Thanks so much! All the credit really goes to Laura for this one. However, the shiny new demo is now live on Steam, and I’m spreading the word as I can.
The game itself cannot be navigated with a MIDI controller. However, you will encounter and collect 26 presets for the in-game instrument. You can play the instrument while the game is running, or from the Instrument settings screen. Check out the Instrument Unlock cue on the Audio Glossary screen to hear what you’re looking for.
It works great with my microKEY after I allow MIDI access in my Chromium-based browser. You may have better compatibility with the dedicated Linux build. Each instrument preset should support pitch and modulation wheels if your controller has those too.
From my general testing over the years, soundStrider is one of the few games on itch.io which are being truthful about their support for MIDI controllers (notwithstanding explicit virtual instruments or audio toys). I sincerely wish there were more that did this, because MIDI is cool!
Out of curiosity, is there a way to do what was intended with QWERTY on AZERTY with more agnostic bindings in this game engine? With JS it’s pretty trivial, because KeyboardEvent.code represents a physical location on the keyboard. Anything else I need to know to accommodate your layout?
That’s awesome! Thanks for considering our feedback. This is a small polish note. The buttons and switches would feel great with some subtle sounds when activated. Lean into the fact that we’re interacting with a physical device. 🤘
Hello! This is my bad too. When organizing the jam, I asked folks in all of my communities if they would like to participate. As much as I would prefer for all software to have a minimum baseline of accessibility, I felt that it would be unfair to require it from everyone who participated. Instead it was just a recommendation. I’m sorry that not everything is accessible to you, especially if I misled you to believe so. If this jam were to occur again, then I would like to be a better advocate of accessibility beyond a bullet point on the jam page. That might mean an additional rating category for accessibility, and tips to score better. Thank you so much for trying these out and sharing your frustration with us.
I’m glad you loved it! I was imagining that as well, but ran out of time on touch controls, MIDI support, and using the mouse wheel to control the depth of the pointer. I’d love to see something like it on a wall, as tall as you, that you and friends could just walk up to and inspect. Makes sense living in a children’s museum, but I’d settle for some arcade or club too. ✌
Really nice update! The sound menu and numbers are super helpful for choosing and moving sounds around. The only bug I found is that when I would right-click to preview sounds, they would get picked up and stack beneath the cursor
I tried performing a song with it for about 15 minutes. It was really fun! This time around I maybe expected it to also delete sounds if I drag them off the track or put another sound on top to replace them. But I was also working with just the mouse at over 9000 BPM, muting single sounds for a half second by clicking them, etc. So I’m not so sure if you really need to adjust anything if that’s not the sort of behavior you’re looking for.
Anyway, that’s just how jams go. In the last jam we were in together, I think my codebase was pretty organized, but this one got pretty messy by the end, likely because there was no plan here either!
Don’t feel like you need to change a thing with this one. Congrats on finishing your first jam. You have what it takes to do more and continue growing from the experience. Cheers!
You’re welcome! If it helps, the MIDI file I used for testing had multiple channels, which the application would attempt to play. It would sound fine until it hit something intense like a ton of notes or CC messages. It might be easiest to ignore extra channels or strip CC out instead of going into all the technical details. It’s just a piano and shouldn’t ruin your day.
Nice insight and post. The web build is very snappy now. I’m glad that the solution to the loading times was as straightforward as reducing the file sizes. I hope you’re able to finish what you couldn’t soon. Thanks for participating in the jam!
Impressively ambitious concept. It has a lot of potential for ambient music. I’d really like to revisit this one with a better setup, because I think my main issues are performance-related. This would be great with MIDI support, and more factory presets and voices to show off what it can do. Excited to see where this and your future projects go. Nice work!
I spent way more time in this than I expected. It was really easy to set up a loop and jam over it. Everything works towards a thematic zen. I’ll echo the call for mouse controls. If the plants were mapped to the keyboard (e.g. Z, X, C), then it could also be fully accessible. Nice work!
I’m sorry if this comes off the wrong way, but every detail straddles this uncanny valley between brilliant trolling and cringe: the stretched logos, the spacing of the keys, their atonal scale, and the fact that they don’t play sound until you release the mouse. Yet it opens, it plays sound, and I absolutely love it. Nice work!
Very relaxing and polished experience. I like how the echo control works and structures how you play in a call-and-response manner. However, I don’t think it listens to notes played by the mouse, and the keyboard controls can take some getting used to with the root on the H key. Nice work!
Thanks for sharing your progress and listening to feedback on Discord. It’s a great concept that really gets you thinking, like Factorio or a Zachtronics game. I might add stereo pan and filter frequency parameters to each note. The more mechanical parameters (i.e. layer, mask, influence, cooldown, speed) could use title attributes that explain more about them. Nice work!
Lovely concept. The entire aesthetic is great musically and visually. I ran out of ideas after a while, but it was fun building up a song and jumping around to it. Maybe I might lean into the gardening aspect a bit more or play with stereo positioning. Nice work!
This can produce some gnarly tones. The circuit makes sense after tinkering with it, but I’d like some presets and documentation to make the most use of this. Beware that it can get quite loud, especially with polyphony. Nice work!
Loved the concept, soundtrack, and art. It was great seeing a narrative game submitted to the jam. The story had me hooked until the end. The puzzles were a little too simple for my tastes, but the execution was great. Nice work!
If this were a physical product, then I’d be the first to buy it. The waveform editor is as deep as you want it to be, unlocking so many possibilities with a variety of functions. Its only fault is how the input buffering makes it feel unresponsive with chords or fast notes. I also wish that I could control the pitch wheel with my MIDI controller. Nice work!
Thanks for sharing your progress and considering my feedback on Discord. This is deeply nostalgic and flawlessly executed with a ton of cool retro sounds. I enjoyed messing with this one at high speeds. I wish I could preview the notes by clicking them in the menu. Nice work!
This is the most impressive of the three. I made some really cool sounds with it. The circuits are complex but understandable. The step sequencers and ring modulators open up a ton of sonic possibilities. Sometimes it felt as if it wasn’t working as expected, and it could use some presets. Nice work!
Thanks for letting us watch this project grow over the jam. It’s wildly fun, especially when stretching it toward soundscapes and textures that no longer sound like a drum machine. The visuals are very polished as well. Occasionally I can break it, but that’s part of the fun. I hope this does well on the app store. Nice work!
Great port of the classic toy! I’m pretty sure I had at least one of these as a child, so I especially love the hand and mallet. I also wish that holding down the mouse would play notes as you drag, maybe with a slightly different sound. That would complete the experience for me. Nice work!
It’s an effective keyboard in a pleasant package. The piano soundfont sounds great on my microKEY. Beware that I made it crash when I changed the tempo while playing the sample file. It can also crash if you feed it really complex MIDI files. In the future, could it allow for changing the current voice or loading custom soundfonts? Nice work!
Great concept, soundtrack, and visuals. I wish there were more sounds to manipulate, and things to do on stage, because the foundation is solid. In my second playthrough nobody ever came to my show, but I was also messing around more that time. Nice work!
I completely forgot about SynthEdit! Without a manual or presets it’s hard to make full use of it, but I found a technical manual for the Sega Genesis which helped. The envelope generators are a nice touch, but it feels slightly unfinished to me. Nice work!
Nice feature set and samples in a pleasant package. The two-octave keyboard layout is great. The samples might need some trimming or fading at the ends because they tend to click for me. There are some minor quirks, like how starting playback will not cancel recording, or the re-rhythm feature doesn’t work so great with polyphony. Nice work!
Intriguing concept and application of AI here. While the sound itself is quite basic, I see potential in this being explored further for accessibility, compositional, or research reasons. Beware that it can soft lock when playing the highest or lowest notes. Nice work!
The new update is great! Thanks for considering my feedback. The amount of customization available from all the new settings lets you create so many different sounds and textures from eight simple samples.
Hey! Thanks for checking it out. That’s all really nice feedback. So far I’m trying to squeeze out as many ideas as I can, but it could be good to revisit these before the end of the jam, or in a later update, or possibly even as standalone games in the future.
Melody Heights is my favorite as well! I’ve been thinking about what elements I’d like to take from it and bring back to my main project as its own world. It’d certainly have all the movement you describe—even a jetpack you could take to the exosphere.
I could definitely see there being more to Harmony Falls. After the five-minute mark you’ve hit the maximum speed and seen everything. I love the idea of incorporating different sounds and themes. Maybe the levels could ebb and flow with lulls between, with more sophisticated ways to generate the obstacles. I’ve considered collectible power-ups as well.
I’m putting Secret Bread together this weekend. It’s hard to explain, but in my head it’s a sort of a tactile exploration game, or if a musical instrument had the controls of Surgeon Simulator or Octodad. I’m not so sure about Super Kaleidophone yet—that one was more referential humor toward a previous project of mine. 😂
You’re welcome, and best of luck with any changes you make before the jam ends and beyond!
I completely understand your hesitation with Discord. I think we chatted a bit during Games for Blind Gamers 2. That community is great! And your submission was super interesting and against the grain! But in general I’ve felt overwhelmed by Discord over the past few years, specifically the 24/7 availability it expects from me, and how exposed it can make me to things I’m not expecting as a very private solo game developer. It can be really stressful! So please prioritize yourself over anything else, with no pressure.
Tomorrow I’ll be starting a 96-hour sprint to add a walking simulator to my submission, so you might see some updates from me. Cheers!
