A content creator and video game musician for over 10 years, Julian Conroy self-produces covers of video game music on his YouTube channel and composes music for Brace Yourself Games. Soundtracks Julian Conroy is featured on include Cadence of Hyrule, The Binding of Isaac, and Crypt of the Necrodancer. Initially released publicly on Steam in 2015, Crypt of the
Necrodancer combines the skill-intensive nature of a roguelike, and the beat-matching gameplay of a rhythm game, into one, resulting in a game where no two runs are the same. The primary programmer of Crypt of the Necrodancer, Ryan Clark, created the game to address a problem in roguelike games. Roguelike games, a genre named after the 1980 role-playing game Rogue, involve a player completing a certain objective by traveling through procedurally-generated locations. The player would only win the game by completing their chosen objective without dying.
Clark enjoyed the uniqueness of each run of a roguelike, but not its skill-intensive nature. Players need extensive knowledge of a game to know why they died, so improvement is difficult to measure. At the same time, Clark wanted to create a turn-based game, like Rogue and its initial successors. Therefore, he built Crypt of the Necrodancer’s gameplay around rhythm game mechanics, where the player would move and attack to the beat of a song.
