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mattmora

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A member registered Jan 19, 2020 · View creator page →

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Thanks for playing and appreciate the feedback! I'm not sure if or when I might do more with this, but I very much agree with your suggestions. 

The combustion engines especially are arguably even worse than useless. If you waste too much fuel with them, you can stunt your progress. That said, I'm not sure I'd completely remove them, especially if I took a narrative route with future development. There's maybe something interesting there about technological obsolescence.

Ok, unfortunately not sure what I can do. A different browser than whatever you're using might work or even just incognito/private mode in your current browser maybe. Or one of the non-browser builds. Sorry I can't help much at the moment, but thanks for enjoying the game!

Sorry to hear that! The Windows and browser builds at least still work for me. What are you playing on?

Thanks for playing and really appreciate the feedback! 

I absolutely agree with your points about the rate of progression and clarity of numbers. They're the first things I'd work on if I dedicate more time to this. (It was made for a course, on a deadline, so of course some things just aren't as polished as I'd like!)

And thanks for pointing out that Lorentz factor error. I was aware it's dimensionless, but carelessly copy pasted some code and forgot to remove the unit! Will certainly at least fix that.

Awesome! Really strikes a nice balance of visual clues while keeping listening and recalling sounds as its core. Oddly though, I think your recommended starting area is the one I found hardest! 

Thank you! Cool to see some similarity to your game Ultratoro - we need more runner games on weird geometries!

Thanks for playing! Sorry you couldn't find more. Most of the stars are past some hidden paths that can be tricky to find. I haven't heard from anyone who found them all without a hint or two. Something to improve in a later version though no plans for that in the near future. I've just added some hints to the description at least.

And fun idea for the Mario block! I feel like that a surprisingly rare mechanic to see in platformers outside of Mario and could definitely be fun to play around with.

Thanks Joey <3

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Interesting! Some weird precise collision bug I guess, maybe having to do with seams in the ground colliders. I vaguely remember something similar happening once while testing and guess it never quite got fixed. Good to know and learn from, thanks!

Thanks so much for playing - glad you enjoyed it! 

I'm curious how you managed to fall out of the map! The "intended" way to get down there requires getting all the stars, though I expected someone might find another way, just not so quickly!

And if you wanted to know, spoiler for that last star: There's two in the right area, the one in the brick house and another below it via secret path, which requires a short jump to enter.

No, not winnable! It's just a short "story"

nice! a small exploit-y thing you can do with one star is spam recall immediately after a hit to get multiple hits, and it seems best to focus on building up one star anyway. thanks for playing Joey!

Amazing, truly an honor and a privilege. Thanks for the game Nyusha! <3

Thanks Hao! <3

Thanks! And yes there's not really anything to do, just pick up the orange blocks and go fast. More just a test of some ideas than a game.

Really nice additions and polish! I especially like the decision to open up the boundaries of the environment. It nicely acknowledges players who don't choose to stay on the main path and makes the space around you feel even more expansive and surreal. 

The only thing that feels a bit off for me is the trigger behavior for the alien musicians. Partly because their animations suggest they are always playing I feel like their music should fade in and out as I get closer or farther away, rather than abruptly come in or cut off when I approach or walk away. I think they would feel more integrated into the space if either their music had a smooth distance-based roll-off or if their animations only played when you can hear them. Also, this might take more effort than its worth, but it would be a really nice touch if their animations exactly matched their music, only moving on each note. 

This is a really nice polished, cohesive experience! The flow of the environment from the pond to the spaceship with a few objects of interest along the way works very well and that journey is reflected well in the music. The sparseness of the music is very fitting and I would try to preserve that if you add this. I really don't have many ideas for what you could add to this - I think it works quite well as is. Adding a filter effect while underwater is an obvious idea and it might be nice to have sound sources that move through the environment, but that depends on how lively you want the space to feel. Also since looking at the sky feels meaningful with all the stars and constellations, maybe you could change the music based on where the player is looking.

A conductor rhythm game is such an interesting idea, and I really like the one button approach as an abstraction of that action, though playing with other cues and input is definitely a possibility. If you were to go down that road, I'd just be careful to avoid keyboard-ish cue designs. Other than that, I think you've already mostly identify where there's room for improvement (though I do quite like the visuals already!). 

My main other thought is that you may be able to play into the role of a conductor more in how they control the pace of the music. For example, maybe some cues have larger timing windows and depending on if you play sooner or later in those windows the music speeds up or slows down, or maybe some cues simply pause the music and wait for play input like this level in Rhythm Doctor on "so long." It's definitely a technical challenge, but would be very unique for a rhythm game and really represent the player as a conductor. 

A nice short, coherent track and beatmap and a gothic-themed rhythm games is an interesting idea! I wonder how the cue design could visually and mechanically support that theme. 

The main critique I can give here is maybe how to polish the beatmap a bit. There are a couple places where you're either missing a cue or have a cue that doesn't clearly map to any sound. First, the very start of the song where the organ enters should maybe have a cue; I don't see it as meaningfully different than the following attacks in the organ. Second, after the first set of doubled cues on W and E, you have an E and then a W, and I don't hear any sound on the W. It feels like maybe you intended that to be another doubled W+E. Last, a more subjective point, the Q+E doubles don't feel justified to me. They seem to be based on the piano, which isn't chordal or especially emphasized.

Also, on the topic of repetition, I understand the appeal of varying how you map a repeating section of the music, but in many cases it can be better to repeat previous mapping patterns. It's good to remember as a composer/mapper that you are spending a lot more time with your work than the average listener/player, so what feels overly repetitive to you, might feel good to your audience in that it lets them build familiarity. Also, it matters less for easy maps like this, but especially for higher difficulties where a player might have to process more information in a shorter amount of time, introducing arbitrary variation that isn't reflected in the music can feel unfair to some. 

Of course all this feedback comes from a sort of "traditional" way of thinking about beatmapping, which definitely isn't the only way of doing things. So as it goes, I'd only follow this sort of thinking as long as it's useful. 

I really enjoyed this sound toy for as simple as it is so far! The sound and visuals are imaginative and inspire a lot of ideas for potential interactions and features. Maybe the frogs transform over time, or have a way to hop to different steps in the sequence. I also like the creepy/uncanny angle a lot, and I imagine some adding hidden or gradually revealed interactions or supporting more unhinged sound possibilities with features that facilitate dissonance or extreme/uneven rhythm - even without equally uncanny visuals - could really bring that forward.

On the issue of continuous versus quantized pitch, I still quite like the continuous sliders because they tend toward more dissonant, out of tune sequences that are uniquely expressive in that uncanny way. But as you mentioned in your postmortem, quantization is nice for quality of life and being able to choose a scale could add variation, but I'd also suggest experimenting with non-equal temperament tunings or just general detuning on top of a quantized system. 

Anyway, I think this is a really strong prototype and would be excited to see you add more! 

Love the overall aesthetic and tone of this! The sprites and sounds go well together, harmonic minor is a nice choice of scale for the theme (instead of defaulting to pentatonic which would definitely give this a different tone), and the background noise is a nice touch. 

The main thing I would want to see out of this is more refined pitch mapping. It seems to just be based on character position now (if that's wrong, I wonder if you can make the actual mapping more apparent), but with the theming, I expected it to be based on ghost positions relative to the player, especially with the red ghosts. I imagine that some interesting sound patterns could emerge as you push the ghosts around. Side note: the current position to pitch mapping feels odd as it wraps before the screen edges. I actually like how this makes the mapping less "obvious" but those wrapping thresholds sound quite jarring. 

Love the idea of a pachinko sound toy - there's lots of interesting physics and collision patterns to sonify. So far you're simulating those physics really well, and I think the marimba is very suitable, but when comparing your prototype to real pachinko/plinko, it doesn't have quite the same exciting speed and energy. It could be interesting to further experiment with the physics - maybe higher gravity or peg bounciness.  

I think the option to set which pegs are active is really strong as a way to shape the sound more intentionally. Almost turns it into a weird physics-based sequencer. On that note, one direction you could try if you want a more autonomous option is to have the chips wrap back to the top when they reach the bottom, so it kind of loops like a sequencer.