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A jam submission

CHEESYchordsView project page

A musical plaything for the Game Boy Advance
Submitted by Cubellia (@cubellia), KirakiraMagic — 5 hours, 54 minutes before the deadline
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CHEESYchords's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Audio#143.5003.500
Originality#283.3333.333
Technical#332.8332.833
Polish#362.6672.667
Graphics#372.6672.667
Overall#392.6672.667

Ranked from 6 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

  • The controls aren’t very intuitive, to be honest. Maybe having a cheat sheet on the screen would help.
  • Neat little music program! I spent more time than I expected playing with this one. As a non-musical person, I didn't understand sequence mode too well, can you add some more description to help people like me understand what it does?
  • Very original! I think it could become a great toy with a better interface: even with the project page at hand, it's hard to know what do you have to press to play notes, switch modes, etc. Also I had a crash, I think it was because the menu printed too much characters and there were not enough sprites for them.
  • Stylish and fun to play around with! I wish there were a few more samples and that it was possible to edit the sequence while it's playing. The sound only comes from the right channel, which is kind of annoying when wearing headphones. Despite that, I can totally see myself picking this up the next time I need musical inspiration!

Jam ROM submission

Ok - understood! I attached the GBA ROM file as "MYGAMENAME_jam.gba".

Type of submission

Tool

Open Source Repository URL
https://github.com/Cubellia/CHEESYchords-gba

Existing assets
No assets... we used butano framework though. Main font was also lifted from butano

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Comments

Submitted

Nice to create small progressions and the sound is clear, but there was a minor note: the volume remains quite low on my gba even with the slider at max.

(1 edit) (+1)

this is great i was vibin'. it crashed a bunch for me but that might have been my own fault cause i had my everdrive in quick boot mode, i gotta try it again cause my friend told me to turn that off cause it breaks a lot of games. one-chord-per-button with 7th on L trigger is a fun as heck way to jam and i kinda want to do similar on DS now..

Submitted(+1)

This is a fun little toy that I enjoyed messing around with :) It's cool that there's several samples added as well, and even an arpeggio function. I had fun, nice work!

Developer

Thank you!

Submitted(+1)

I tried mashing buttons to follow the intended usage as described on the game page. The engine ran out of sprites, resulting in an error screen. Specifically, it says "output_sprites vector is full. can't hold more sprites." Specifically that seems to happen whenever mashing buttons while holding the 7th chord button.

On the concept itself, I think this might be down to differing musical tastes or different expectations on who would use such a device. However, I think the idea of giving musical inspiration and the idea of restricting to only what will basically sound good are conflicting ideas.  I've seen it elsewhere too, though, so your tastes might be more popular in the hobbyist game dev sphere. (also my liking of the locrian mode and modes in general may be an indication of what sort of musician I am)

Developer

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah this is definitely designed first and foremost for those who want to dip their toes into music rather than those who are experienced composers (this was actually made for a specific person I know who lamented on not having something like this)

That said, I am ALSO a fan of the locrian mode and I would love to extend the functionality of the device. Not just with added modes, there are many things I thought about adding that just didn't fit an MVP or were a struggle to fit in the confines of the GBA: inversions / voicings, other chord types, the ability to break key... all of these I think are essential in actual interesting composition work, so this definitely is more of a toy as it stands.
Inspiration wise I think personally I get more out of using the sequenced arpeggio as a melody generator of sorts than the available chordset.

Thanks for the bug report as well, that's really frustrating since I know how to fix it pretty quickly... aaaah well.