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Game's Take on the Theme
All actions rewind the tape reel forward or backwards, which consumes tape. All risk reward decisions are based on how much, and in which direction you spin it.
Did your team make the majority of the art and music during the jam?
Yes. We got our building, road, and wood textures from here: "https://www.fab.com/listings/7a254e70-5f03-4c2d-b01f-ff4509732198" and used this async loading screen plugin: "https://github.com/truong-bui/AsyncLoadingScreen/tree/master/Source/AsyncLoadingScreen/Public". All other code, 3D models, assets, animations, sounds, and everything else was made by us during the jam.
If not, please link to any asset packs or resources used here.
We got our building, road, and wood textures from here: "https://www.fab.com/listings/7a254e70-5f03-4c2d-b01f-ff4509732198" and used this async loading screen plugin: "https://github.com/truong-bui/AsyncLoadingScreen/tree/master/Source/AsyncLoadingScreen/Public"
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Comments
Really loved the game! The visuals were and the gameplay were awesome!
(If you're willing to I'd love it If you rate and give me some feedback on my game! I'd love to see where I can improve for the future! :D )
I had a lot of fun with this game. Great Job. The visual effects are great.
1- The dialogue UI i thought it was automatic, but no, you need to press a button, i spent time looking for that button, press"enter/space" to continue the dialogue, for input dialogue i recommend adding a small icon of the button on the corner or idk, i was surprised everything in the menu had control indicators but not the dialogue in game.
2-The tutorial has too much text, i see you focused on the visuals, but reminder that a player don't wanna read text, he wanna plays, why genshin is popular even tho it has many dialogues? Because it has clear simple few text for tutorial and you actually play during the tutorial, for now i am just tapping space and arrows and see what happens. (it was space actually and idk what it does)
3-In the tutorial "This time, when you see it comin', hit (idk what button is this) to the beat."
4-The button is actually space, so without the help of my friend, i couldn't have passed the tutorial, and he told me to read, i like reading but not in a game tutorial, here is the deal, that friend of mine is a musician and already played a game called Hifi-Rush (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1817230/HiFi_RUSH/) i advice you to check this game and see how is their tutorial, not everyone is musician and i was stuck in the tuto not knkowing what to do, now i got the gameplay, my friend helped me, and it's pretty fun, just the tutorial was horrible for me. Sure i didn't read a little but listen, i read a little and that made me confused, the dialogue needs clarity, and avoid to say nothing using many words, be simple, clear and us as less text as possible and make it more interactif, i say it again, my musician friend literally understood it under 5 min, me i was stuck more than 3 hours not knowing what to do! I'm no musician
5-I don't have rythm, i cannot be a musician, and that is why i cannot beat this game, i rage quitted, the boss killed me when it was 1hp
6-Subjective feedbacks ends here, time for objective feedback!
7-This game is not made for everyone, but for musician, it is cool you have a target audience and in that perspective the game is well made, keep up the good work, everything was based about rythm rather it is combo, heal, def, dodge, parry, attack, environment, character animation, boss attacks, the rewind and and discharge system gives a lot of satisfaction when well executed, and add challenges without making the game unfair because if you master it, you gotta focus and not lose rythm, every mistakes is made by you and only you, the boss has a great anticipation and you can easily dodge or parry its attack as long as you follow the rythm. you don't need to adjust the game for a wider audience, i advice you to do the opposite, make this game special for musician and satisfy them, if you wanna make it more accessible, do another game, this one is pretty good and pretty fun, create a strong and participative community instead of targetting a large audience and lose focus, i'm willing to see where this is going, this can be a great game to learn and practice rythm, musics, basic of song, beat, bpm, etc.To sum up, this has a great potential not to say, it would be very popular among musicians.
Thank you for creating such a great game, now i wanna put effort into making mine too, and i am sorry that my subjective feedbacks were so rude, to say the least, it is because i was biased by the fact that i am no musician and had horrible time figuring out what to do, but with the help of my musician friend i understood what to do, and after a lot of trials, errors and practices, i almost beat the first boss, i rage quitted because it had 1hp left when it killed me, this is not your fault, this is skill issue.
To sum up, it is a great game, for musician, but still a great game for no musician but you need a lotta practices to get the rythm and finally enjoy if you are not musician, that is why it is a great game. Even a musician can play it!
I forgot to mention, when i was playing, i was always looking at the metronom to focus on the rythm, maybe you could make a lock system so the camera would follow the boss so the player could really focus on the rythm because, remember when playing , a player doeas many things at the same time: getting the infos where the boss is, making combo with metronom, walking, dashing, parry, checking if the boss is in attack animation, what attacks it is, etc, this is well made, the player has time to react, but me, i said me, i was always looking at the metronom to not mess up my rythm.
Wow thank you for taking the time to play the game and for taking the time to write such thoughtful and kind feedback! I really appreciate it!!
To address some of your points regarding the UI icons and tutorial, I apologize for all of that! We were really pressed for time and we implemented the entire tutorial in a couple of hours, we didn't have time to make individual textures for each key/gamepad icon possible, so we just used a single standard "square" texture and pasted the universal icon for the "space" key as text rendered on top of it lol. We do intend to make real icons for everything though, and we'll be sure to make the icon for the space key wider for the sake of clarity!! The same goes for the entire tutorial part, I agree with all of your points and I despise text-heavy tutorials as well -- it was very much hastily thrown together, but we'll be sure to improve on it as we move forward!
Regarding your other points, don't worry I do not intend to dilute the game of its main focus at all! I don't intend for this to target the widest audience possible, and I am very much focused on trying to make sure that the core gameplay remains as satisfying as possible for anyone willing to learn how it works! That of course means that I can't cede on some things that would make this challenging -- I fully agree with you there! I do however think that there are some holes in this game currently that would get in the way of this, and would in turn make it just a tad more accessible for people.
For example, you could be a very good musician and rhythm game player, but if you have a weird audio device or a bad monitor, you'll inevitably have some nasty input latency that would mess up your timings. Usually, a good rhythm game has a calibration screen that would let the game mitigate and account for that latency so it doesn't feel nasty to play. This is something that we need and would make the game a tad more accessible without sacrificing quality. I also think that having multiple difficulty options with varying timing windows wouldn't hurt.
There are also numerous tricks in here already that make timing things easier (outlined in the game page). For example, even if you mistime your attack, the "impact" frame of the attack animation (the moment the attack lands and the boss flashes white) will always land on the next beat. So if, instead of focusing on the music, you focus on hitting any of the attack buttons right when your previous mistimed attacks land, you'll have a guaranteed successfully timed hit. Another trick is that the dash is free, so you could try to dash until you get it right, and when you do you'd immediately press attack or rewind or whatever you want to do and it will be successfully timed. These are all things that presently exist in the game but are not as intuitive as I'd like them to be. So I think it is worth investigating various different effects to get them to a more polished state (eg., via hitstop, particles, something else), which I think would make the game both more satisfying and more accessible without diluting it.
I am curious about what you mean by the "lock system". If you don't mind me asking, would this be different from what's already there? The game already automatically locks the camera onto the boss as soon as any boss fight begins.
Thanks again!!
This game is VERY charming, but as i am not used to play rhythm games i found hard to play this one, in crypt of the necromancer felt more natural, perhaps because of the background beat and more spaced-out notes or a bigger reaction space, i couldnt do much to the boss but i see that a lot of effort went into the game!
good luck!
Thanks for playing, and thanks for the feedback! I also think that one might have been easier moreso due to the strong background beat but also possibly because of the way the game mitigates and accounts for input delay (as any rhythm game should). We don't support the latter (yet!) due to time constraints but it's very possible that some hardware is adding input latency here, we don't have any kind of calibration screen that let's you accomodate for variable input delay caused by monitor/audio devices so it is very likely that this is contributing to what you're experiencing here. I could only guess though heheh
From what I remember Crypt of the NecroDancer often operates on the same BPM range & time signature as we do for this, especially for the end tracks that I believe are often between 120-145ish bpm, so it may be less likely for the amount of time between beats to be the culprit here. For this game we stay strictly inside that 120-145 range
Not sure about what it does for its input window though. I went with the same amount used by other games in the rhythm action genre (which was also the bare minimum I needed to make sure you can't just mash a button and get everything right), but maybe CotND is more lenient in this regard. I'll have to investigate and benchmark it later..!
It's interesting to think about though, we'll be sure to test out and iterate on different things to account for this in the future. On top of the latency calibration screen, we've been talking about adding some difficulty settings that would maybe let you adjust the timing window. We'll see how that goes.
Thanks again for checking the game out!!
cool! i will be keeping an eye in the future, good luck!
Absolutely loved the look of this game and the charm of the characters too! I didn't know what button you meant for the parry tho? Looked like a bracket? Overall I can see this being a much bigger project in time
Thanks for playing, I'm glad to hear you liked the visuals! You can remap it, but the default parry button on keyboard is space! We probably should have added a wider icon for it lol
Ahhh space!! I will try again with it :)
WOW! You really nailed this visuals! It looks incredible, amazing, I can't even realized how you achieved this in one month! Really, congrats! Also the gameplay was pretty fun tho the controlls were a bit weird but I enjoyed it a lot! :D
Spectacular art direction and visuals, very satisfying and interesting to look at!
It took me a while to get familiar with the gameplay but once i did it was pretty fun! My one and only and problem really is the lack of a more distinct beat/bass in the song which made it quite difficult to play without my eyes being locked to the metronome.
Great job! 🤗
For a month work this is fantastic, awesome graphics, had a bit of a hard time defeating the boss, but I blame my 2 left feet and lack of rhythm XD overall Good Game
Fellow rhythm game dev! Saw your game from your review on my game. Wanted to check it out.
Solid game base, and I echo a lot of what other people have mentioned about it being a hifi-rush feeling game. The inspiration is definitely there.
I think there should be more SFX for enemy attacks, it becomes very hard to time when enemies are doing multi-stage attacks (the laser projects for boss 1 and the multi-bike attack for boss 2).
It can also be quite punishing when you miss just one dodge and am forced to take damage for multi-stage attacks (the laser attacks come to mind).
The rhythm aspect is particularly find but I find myself having to "re-tune" myself to the music multiple times, I think the music could use with stronger bass to really tune into the music. Maybe.
Otherwise, sick!
Thanks for playing, and thank you for the feedback!! I really appreciate it!
100000000% agree with you on the hitstun stuff, alongside the fact that the player has nearly 0 forward movement in all of her non-discharge attacks, it is no doubt the part of this game that ticks me off the most. I originally intended to add some kind of invul knockdown system but that meant a whole new suite of animations and states for the player and I was already kind of dying by the end so it unfortunately didn't make it.. You can bet your sweet bippy that I'll address that problem though!!!
And yeah, the way those things are telegraphed is a bit lackluster. All of those attacks are meant to be a kind of "check" on your parry skills. They're meant to be parried in the same rhythm as the sounds that precede it (for example, the first boss will spawn 4 wind balls one quarter note away from each other while making a sound, and thus you'd have to parry them by hitting the parry button in the same manner as those sounds 4 times). The second boss' blue katawaguruma summon will do the same, before it starts shooting at you it will kind of make sounds at half note intervals from each other, and the parry rhythm for it is the same exact thing. It has 3 flames that light up alongside the sounds it produces, so it only throws out 3 lasers, etc. I totally get how unclear this was though. We've been talking about adding more SFX for boss attacks and whatnot. On top of everything else, the existing sounds these things produce sort of drown due to the music so they're difficult to look out for. Lots of things to iterate on and test here in the future.
Thank you again!!
Feels super clean and polished and has a lot going for it. I just wish i wasnt shit at rhythm games haha well done though!
Cool game. The visuals and music are amazing. It took me a long time to get used to the pressing timings. There is still not enough click bar like in the OSU!, which shows whether you pressed early or not (I attached a picture of what I mean). It seemed to me that the window for a successful press was quite small. If it's not a secret, can you tell me how much time is given there?
Thanks for playing! If I remember correctly it should be about 0.1-0.2 seconds or something like that(?), the same thing as Hi-Fi rush in normal difficulty (and the bare minimum I needed to make sure you can't just mash a button and get everything right). I don't necessarily intend to keep it that way though, the fact that this game actively penalizes you for getting your timings wrong means that a bit of the challenge in that regard should be lifted away from that particular aspect of the game and shifted towards meter management or something along those lines. We'll have to iterate on this with time and find the right balance here, along with some difficulty options that straight up let you choose between different timing windows.
I didn't observe many issues with regards to timing when my friends were playtesting the timing windows, but I do know for certain that the experience won't be the exact same between people depending on their hardware (i.e., monitor input delay or audio device).
Right now, you can kind of get less input latency by switching off vsync in the game settings and maybe perhaps changing the anti aliasing method to FXAA or something (and also maybe by messing around with your GPU settings, the same typical tricks people do for other rhythm games), but the correct way to solve this issue is to introduce a latency calibration screen into the actual game so it can compensate for it (which is what most rhythm games do nowadays). I intend to work this into the game as soon as I'm able to update it, we kind of just ran out of time and couldn't add that feature for this jam.
I'm glad you liked the visuals!
Wow, this really gives me a Hi-Fi Rush vibe! Congratulations on such an impressive project!
Thanks for playing, I hope you enjoyed it!! I looked at a bunch of rhythm action games for reference and Hi-Fi Rush was definitely one of them!
Visually stunning. Good game.
Come feedback my game. It's in 2D though.
Visually stunning. Good game.
Come feedback my game. It's in 2D though.
As soon as I entered the game, I was stunned by the amazing art style—so authentic with that Japanese flavor. In this game, rush is the move I use most often. Since I’m not very good at rhythm-based games, I usually don’t get close to the boss for regular attacks. Instead, I focus on keeping my distance from the boss, storing up tapes and attacking, while constantly rush the boss’s rush moves. Once I’ve filled up my action gauge, I hit F to deal damage to the boss (it feels like F deals more damage). It took me about half an hour to defeat the first boss, and I always fail to block its laser in time… I’m still too noob.
Also, is the tutorial after defeating the boss mandatory? I couldn’t skip it by pressing any keys.
The gameplay design is excellent, and defeating the boss gives a great sense of achievement. The difficulty is just right for beginners!^ ^
The tutorial thing is sadly a bug, we will fix it post jam. But if you say no to the tutorial before you fully start the game (when you first run the game), it shouldn't keep reappearing after each boss.
But you did well the idea is to use the dash to sync yourself up before switching to an attack or rewind, helping you to maintain the beat.
You have 3 combos one focused on damage which should help you to beat the boss faster, another heals you and the other gives you a shield. You discharge the reel to use them. It has a bit of a learning curve but Im glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for playing our game <3
Ps. Once you do get into the game and you sync your attacks and different combos to the music its a great feeling! :D
It looks great and I love the Japanese influence on all the monsters, I bet this is really satisfying to watch someone who is good play this cus it would flow really nicely but i’m a stuttering mess just spamming e and dying constantly, it’s a pretty fast beat and I couldnt hear any good visual clues, maybe a tick every bar would help cus as soon as i was off beat id have to stop just to listen and pick it back up, skill issue on my end for sure
Cool game, though a bit tough for a rhythm game. I’d love to see slightly larger hit windows or a more pronounced beat in the music. Understanding how the cassette mechanic works was tricky at first, but eventually, I got the hang of it intuitively. The visual style is amazing. Overall, I really enjoyed it!
I love the artstyle and the tutorial interactions. Unfortunately the game is too hard for me. I was keeping on time by in the tutorial just fine but couldn't keep up with everything happening in a fight. Would be great if the timing was a bit more forgiving or if the music had a stronger matching beat to help indicate the timing without looking at it. This was a nice and unique take on the spin mechanic.
Thank you for playing! I appreciate the feedback, and I am happy to hear that you enjoyed the visuals!
We'll definitely add some difficulty options to tweak the input window soon. As an alternative to focusing on the music, player attacks are always guaranteed to land to the beat, regardless of whether or not you've timed it correctly.
So if you focus on pressing any attack button right when an unsuccessfully timed attack lands, your next attack will be guaranteed to be on time. If you go into the hub and try it on the dummy, I'd suggest just focusing on pressing attack buttons right when it flashes white after being hit.
This of course is harder to apply for other mechanics such as the quick rewind and parries (for which there are also some neat tricks I outlined in the game page you can apply instead), but I've found it to be a reliable way of making sure attacks land on time.
Awesome awesome project, the level of stylistic polish is pretty absurd and you very much wore your aesthetic inspirations on your sleeve and did them so much justice. The combat system is really cool and unique, but I definitely think that the input timing was a little off for me which threw off my rhythm a lot of the time, usually with rhythm games like this you'd want to increase the window for inputs because sometimes either someone's device won't register inputs in time for the beat, or the audio will play just slightly delayed/ahead. Things like this is why you either have an input configuration, which would be a main menu option that'd allow the player to listen to a static beat and decide what input delay fits their device best or you just increase the grace period for inputs. If you expand this game into a bigger potentially shipped project, which I REALLY think you should, I think the former feature should be the very first thing you implement because it's very important for a game like this
Thank you for the kind words and thank you for playing!!! Yes, we've been talking about having some kind of calibration screen so you can account for input latency due to how important that is in rhythm games. We kind of just ran out of time to include that for this jam though lol. But we'll definitely be adding that in!
Good game, I like the art style and general idea. I kinda brutforced first boss with dashing, but then second boss comes, which really checks your parry skills and there I fell. So yeah, I guess I didn't get the parry thing from the tutorial. Perhaps in tutorial you should be required to do several successful parries in a row. Also a bit annoying, that you can't use "F" if your tape is somewhat full, so if I loaded 4 attacks in it, but somehow wasted a bit of tape, I have to fully empty it.