Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → Low Notes
By mhorth
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 485 | 3.78 | 48 | |
| Fun | 201 | 3.93 | 48 | |
| Innovation | 791 | 3.31 | 48 | |
| Theme | 1150 | 3.45 | 48 | |
| Graphics | 1185 | 3.42 | 48 |
I played lots of rhythm games (one of my favourite genre) so playing this game was very fun! The 4 sided circle isn't really unique but it is a nice gameplay idea. I love how you tied the theme with the pitch of the songs (although I personally enjoy listening to the normal song) Also huge :thumbsup: for adding megalovania.
A really nice experience and I hope you continue developing the game!
@fabighindaru Thanks very much for the review, glad you had fun!
I really missed a menu beep sound but still a really cool idea.
This is really cool! Simple mechanics, fun execution. Definitely more room for more difficulty, though I'm not sure how it'd be added. A combo system would be rad too.
Some thoughts: Hard to tell how far notes are along (meaning it's hard to tell with notes on alternating sides which is first), and hard to tell whether you've missed early or late on some notes. The detune is also a bit aggressive early -- I like it, but maybe at low health instead of not-perfect health.
Great choices for music, simple gameplay and I love how when you mess up the music gets all distorted. I had lots of fun playing this game, GJ!
A really nice concept and a smart way to tie it to the theme. Presentation felt very polished. As a jam game I also liked that you made it very lenient. If this were any other rhythm game I would have gotten totally destroyed. Great job all around.
Hey there fellow rhythm-game-creator! :wink: This was really fun to play! I didn't experience any issue with synchronization of triggers and audio. The one thing that I would have found helpful, would have been better feedback on whether I hit the note correctly or not. I am really curious how you created the "levels" for these songs? Anyway, good job!
Very clever! Great visuals but It's a little hard to tell which note is first. Maybe shift the color as they're getting closer.
Enjoyed this, the visuals feel well polished.
Still not quite caught up on sleep so I couldn't make it all the way through anything but the first song, but it was good fun all the same!
@chris-dirkis great feedback, thanks! I think I’ll divide the health bar into quarters or thirds and only do the pitch change when crossing a threshold.
The appearance of which note comes first in quick alternating patterns is definitely an issue, I’ll have to do some more thinking on the best way to solve that.
Glad you had fun!
@timtipgames thank you! I’m pretty embarrassed that my strategy for making levels was pure brute force, scriptable objects that contained a list of notes, and I manually typed in what time those notes should cross. It was easy to edit and customize but painfully slow and tedious. That will be the first thing I work on if I continue with the game.
One of my friends also mentioned better feedback on successful hits, so I’ll look into cranking that up more.
Most unique take on the theme I've seen so far. I love myself some rhythm games and would definitely like to play this some more if more songs were ever added! The one issue I found is that, at times, I had a hard time seeing which notes would be coming in first, besides that, a fun quick playthrough and it made me want to re-do tracks to do better the second time
This is quite a twist on the theme! The game is very fun, and with a few screen effects it could look great. The only thing lacking is amount of tracks, but i think it's still a good amount for a game made in 72 hours. Overall, a great game!
Didn't think I'd hear Megalovania while testing games but here we are.
I mean, I don't have too much to say here. It's a nice rhythm game with clean graphics and nice beatmaps. Although sometimes (especially in Megalovania) it's sometimes difficult to see if the next notes are three rapid fire notes or one note on three keys. Other than that, no complaints here, I had fun!
Really fun, well made and challenging game, I only have a couple of critiques: sometimes it can be a bit hard to tell which notes come first, some more oomph factor for when you hit the note would make it feel amazing, and it's a bit hard visually to tell when you're supposed to hit the game. Other than that though, this is definately the most fun game I've played thus far, and a very solid entry!
@pizzart64 thanks very much! When I was getting close to my deadline I thought "I wonder how it would look if I made the notes 2D lights and added bloom post-processing..." I stopped myself from going down that rabbit hole but I'll try to add more juice to the graphics. Happy to hear you enjoyed it!
yup its fun, simple and satisfying 10/10 IGN also for improvement you can add extreeeem over the top post processing to add more game juice
Game is really good and fun, allowing for notes to be clicked a bit 'late' would be good, the sound distortion is maybe a bit too highly pronounced which makes it harder to keep on playing (in my opinio)
@fadoli03 thanks for the feedback! I agree, I shouldn't have lowered the pitch immediately, but instead wait until you've gotten down to perhaps 75% health.
Really cool and original idea in concept and I'm always here for a rhythm game in the jam! ...But in execution it was a little uncomfortable to hear the music constantly distort haha :')
Since you're gonna keep working on this project, something I would suggest trying out is instead of the music changing "deepness" everytime you get something wrong or right, only change it after the player misses or gets it right a certain amount of times, so the music stays consistent for longer.
Also, I think you can punish the player a bit more haha. I felt like I was getting a bunch of notes wrong and still never got close to losing. Punishing the player for pressing the wrong key might be a good idea too, otherwise I can win by just pressing every key on beat!
Lastly, I was reading some ideas on the comments and I agree some visual cues like changing color as the note gets closer would help too.
Anyway, really enjoyed it overall! The graphics are very polished and the gameplay is quite fun. Congrats!
@borabee thank you so much! I like all your ideas and I'll keep those in mind when I get back to working on it. One of my friends play-tested for me and caught the same thing, he just mashed all 4 arrow keys the whole time and got a perfect score lol.
If I ever go for online leaderboards then yeah I'll have to punish wrong presses, but as long as it's local, I know that I like the freedom to fidget with the keys between actual notes.
This is quite fun! Although, I'm not so sure about the whole music pitch-shifting thing, it doesn't sound all that great. I liked the game though (although I was very bad at it despite being a musician haha)
Fun game! I'm not sure how effective or maybe overwhelming it would be, but I feel like a circle closing in with each beat would help with discerning how close notes are to the middle. Just something barely visible to help align things, y'know? Another thing that could help is having an outer circle that notes come from so you aren't seeing the left/right notes appear before the up/down ones even though they'd be played after them. Just my two cents! It's a fun game otherwise, I love the visual style. Nice work, and good luck!
Ok, first wow. Great game. But I am so bad that I did not even get over 70 points in normal mode. But the idea behind it is ingenious. Would be happy about more songs to try my luck there to get over 70 points. :D I must now only once continue to train so that I get better.
@studio-gomp thanks for the feedback! I'll probably include a toggle option to disable the pitch shifting altogether if this ever gets to Steam or anything really public.
@goggleskitty both great ideas! I had spawned the notes off screen because I didn't want them to just pop into existence. I think spawning on screen at a consistent radius will help with ordering and I can do like a fade-in and grow animation to avoid popping. I also really like that circle idea. It could get cluttered but I'm definitely going to try it and see if that helps.
Great game, the principle is very original is very cool, the music as well as the graphics
Jamming out to Megalovania was a lot of fun lol. I like how your interpretation of the theme means you can really *hear* how well you're doing. Doing worse feels worse, and playing on time means you get to hear the clearest version of the song. Very clever - nice job!
I played through all the songs! I think the thought behind the mechanic, but it mostly ends up as feedback that you're doing badly. I think since rhythm games are a pretty established genre, you'll get compared the games that are doing it well. That being said I think the what would probably help it the most is better feedback for when you get a note right - that way the player can establish a good cadence with the rhythm of the song and not have to rely of visual matching as much. Overall, really nice job for your first jam! nice work!
I like this entry a lot! There's a lot of potential in here to do some cool things with this. Besides what you prob heard, which I will also agree on as well (maybe show how close the notes are to the timing like color change) The pitch change I thought was nice, but I do agree, maybe tone it down a bit? If anything, one thing that could be neat is to have thee HP bar be represented by like something more visual, like static level on the screen?
Either way props! I can't believe even in a jam, there's always a undertale reference. :laughing:
I enjoy rhythm games, and I could definitely see myself playing this if you keep working on it! The graphics are simple but work well. I think adding an accuracy system would definitely give the game a lot more depth, and it would be nice if there was some sort of visual feedback to know how early or late you hit a note.
I really liked the visuals. I'm not much of a rhythm game players (lots of mediocre Rock Band playing), so take this with that in mind, but I found it hard to tell what bars were simultaneous presses when there were a bunch really close together, especially those that were not adjacent to one another. Maybe having them shift in colour slightly as they approach the middle of the circle. Either to a different colour or getting lighter. It could really help with keeping things visually in sync.
Very nice! I love me a good rhythm game. One suggestion from my preference would be to have the audio pitch back up after the mistakes are made, not just when you get more correct notes. I can understand how keeping it low is apart of the game, but it feels weird to me to not be able to listen to the normal song I guess.
Here's some thoughts on improvements, not really anything you did wrong, just thoughts if you wanted to add more.
There needs to be more difficulty options and they should follow a similar note layout. The ones you had in there were good, but it felt like it was swaying between a bunch of difficulties, which can make it hard to follow. For example, if you want it to be hard and follow every note, then it needs to follow every note so the player is expecting constant notes on the melody or wherever. Expert or something could have even more additional things. For like a medium it could follow slower melodies, but it should be something like only the major parts, but whatever it is it needs to be consistent.
Lastly, additional inputs would be awesome. Something like clicking space changes the spots the arrow keys hit (Giving you double the notes) or maybe you have two circles, one for arrows, one for wasd. Or to be really difficult have a lot of different keys so you have to move your hands around the keyboard.
I'm mainly just rambling at this point. haha but very good job I enjoyed it a lot!
Super cool game, great job! A few minor critiques: - It felt like when the pitch went down you maybe did that in such a way that the tempo slowed down slightly as well, but the visuals didn't slow down at the same rate so at slower speeds it seemed like I couldn't get a hit on the notes by going off of the song rather than just the visuals. - Because of this, I found that I often was just button mashing to get back up to fast speeds, rather than trying to line up the hit to the song. Maybe if the button hits gave a sound it would disincentivize that sort of button mashing gameplay.
Overall though, I had a wonderful time and actually wanted to finish all the levels which doesn't happen often! You rule!
I really enjoyed the game! Challenging at first, the notes flowing in overwhelmed me but I eventually got used to it and it was really satisfying like most rhythm games. As people have said before though it isn't really enjoyable when the pitch of the song goes deeper, kind of takes of away from my concentration and it overall kills the hype. But obviously its the whole point of the game and the connection to Deeper and Deeper so I can't really blame you. Plus it is a really unique concept and take on the theme so bonus points and it creates more of an incentive to hit notes to heal back your hp and restore the song back to normal. Overall I like the game in general, how it plays and feels like a well polished game (I assume the updated version is even more polished). My only gripe is that the connection to the theme feels a bit forced but it doesn't take away much from the game.
This is a pretty neat idea. I like the concept and the interpretation of the theme. My only complaint was that there didn't seem to be any penalty for pressing a key when I wasn't supposed to, so mashing every button seemed to work. When playing the game normally though, it seemed that some of my presses were on time with the music, but the rings weren't in time. I may just be bad at the game though.
There are some problems with sync sometimes, but overall game is pretty nice. Good job!
I love a good rythym game, and this one had a really interesting take on the theme. I liked how the music would get deeper and just feel really off when you hit a note. It really helped you realize how bad you were doing at some points. The pirate song was pretty easy, then I moved onto the Toby Fox one, and I failed miserably. I think it was a bit hard to tell what was coming next.
[Thanks for submitting your game to our stream!](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1007626304?t=06h11m14s)
Rhythm games are my weakness, so this one instantly grabbed me. I love the unique interface you got going on here. It's both visually and mechanically super interesting!
You've already made some serious improvements to the game already in your post-jam version, I noticed. I'm super interested to see where else you plan to take this one!
What a amazing experience! Loved what you did with the tones - but you see, i don't have much ability to match 100% of the music, but it was really fun to try it! Great work.
Great job for a first game jam. Here's to many more.
I play a lot of console rhythm games and maybe because of that I found using WASD keys really difficult, especially for three-note chords. If it's not already something you're working on, difficlty levels (Easy-Normal-Hard) would be nice.
I like the idea on your itch.io page of having the submitted game for rating and the current game post jam. I may copy that in the future.
Nice ryhme base game I liked it ! The patterns were good and I had fun playing the game, even if it was a bit hard for me. Good job !
Love me a good rhythm game! The interpretation of the theme was quite nice here. Only thing I would add to it would be some sort of calibration. Most games like this have something to calibrate input timing so there's plenty of inspo to draw from. Personally I found the notes to be a bit slow compared to the music (especially on Mega) so I had to anticipate the notes and hit the keys a bit earlier than the music. Otherwise good job and good improvements to the post jam version. I'm a sucker for neon glowy things
I do say that I enjoy myself a rythm game here and there - but i'm by no means good at them. Starting with Megalovania totally kicked my ass and not in a good way.
But! It's a really polished game, feels great to play and I love the take on the theme. Would love to see that expanded with something like a MP3 parser oder something to play any of my music with it?