Rhythm Heaven Modding “Remixes”

This is my unofficial modification of the video game Rhythm Heaven Megamix, which adds in a new “remix” stage themed around the song “What U Need” from the game Sonic Rush and its corresponding in-game level.

Rhythm Heaven Megamix is a rhythm game centered around a series of small rhythm-based minigames, which are also called rhythm games. In addition to these rhythm games, there are also remix stages, which combine several rhythm games at once by switching off between them to the tune of a single song. Every rhythm game also comes with its own visual themes and characters. Remixes typically redo the visual themes of their games to all match a single theme but leave the characters intact.

My remix features an original stage, taking four rhythm games from the base game but redoing their visuals with assets from Sonic Rush and using them in new ways with different patterns to match the song. It’s a sizable length, too, clocking in at around three minutes long, whereas most official remixes are shorter.

When I was younger (12-15 years old), I took up a hobby of recreational hacking. Not hacking other people or even pretending to do so, but hacking my favorite single player video games to make custom modifications (“mods”) themed around more of my favorite things. Rhythm Heaven Megamix was by far my favorite to work with: despite its small community and relatively underdeveloped tools, I made numerous mods inspired by all my favorite songs.

The community around Rhythm Heaven hacking is quite small, with only a handful of major contributors. As such, the game isn’t very well understood and tools for modifying it are quite minimal. Writing custom code for Rhythm Heaven Megamix requires rewriting compiled game code. It’s not quite machine code, but rather a form of bytecode that the game uses to sequence the commands that make up rhythm games. The community has dubbed this bytecode, along with some limited programming functionality that goes alongside it, “tickflow.”

Funnily enough, tickflow was one of the first programming languages I ever learned. At the time I learned it, I had only a basic understanding of how programming works and a very superficial understanding of C# and Java. I was competently typing out bytecode in this format before anything else, and I’m proud to say that I’m one of the few people in the world capable of hacking a remix into this game.

Below is a (very large) screenshot of the entire project timeline that I used to plan out this game before programming it in. This is to prove that I am the original creator, as I have released this mod elsewhere on the internet, but without these project files.