technical experiment because I knew Godot had supported videos for a while now, but I never tested it.

I'll be documenting our learnings with this post, specially regarding how we integrated the music, some hardships on using OGV video format, and how we did the rotoscoping animations.

The Game Concept

Since we wanted to create a "music experiment", we decided to set the player story in our game first. Requiem for a Dance is a first person platformer(ish), where the player has to dance with other people that appear in the dance-floor/level. As the player dances and brings color to other people, more soon-to-be-dancers appears, until the entire dance-floor is full of people dancing. Then, we'd play a video showing "real life", kind of a reminder for the player of the life that is still out there.

In the concept we had in mind at the beginning of the jam, we also wanted to add a second half for the game, where the player would wave "goodbye" for all the dancers after the video section. As always, something had to be cut because we didn't have enough time, so we shortened the experience to end after the video.