Hey there, NecroDancers! We’ve got some news about the state of the game, as well as a bit of a tempo change.


Rift of the NecroDancer is coming along nicely. As of now, the game is pretty much content complete, and we're having a blast playing it. It’s been awesome to see everyone’s reactions to our demo too!

https://steamproxy.com/steamstore/app/3029150/Rift_of_the_NecroDancer_Demo/


To hit a 2024 launch date, we would have needed to do some serious crunch to polish and bug-fix. Here at Brace Yourself Games, we're all about a sustainable groove, not the grind. We believe in making awesome games without sacrificing our team's well-being.

We decided to avoid cutting certain features to hit a 2024 launch date and possibly being forced into releasing something half-baked. So, we're taking a deep breath, stepping back, and giving Rift of the NecroDancer just a LITTLE bit more time in the oven.

One of the things we’re doing to give ourselves a little more time is decoupling Steam launch from additional platforms. This means that we’ll launch on Steam first, and follow on console at a later date. That date is still TBD, but we’re ready to share the Steam launch date, so keep reading!


You might be saying, “Brace Yourself Games, you already announced a delay last year. What’s going on? I want to play this game already!!!”

To that, I say SAME. But let me give you a little insight into what we’ve been doing this last year, and why we need just a couple more months.

1. IMPOSSIBLE Difficulty. The game was originally going to just have EASY, MEDIUM, and HARD, but we decided to add a fourth difficulty level: IMPOSSIBLE (previously known as EXPERT). IMPOSSIBLE is uh… really hard. We want a little extra time to tune this so it’s not actually impossible, right? But it’s still going to be really hard.
   
2. More Rhythm Rifts. We added even MORE Rhythm Rift beatmaps to songs like the boss battle tracks.
   
3. Off-beat Readability. The readability of off-beat monsters is probably our number one most received piece of feedback. We’ve been doing a lot of experimenting and playtesting to get this to a state we’re happy with.
   
4. Custom Music Tools. Thanks to the help of the dev behind Crypt of the NecroDancer: SYNCHRONY DLC, we did a full revamp of Rift’s internal level editing tool. Not only that, but we’re preparing it to be released publicly at launch so you can all use this tool to create custom charts to custom songs.
   
5. Remix Mode and Daily Challenges. Remix Mode started off as one of those “wouldn’t it be cool if…” ideas that ended up actually being REALLY COOL. The TL;DR of Remix Mode is that it throws a fresh chart your way every playthrough while retaining the original level's rhythmic design. That makes Daily Challenges possible, by changing up the circumstances for each song. And we love Daily Challenges. We’d love to do a more in-depth blog about Remix Mode soon to talk about the nuances of developing Remix Mode!
   
6. Tutorial and Practice Mode Improvements. We’ve made a lot of improvements to our tutorials and practice mode based on feedback we received from the demo. The tutorials are more comprehensive, and we also added in a highly request slowdown functionality (up to 50%) into practice mode to help you better parse difficult patterns in high BPM songs.
   
7. Animation Clarity and Feel. We’ve gone through a bunch of iterations on character/monster animations throughout development. If you take a look at our very first trailer and compare it to the demo, you’ll see what a massive difference it is!
   
8. Background Visualizers. Technically no one asked for this, but this is something that we really wanted to do, and we discovered it adds a lot more visual variety to each Rhythm Rift, which helps us and content creators make better videos.
   
9. Boss Battle and Story Revamp. We felt there was room for improvement with the state of boss battles and story mode, so we decided to give these aspects a total facelift.
   
10. Shine Factor. We’ve addressed the majority of our high-impact bugs, but we want to make sure this game is polished to a mirror sheen!

With all that said…


We're so confident in this new date that we're announcing it right now. No more "coming soon" or vague windows. Mark your calendars, folks, because the NecroDancer is opening the Rift on February 5th, 2025.

There you have it. We know it's a bit of a wait, and we are so grateful to have a community like you that trusts in us enough to let us cook for as long as we need. In the meantime, our Steam demo is still up, so if you haven’t checked that out, you should definitely give it a shot. We'll also keep you updated with behind-the-scenes peeks, and dev content. If you have any questions or just want to hang out with us while we finish this game, you should join our Discord[discord.gg]. It would also be a great help to our team if you add Rift of the NecroDancer to your wishlist. 😊

Thanks for your understanding, your patience, and your endless enthusiasm for all things NecroDancer. We can't wait to share this game with you.

The Brace Yourself Games Team