@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.