VTuber Amelia Watson releases original song with its own addictive rhythm game

Hololive VTuber Amelia Watson has released a rhythm game, ChikuTaku, to accompany her original song by the same name that she has been working on. The game is available to play for free via Ame’s new itch.io page from today.

Ame showcased the game during her latest YouTube stream on Jan. 24. It plays similarly to Rhythm Heaven, serving as an interactive version of the “ChikuTaku” video. 

The game features a variety of ending animations based on the player’s score. At the request of her YouTube chat, Ame ran through the game and deliberately missed all of the beats. The result was Bubba, Ame’s mascot dog, twerking.

“Is there a secret ending? Is there an easter egg? I guess you guys will have to find out for yourselves,” the detective VTuber teased on-stream. 

Much of the remainder of the VTuber’s stream was spent sharing designs and stories about the game’s development. Future updates to the game are said to include fixes to the settings, including a volume slider, and a possible score ladder.  

“I don’t know how much replayability [it] has, but it would be cool to add more levels and stuff,” she said. ”You know how, in Rhythm Heaven Fever, you can do individual mini-games, and then it’s a mix at the end? [ChikuTaku] is like showing the mix at the end — it would be really cool to do individual mini-games based on each section.”

Creating a Hololive game was one of Ame’s original goals during her VTuber debut. As fans on the Hololive subreddit were quick to point out, the release of Chiku Taku finally marks the completion of all six goals more than two years later.

“This was a project I initially started working on over a year ago. It was before I had the original song. It kind of lost steam, but we were working on an idea for a Hololive rhythm game, like [ChikuTaku], but with other songs and other members and stuff like that. I ended up getting kind of sick and ended up not following through,” she discussed during her reflection.

“But then I brought everyone back together to work on [ChikuTaku] and the game for the original song… a little less than two months [ago].”

Ame talked about how creating the game was a fantastic opportunity for her to reuse a lot of iconic assets made for her VR projects such as her generation’s iconic one-year anniversary celebration and Smol Adventures. However, she is unsure whether she wants to create any more games going forward, and will be deciding on that later.

“If we had more time, more people, we could probably make something kind of cool. I just wanted to really try doing this at least once,” she added.

The Hololive VTuber star later admitted she would still like to make more original songs in the future though, and already has a few ideas ready she could build on.