Rhythm Doctor OST - Dreams Don’t Stop

Act 5 is out now!

Composed by fizzd (‪@fizzd7‬ )
Vocals by ‪@MardyLeith‬
Guitar and Bass Performance and Arrangement by dvdfu (  / dvdfu  )
Mixing and Mastering by Ashwin Gobinath (Nadir Studios)   / nadirstudiosmalaysia  
Lyrics by fizzd and Kyle Labriola
'Lucky Break' melody by celesti whispers

Gameplay Video from BluPen:    • 5-X Dreams Don't Stop [Rhythm Doctor]  
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Ok I did not mean to just randomly stop uploading daily right before 5-X oops, if you were anticipating this and I had shut your hype down I am sorry. This one needed some extra edits to reduce cutscenes which I just got round to now.

Composer's notes from fizzd:
This one was tough for a few reasons:

- The level 2-X All The Times exists, so now I needed to make something that could live up to its reputation. That's on everyone of course beyond the music itself, but the music in RD dictates the amount of canvas I'm able to provide to people like Jenny and Morph to work with for their VFX.

- All the other boss battles exist. I wanted 5-X to be something whose structure and gameplay would feel different to all of them.

- This was the first boss level where it had so much story to tell to wrap up a character arc. With the other boss levels, I wrote almost all of them as self-contained stories before I figured the other levels in the act, and then let Kyle flesh it out with all the cutscenes to make it work. (Fun fact, 3-X One Shift More was literally where the characters of Paige and Ian and the Stevensons and Richard Hugh were all born. I had no idea when writing it that Paige/Ian would end up the game's main characters. It was just a "ooo doctors but Les Mis musical, wouldn't that be cool.." cause Winston (artist) and I acted in a student version of it before)

- But for this one we had a general character arc of Lucky already started on by Kyle, and we had a lot of ground to cover in 5-X to finish it.

So, to solve all these problems together, i needed some story/musical conclusion that would both be plausible for Lucky's arc, but also be able to use gameplay mechanics of that act in new-feeling ways.

The inspiration of making the resolution be "the whole hospital team comes together to learn baseball" was from a rock-climbing interview I saw a year ago, of a bouldering champion (Gavin Chiam) who had gone from competitive bouldering to coaching, and found that he was actually even happier seeing his students win than winning himself. That felt really suitable to RD's themes of friendship and relationships over work.    • Pinch Of Salt Episode 6 | Mark Chan [...  

So I pitched that to Kyle, he said ok we'll use that, and I struggled for months (and started and finished 5-1N etc) before finding the main melody and tempo that could work for the level.

Oops I havent started talking about the music and everyone's roles in it at all, and this is so long... I'll come back and add more on another day... Mardy, dvdfu, and Ash all did amazing work on the vocals/guitars/mixing, I'll leave it there for now. Thanks for reading!

Some music that was an inspiration for different sections:
칵스(THE KOXX) - '부르튼(Blister)'    • 칵스(THE KOXX) - '부르튼(Blister)' Officia...  
Vaundy - 踊り子    • Vaundy - Odoriko (踊り子) (Lyrics) (Rom/...  
Journey - Don't Stop Believin'    • Journey - Don't Stop Believin' (Offic...  
MCR (rest in peace) - Welcome To The Black Parade    • My Chemical Romance - Welcome To The ...  

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Video made with FL Studio ZGameEditor Visualizer plugin
Effect author credits:
Linear - StevenM,Dubswitcher,Youlean
HUD 3D - Rado1
TextTrueType - Ville
Youlean Drop Shadow - Youlean