adam-gaskins 2023-05-02 04:19
Ahhh this looks so fun! Is there any way for you to make a Mac or Web build?? Would love to play
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD53 → Beat Boxes
By ponygirlluna
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 437 | 3.71 | 42 | |
| Fun | 211 | 3.85 | 42 | |
| Innovation | 147 | 3.91 | 42 | |
| Theme | 365 | 4.12 | 42 | |
| Graphics | 407 | 3.96 | 44 | |
| Humor | 502 | 3.24 | 41 | |
| Mood | 632 | 3.48 | 40 |
Ahhh this looks so fun! Is there any way for you to make a Mac or Web build?? Would love to play
Thank you! Unfortunately Unreal doesn't do web builds anymore and I don't have a Mac upon which to compile. I couldn't even figure out the Linux build process in time. But should I ever expand this into a larger, more complete game, I would love to have it available on Mac as well.
Edit: got the Linux build sorted out and it's now available
There's something deeply cathartic about this game as an ex-Amazon warehouse worker. Absolutely loved this. It feels almost like a VRless Beatsaber and it's definitely noteworthy that you managed to capture that feeling here. I'd honestly really love to see this concept explored more and expanded some.
I played through the whole song, and had a blast! The controls for the beatsaber mouse definitely felt responsive and quick, and not laggy [in spite of having really crisp graphic quality] - which is super crucial for any rhythm game. (As a rhythm game enthusiast, I really appreciated that.) And, I definitely got a good laugh out of seeing the boxes flying everywhere by the end.
One thing that was slightly tricky for me was that it was a bit hard to "reset" to the middle to get ready for the next note sometimes if notes were arriving quickly, because the zone between left and right was relatively narrow.
But overall, I had an absolute blast! Good choice of music as well - it was the perfect music for shoving those boxes around to the beat. Great work!
Thank you so much—both of you. I honestly cannot express how much this feedback means to me. I'm beyond excited that people are liking the game as much as I am—and especially the feel/flow/responsiveness. I'm going to have a good think about the best way to expand this in the future.
The hit zones are 100% the first thing I want to improve upon. Resetting or hanging out in the middle is much harder, as hit detection is performed in the center of the screen (and I didn't communicate this well enough) as opposed to two different zones nearer the boxes. It works for a prototype, but for a more involved effort, I would certainly test out better hit detection.
The mouse controls are definitely pretty difficult, and as mentioned before by @hanadulcet having to "reset" made me accidentally hit boxes quite a bit, I would for sure mess with the hit zones
Pretty fun concept though
Oh, I love this concept so much! Unfortunately, for some reason, though I should have the specs to run it, it only seems to run at, like, 10 FPS on my computer :c Which is a real shame because I can see myself having an absolutely blast with this!
I pained through it regardless, at the least I got to see the cute "Wrong way ;_;" and "Missed D8" quite a lot xD Somehow got some perfects by total fluke. Managed a highscore of -320,300. Let's see anyone beat that 8)
I'd love to get to play it properly!
Very cool idea! Controls are a bit janky (couldn't really understand how the collision on the mouse cursor works). On mobile or tablet, swiping the boxes could feel really nice. The music is damn catchy though ! Great job :)
It was a very enjoyable game. Watching the packages accumulate with swipes was a lot of fun. The rhythm was great, and there were no unpleasant aspects to the controls. Thank you for a fun game experience!
I am so very bad at rhythm games. This was pretty cool. I liked the simplicity in the control just using the mouse.
The presentation of the game was really well done. The music was great and the controls worked well. Took some getting used to using a mouse, but I appreciate the feature of holding the click when there was a left-right-left-right beat. Great work!
I love the whole feel of this game! just a shipping guy blasting away packages to the funky beat. the game WAS very difficult imo, which, even though you can't lose, still brought down the fun factor just a tad. but regardless it was still a great experience and looked fantastic!
Fun stuff! I love rhythm games and managed to finagle an outstanding highscore of -99,200! Loved the concept, hitting 2 boxes pointing the same direction in-a-row was always tough, but other than that it was a jam. Great job!
Super cool idea! I love rhythm games and although I did suck, it was a really cool idea and great execution! Nice job
This is a great game! Everything looks beautiful, from the excellent lighting to the cursor flashing rainbow as you move around the room. This has a great aesthetic. I also loved that you can move the cursor into the trucks. That was just funny, like you're dancing around inside a truck as a little rainbow sprite or something.
The music was fun too and you did a good job of syncing the visuals with the music, as a musician I really appreciated that touch.
However, at times it was hard for me to keep my eye on the cursor and I would end up missing boxes because I couldn't see where the cursor was. I think the main contributor to that was having the accuracy feedback message right over the cursor. I would lose the dot under all the text. Maybe it could benefit from some feedback when the cursor enters and leaves the playable area that sends boxes to their trucks. Like perhaps the world shakes briefly and there's a subtle bump noise as the cursor passes the threshold.
I still enjoyed playing this! Thank you for sharing this with us all!
Nice music! Controls were a bit janky at times but solid entry otherwise.
Well made, but I'm so bad at this kind of game!
I had a lot of fun playing your rhythm game, the visuals are really appealing, and physics all sround the place add a playful element to the overall experience.I think it would be great to include some options for noobs like myself tho, to ease into the gameplay and gradually increase the challenge. Overall, great job on the game! In fact, it even made me want to be hired by Amazon at some point xb
This was fun to play. Tho I am not so good at these games. Music is catchy. Mechanisms are easy to understand and love the visuals.
would have loved to play this but it keeps giving me a blue screen of death everytime I try to open it
Although it was fun to see the boxes explode, the mouse control just did not work for me. visually it was awesome and i loved the overall experience. thanks for making the game.
Loved this! Music was great, though I calibrated before playing and it felt like it was just a little bit ahead of when the box would get to the "swipe" line. Aside from that little thing, one of my favourites from the jam so far!
Sooooooo great to see a rhythm game! Never expected this under this theme!
And there is some kind of humor to see the boxes stacking all over everywhere :yum:
I had a whopping score of -150 on my first try :sunglasses: 43,880 on my second try 44,390 on my third try
Honestly this was a really fun game! The graphics look great, the music is fits well (even if you didn't make it), and everything just feels good together. The controls are very responsive which is nice as well.
The only problem I had was the fact that although they were responsive, they felt quite janky. For a rhythm game, this is an extremely important aspect that can not be overlooked. Luckily it wasn't enough to ruin my enjoyment of the game, but definitely something to watch out for next time.
Oh also that stupid bridge/interlude part was way too hard. The rest of the song in comparison was a cake walk
Overall great entry!
I may be slightly addicted to rhythm games like Osu/BS/RH and I really love this! I'd probably play it more if it was expanded on.
I am hilariously bad at this game, I got like -16000 points, but it was a ton of fun! It definitely felt a little bit like Beat Saber. The note arrangement was good, the music was snappy, and flinging the cubes was really satisfying. I will say that the game performed really poorly on my system, but I do have a somewhat dated graphics card so that could just be a me thing. I also found it hard to understand what to do if two notes were going the same direction back to back, I kept accidentally flicking one the other way. I definitely think with more tracks and maybe a few more mechanics (big boxes you have to hold the mouse to the side for maybe?) this could be a full game. Great job!
@pyspher9 Thank you! I'm working on a post-jam version to address some of the bigger issues and cursor visibility is definitely high on the list. I think I should be able to put it over the accuracy text and I suspect that will help a lot, but I'll also explore a few other improvements, including the ones you've suggested, to see what helps the most.
@mateu Thank you so much! I'm glad you had a good time! That's a seriously impressive score, too—highest I've seen yet by a fair margin.
I was wondering, though: could I, perhaps, pick your brain about what you thought didn't quite work for the controls? I suspect it's a combination of accidentally hitting boxes in the wrong direction when trying to reset and lack of clarity on the actual location where hits are tested (dead center of the screen instead of closer to the individual boxes) that are proving troublesome. I've received a few comments about janky or difficult controls, but just haven't been able to quantify them well enough. No worries if you can't or don't want to, but I would really appreciate it! :heart:
As for the guitar "solo", I really wanted to push the limits of how fast boxes can be pushed off the belt. While *very* hard, it's definitely doable with a bit of practice. I didn't really expect anyone to manage it during the jam, though (which means I probably shouldn't have left it in there, but I just had to push the timing limits for the mechanic). :P
@aurailus I'm so glad you enjoyed it despite the performance issues! As mentioned above, I'm starting on a post-jam version and will 100% be addressing performance (or, at least, providing graphics options). I currently do have things like ray tracing enabled, which contribute a lot to the look and feel, but also still impact performance more than I'd anticipated for such a small scene (I could almost certainly bake most of that lighting once I learn how—I'm still quite new to Unreal). As for additional mechanics, I have several I already want to implement, and while I'm already considering boxes you shouldn't hit, a really big one didn't even cross my mind and is a great idea! I'll have to see if I can work something like that in.
WORLD RECORD POG
Screenshot 2023-05-06 124112.png
@ponygirlluna
Just did another attempt, got 71,070 You're right in that the guitar solo part does take practice. The problem is that it takes a long time to get to the part to actually practice it. Yet another attempt: 76,270
The jankiness I was talking about is pretty much what you and other people have described. It's really easy to get wrong direction boxes and sometimes it's hard to reset your cursor in the center. I may have seemed a little harsh when talking about it in my original review, but it's really not that bad if you get used to it.
I think the biggest problem you have is overestimating how good your players are. Think about it this way: however long you took to code/playtest the game, you were practicing it yourself. That's dozens of hours of playing. Your players are only going to play for maybe 15 minutes if you're lucky. In my opinion, getting a negative score isn't necessarily a great thing for a first time playthrough. What you have to do to avoid this issue is to get other people to playtest your game and naturally assume your player is a literal toddler. I definitely struggle with the difficulty of my games in game jam games. It's so easy to overestimate people's skill level.
Next attempt: 82,660 Next attempt: 80,930 Next attempt: 82,560
Will post a video soon
Very fun game, although i was extremely bad at it.
I really like the idea and would like the game to be more accessible. Although the latency calibration really helped, and the next time I could hit all the boxes in some of all sequences.
Reminds me of an old PS One game: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. There were several mini-games in the genre of rhythm games (I suppose we can name it like that). One of them is to catch the pipes that the ghost throws in the box. There was 3 positions where a pipe can fall. And we had two inputs, left and right buttons. When we release all direction buttons it fastly returns to center position. I suggest you could limit mouse control to make it more accessible. Or make some in-game entity that would react to some of mouse movements. It interupted me when I swipe a box to wrong side, it hits another box, reverse swipe make a row of box become a bunch of box. Sequence of boxes with the same direction is hard to pass because you need to return it to initial position but the next box would move in different direction, etc. If there would be some "thrower"-entity that would react to mouse and push to the same side where mouse moves and returns back and be ready for the next one it would be more controllable.
I remember "Trombone Champ", a curious game. It's a rythm (or I would say melody) game where your move your mouse up and down to change a trombone tone and press any key to play the instrument. I would suggest you to play, maybe it would give you some ideas to improve your experience.
Also, it would be clearer if you would write that we need to correctly position our mouse cursor and not just mouse movements. Because I thought that I just need to move my mouse in correct direction and not touch any boxes (yes, that's foolish of me, the game calls "Beat boxes"). That's cool and unusual but there are some common approaches in rythm games' design. And if you don't follow them you could warn your players about that more obvious.
I really liked the effects and simple design, the game is pretty juicy, I didn't want to say something bad. I wanted to say some useful things that you could improve. Thank you for your game!
P.S. Also, there one fun thing about UI. I had that when I left calibration menu when it prepared to calibrate.
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Screenshot 2023-05-07 153220.png
really fun game!
i would kinda expect my mouse to be locked to 1 dimension (left to right), it's a little weird that my vertical positioning also matters
also i had to significantly lower my mouse DPI to do well at this
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@mateu Wow! What a score! You actually beat my own high score on that version by a good 700 points. I don't think I've managed to get 0 incorrects, either. I genuinely don't have words to express how impressed I am by that. *Thank you*. Welcome to first place!!
As for the controls, thank you for elaborating there, too! I've reworked some of it locally and I've landed on a system that feels *significantly* better. I may yet remove hitting boxes the wrong way, but for now I think I have it in a good place. Among other improvements I've probably forgotten about: hit planes are now on the edges of the boxes and there's one for each side, hitting boxes the wrong way has a reduced window size (so it's still possible to hit them, but it generally has to be intentional), there is a very short "immunity" period after hitting a box correctly during which you can't hit another box the wrong way (this one still needs tweaking/testing), and negative points are a thing of the past (tbh I don't know why I even put those in in the first place—looking back it seems so obviously bad).
And the difficulty: I did totally mess up with that one. I had tried a slower song with fewer notes, but just wasn't having fun with it myself, so I didn't think it would be fun at all. But that was absolutely not the right call (and especially not double stacking with negative points). It would have been fun (probably even more so!) with an easier chart/song. :P
But I did learn a lot from this jam and will hopefully do a much better job of handling the difficulty next time.
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@surweaver Thank you for your feedback! The post-jam version that I'm working on has vastly improved controls and I'm absolutely planning on having it ease you into the game more with easier charts and tutorials. I think some of the difficulty with the controls comes from a lack of understanding of the mechanics, and, while I thought it was clear, it's clearly not as clear as I would like for it to be.
I'm not sure manipulating the cursor itself is quite the right way to go, but it's an interesting thought that I'll try out and see. In my response to Mateu, I detailed some of the improvements that make resetting more feasible. I do want to implement alternate control schemes (like keyboard) for those that find mouse control difficult/impossible, but not yet sure how I want to handle that, as many of the mechanics I'd like to explore rely on the mouse.
I've heard of trombone champ, but haven't played it. I'll have a look at it!
As for the UI bug, I did catch that after the jam, but felt it wasn't worth a hotfix. It's not game-breaking (in that reloading fixes it), so it wasn't a big deal (I do have it fixed locally now, though).
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@badcop Thank you!! That's quite a score, too! I don't think I've seen anyone else (other than Mateu) clear 20,000 points, so color me very impressed. Vertical positioning actually doesn't matter for this version, but some of the mechanics I wanted to try involve being able to constrain the hit area to a smaller portion of the screen (in typical game jam fashion I had to cut all those), so I'd originally programmed it that way. I just changed the hit test area to include the whole screen once I realized I didn't have the time to utilize it differently, so now it's just crossing anywhere along the very center of the screen that counts.
I'm surprised you had to lower your DPI, too. I generally find it easier to crank mine up and throw my mouse clear across the screen. I do have fairly low sensitivity, though, and will have to try it at both high DPI/sensitivity to see how it fares.
Pretty fun rhythm game. The core concept of needing to swipe the boxes was a neat concept and has some nice challenge with trying not to hit things on the way back. The game is a bit too punishing for people starting out with it (with the massive deductions from missing, mistakes tending to compound, & certain sections being completely different and harder than the rest) but once you've gone through it a couple times its nice to go through
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okay i'm mildly addicted
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Fun game ,excpet i suck, banger song thoughy lmao
Inputs on keyboard would be better. Though mouse is fun and messy but is really hard to make precise moves