Rhythm Doggo Keeps Unseen Rooms So Its Dog Avatars Aren’t Left in a Void

Nicklas "Nifflas" Nygren has a forthcoming puzzle platformer called Rhythm Doggo. It’s a neon platform adventure in which you play as a human turned into a dog, jumping through a rhythm-driven world where you modify the music in order to solve puzzles. Behind the scenes, Nifflas built a network of small rooms connected by doors that "exist outside the map" of Rhythm Doggo.

"For code simplicity I don’t remove or create entities too much," he explains, so when a quest is complete and a dog leaves the scene, "it’s simpler to move it out of the map than unloading the entity." He says he "felt bad for the dog to end up in an empty void outside the map," and the connected rooms give the dogs a place to "hang out with each other." There is no code that makes them interact in this state, but Nifflas asks, "how can I be sure they don’t go all 'Toy Story' when nobody is watching?" His previous games include 2006’s Within a Deep Forest, the Knytt series, Saira, NightSky and Uurnog, and most recently Ynglet in 2021.

rhythm doggo, nifflas, nicklas nygren, puzzle platformer, rhythm-driven, dog avatars, connected rooms, outside map, game entities, ynglet