Friday Night Funkin’: vs. OURPLE GUY - Circadian Rhythm
Main Developer
(November 2022 - June 2023)
Download link: https://gamebanana.com/mods/416544
Programming responsibilities: Custom camera implementation, gameplay programming, Lua scripting for events and backgrounds, graphics implementation, technical design
Team Size: Solo
Misc. responsibilities: Art and animation, music and composition
Circadian Rhythm is a self-insert mod for the Friday Night Funkin’ Psych Engine based on the vs. OURPLE GUY mod; in shorter terms, it’s a self-insert mod of a mod of Friday Night Funkin’ based on Five Nights at Freddy’s. (Say that five times fast.) It includes four songs based on my persona, J8-Bit, in various chaotic scenarios. Each song includes a variety of environments and different game events in order to deliver a scatterbrained, yet fun experience.
Development history and retrospective
FNF: vs. OURPLE GUY - Circadian Rhythm was my first major attempt at a mod for the Newgrounds-inspired indie rhythm game, Friday Night Funkin’. I fell in love with the game’s music and presentation, already incredibly invested in previous visual-heavy rhythm games such as Geometry Dash, Just Shapes and Beats, Vib-Ribbon and Parappa the Rapper. It grew on me as a new potential artistic medium, and with the recent release of the vs. OURPLE GUY mod capturing a whimsical yet faithful adaptation of scenarios from the Five Nights at Freddy’s series in the FNF gameplay style, it compelled me to try making my own mod with a self-insert original character.
As the sole developer for the project, responsibilities from all fields required to create the finished product fell on me, which included music production in FL Studio and animation in Adobe Animate. However, programming and design still played a major role; the framework I used, Psych Engine, used Lua scripting to allow for easier mod creation and sharing, and I put it to use in order to create the environment the characters appeared in, the custom events and animations triggered mid-song, and some of the changes to the UI to fit the art style.
While the story involved with the original song, “Circadian Rhythm,” is more or less nonexistent, there was much thought and effort put into the direction and progression of the gameplay. My philosophy for making the song was inspired by both mods I had seen and listened to before alongside lessons I had learned from college at that point in time — keeping the player engaged, excited, and challenge required a proper setup, hook, development, climax, and resolution. The quirky, random, and whimsical nature and theme of the song and characters made the mod narratively aimless but achieved the intended result of being fun to watch, listen to, and play. In a later update to the mod, alongside bugfixes and feedback I received from the initial release, I applied the same philosophy into the second song of the mod, named “Degenerate,” which went through multiple passes to get to a state I was happy with.