Thanks a lot for playing! Glad you had some fun word swappin' to the countdown :)That's a good idea to make the final text output shareable! I've been toying with this more over the past couple weeks, most recently to see how setting this up with trivia questions could play out. That might ultimately be the direction this goes, but the mad lib aspect would be a shame to lose.
Gigatross Games
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Thanks so much for playing! Really appreciate the feedback and kind words, glad you see some potential in this little thing and had a bit of fun. If there were a collection of modes available that each changed up the mechanics in some novel way, yeah, it's possible to imagine this working in a couch multiplayer party game context. I'm picturing a free-for-all of 4 people all able to key in their answers simultaneously and in competition to be the first to snag the "?" blocks in a line to outlast the other players. Cheers for checking this out and sharing your thoughts! :)
Thanks a lot for checking this out and sharing your thoughts! Really glad you've had a bit of fun and like the presentation and concept. Agreed that the ever-decreasing stamina is maybe too much right off the bat, I've been trying to think up a way to soften that a little without removing the pressure entirely. Something as simple as awarding a stamina point for a correct answer regardless of how it's timed might do it. And yeah, a nice selection of songs to play would be key! In the downloadable Windows build, I reworked things so that the game now reads all of its song data from a set of easily editable INI files and whipped up the stuff to make 3 additional playable choruses. For something different on top of that, I wanted to see how this would feel with straight-up trivia instead of song lyrics so put together a couple video game trivia levels, one about the Mega Man series and the other Castlevania. It kinda-sorta works! Thanks again for playing and cheers for your feedback :)
EDIT: Just made a tiny little difficulty tweak to the latest version, correct answers now award 1 stamina point and hitting "?" blocks now award only 1 bonus stamina rather than 2. Makes for slightly better balance, IMO!
Thanks a lot for checking this out and giving it a spin! Something I hadn't considered until seeing you play was how the extra "?" blocks in a line on Easy difficulty could be confusing, they're not meant to hint at the character length of the missing word but instead are there to offer a larger target to hit with a well-timed click. A little change I might make here for clarity is using a single, triple-wide "?" block instead of three blocks in a row. You nailed the timing on a few selections but the game grinding to a halt had to do with your stamina meter hitting zero. I really, really ought to have a "stamina drained" or some such message appear when your stamina meter hits zero to accompany the stopping of the music and text scroll. Anyhow, really appreciate you sharing a look at this on your channel, cheers for spending time with all these submissions! :D
Hey! Just thought you might be interested to hear that it's now possible to mod the text contents of this thing. While quite a rough implementation, the Windows build now comes with it's chorus data in an easily editable format and also includes 3 additional songs' choruses to play through (all Iron Maiden, I'm afraid XD). Also, in both the web and Windows downloads there's one tiny little tweak to the hard mode in that every single A-B-C-D selection subs 1 stamina so changing your choice or missing a "?" block has more of a consequence.
Ah jeez, that's an unfortunate bug! Sorry about that but cheers for the heads up. I haven't been able to reproduce it in Chrome but there are definitely some quirks I've seen machine to machine with this web version that I'll be looking into. If you'd like to give this a proper try and have something running Windows, the downloadable EXE should perform much more sensibly :)
Lovely choice of music! As others have commented, having the next move be telegraphed would be most welcome, as would a gradual ramp of speed. It would feel much more satisfying to be able to let your square rest for a few beats and drink up points once in awhile rather than having to constantly be flitting about, at least at the start. Sequential wave-like keypresses to move around is an interesting idea but I found it a little tough to play, I would really like it if the key-wave was relative to your current position rather than constantly having to start from 'A' and go left to right. Nice job, though! :)
EDIT: Just read your pinky trick on the game page. That helps a lot!
Definitely dig the concept, constructing chords from a solitaire-like spread of cards is an awesome idea! Something I would really appreciate would be the ability to click a card to hear the note without actually playing it, just a way to have my ears help pick out viable combinations as I have a tough time interpreting piano keys. I second another commenter who pointed out the educational potential, this could be a great learning tool. The no-frills presentation is perfectly understandable given the deliberate constraints you were working within, but it would be awesome to see this idea dressed up with all sorts of polish :)
Nice work! :) Getting to hear the music progressively come together was entertaining, the assortment of environments were interesting to wander around and I appreciated how deliberately colour coded you made the gate objects. Interesting how you'd set it up so that the individual music notes themselves are set to switch on a particular layer rather than having to do with their placement on the dance pad, my curiosity got the best of me and I had to fool around with that a bit to confirm. I think it would be really rather fun if the player could put the wrong coloured notes for the stage onto the pad which would play some deliberately off-sounding track (something that clearly didn't blend) making it a little more of a sonic puzzle.
Really dig the selection of samples, all very pleasant to the ears! It felt good to mash the keys, made it to the end. The mini objectives were entertaining enough, I could see it being a lot of fun if there were more elaborate goals for the player to complete, or make it possible to actively subvert the lecture which would affect the content of the slides as Professor Professor gets flustered. I quite like your screen layout here, breaking up information across the projector screen, laptop and notepad works great. Nice photo, BTW! Also, Professor Professor's PowerPoint skills are utterly unmatched XD
Thanks for checking this out! Just wanted to say: the fonts and sounds were made by me previous to the jam, sure, but the /programming/ of the game engine here and all of the other art featured in the game is completely unique to the jam (the fonts themselves received a bit of editing, too). My friend was intending to produce a unique tune over the weekend but he got sidetracked by a family emergency, so this old chiptune of mine in there as placeholder stuck around. No different than a solo dev using open-source fonts and sounds for their entry. You're right, there's only a half dozen multiple choice selections to make, but better to keep the scope contained IMO for something like this when the mechanics are definitely not final. This is very much a proof-of-concept experiment and not intended as a complete game, I chopped down a ton from the original idea (which among other things includes making multiple passes of the chorus to progressively alter it) in order to make this manageable to complete and had the submission ready 3 AM Sunday night. I'm glad you see potential in the idea and I agree that the timing of the arrow and wide window to make a choice are things that ought to be thought about, and will be. Cheers for your feedback :)
Thanks a lot for checking it out! Really appreciate your feedback, glad you dug the look and sound and see some potential in the concept. You got it, it's a fill-in-the-blank kind of thing and ideally there would be a selection of songs / nursery rhymes / famous quotes / whatever for the player to pick between or queue up rather than getting served the one set of lyrics. Die With Your Boots On is a really great Iron Maiden track with somewhat of an inane, rhyme-at-all-costs chorus and it was specifically what I had in mind when this idea sprang up. Thanks again for playing :)
Thanks for checking it out, really glad you enjoyed the concept! Some sort of in-game demonstration of what to do, plus a quick playable tutorial, would be musts if this thing goes any further. That's a great idea to have the selected word get inserted into the line immediately regardless it if's in the blank or not, and being able to replace any word in a line would be pretty amusing! Could imagine that also providing more to separate difficulty modes, being enabled on the harder difficulties only, maybe. Anyhow, lots to think about! I definitely had fun whipping this together last weekend, really appreciate your feedback and thanks again for playing :)
Really appreciate the feedback and I'm glad you dig the tune! There's a heck of a lot more I'd like to do with this, not the least of which being the addition of more lyrics to play through with different objectives (intentionally wrong, rhyming but not a perfect match, and so on). Thanks for checking it out! :)
Right on, really cool to hear you're planning to carry on with this! It's a thoroughly interesting approach to tower defense you've got going on here and it's already really enjoyable in this little prototype, very easy to see it becoming something special. Haha, I understand the pain of having too many burning ideas and not enough time! :)
Oh sure, there's certainly more explanation that deserves to go on the game page, but here's the personalized gist:
It's a rhythm-based music trivia game (in this gamejam-specific iteration featuring a whopping 1 Iron Maiden song's chorus) where you're trying to pick the correct words to fill in the blanks in the scrolling lyrics. You've also got a constantly depleting stamina meter that you need to keep replenished by timing your A-B-C-D selections with the arrow zipping across the screen so that those "?" blocks get hit by your click. Thanks for giving it a spin! :)
Cheers for your feedback! Really appreciate you giving this thing a spin, glad you liked the chiptune :) Yeah, it needs a better scoring system to give more purpose to answering a blank correctly and there obviously should be more lyrical content to play. Lots of ideas that I wanted to include in here that got chopped out for time's sake, but ideally there would be several phases the lyrics get run through where you're tasked with, say, deliberately choosing only "wrong" words, stuff like that. Thanks for playing! :)
Dang, this is tough! Have to admit, my first minute with this was really quite frustrating but there's definitely an addictiveness to the challenge. Hard mode is kinda ridiculous, it would be a traumatizing typing tutor experience for a child learning to use a keyboard XD I'd really appreciate some game speed options and perhaps the ability to click on a given square in addition to hitting the corresponding key. I had some fun with this :)
Thanks for playing! Really appreciate the feedback, glad you found it interesting. Agreed that the objective is a little obtuse, but I imagine you got it. For the sake of overdone clarity, though, it's about getting your (correct) answer for the blank in on time while simultaneously trying to sync up your click with the arrow when it's over a "?" block which refills your constantly diminishing stamina meter.
And ah jeez, yeah, there are definitely some weird performance / timing issues I've seen in the tiny amount of testing possible over the weekend, the web version appears to be far from 100% consistent machine to machine. If you're on Windows, the executable is much more stable :)
An interesting little thing to play with! I could see this being fun with some sort of time pressure applied, like a "Make me a X and a Y and a Z" while the clock ticks down, or having to try and make a series of drink orders work with only a limited amount of key booze to pour. Pleasant organ sounds and I really like the pixel art labels :)
Very easy to play, an Atari 2600 sort of simplicity to it. I'd enjoy it if the enemies were more thoughtfully timed to the rhythm and came in more challenging formations, there's that one big jump in intensity when the music picks up but otherwise the one-by-one trickle is a cinch. Blocking a whole string of enemies with the shields would probably be quite satisfying. Good start to something and a nice tune! :)
Oh definitely, 'half-correct' responses that do /something/ would be great. Setting up some reward for picking a word that rhymes with the original or that has a funny effect on the meaning was the original plan, but that got cut out for time. Original text would be better, yeah -- the thought here was to use something that might be semi-recognizable to help guide the player Guitar Hero-style where you queue up a song you know.
Thanks for playing! The button just to the right of the volume '+' mutes the metronome, BTW. Ideally keyboard controls would be rebindable to user preference, setting actual A, B, C, D obviously makes sense but in a snap decision I wanted to make sure the 4 choices were grouped together (for QWERTY users at least). The scrolling text could be anything, I was thinking of Iron Maiden when the idea first came to me and wanted to see how it'd go. Having the soundtrack be chiptune covers of the scrolling lyrics was the proper idea but, y'know, timecrunch, so an ever so slightly Iron Maiden-ish tune instead. Cheers for the feedback on this experiment :)