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(+1)

Nice game, but there are some issues with the difficulty

I doubt anyone can get higher than a D within an hour of playing, which is a long time for a gamejam. There's a few things that especially make it hard.

1) "Miss" and "crack" aren't very helpful words. Crack sounds good, but breaks your combo. Also miss could mean you missed your swing. Thus it took me a while to figure out whether I was early or late, partly also because of the next three points

2) The feedback isn't located at spot where the feedback originates. This makes it very hard to see how to improve, especially if you do not notice it.

3) Which button corresponds to which instrument seems to be largely arbitrary, some of the patterns are like "k k  k     k  k    k      k k   k     k" and without knowing how the music is gonna sound that makes me have to do 4 of those at once. It would for instance be nice if too buttons had a more extended section of a simple pattern so I could focus on the other two buttons.

4) It's very hard to see when exactly you need to press the button, it looks nice, but it's hard to see. With the "kjk kjk kjk kjk kjk" section it's doable because you can just listen to the music, but when there's four inputs right after eachother it's hard to know which one corresponds to which note.

5) There are way too many new patterns that you have to learn at once. One simple thing to make this easier is to have a pattern in isolation first, and then adding it to another pattern.

6) When I first played I played with the arrow keys. On top of everything else this made it literaly unplayable.

I deem it possible that you knew most of these, and either chose it to be this way anyway or decided to spend more time on the art, which is fabulous by the way, in that case this is way too much critique, but maybe you find it to be useful.

Also, in the web version the music started desyncing from the gameplay, which is hardly your fault, especially since you have a download available.

After two hours I finally figured out that all the inputs are monospaced in the hectic segments. I thought I had to do weird stuff with the timing, but it turns out I only have to keep the rhythm and press them in order. This kinda negates the "k    k k   k     k" point in point 3 I made earlier. It would've been very beneficial to have one of those lines that come at you.

The D range is also way too big, I got 17000 first round, which I don't think is that weird for a first round, and 130000 is still D? ... One hour later, 230000 is also still D... Again an hour later I finally got a C. 

I also figured out that combo doesn't do anything? Meaning I'd definetely give its prominent spot in the UI to the resonance meter or the score counter, or leave it empty as there's enough on screen as is. I'm not saying you can't show "max combo" in the end screen.

The art is definetely impressive and the gameplay is fun enough that I played through it a couple times even though it always ended with a D. 

(1 edit) (+1)

Hey, thanks so much for playing, and for sticking with it that long! Two hours of D ranks and you still came back to write all this, that honestly means a lot.

And yeah, you're pretty much right about everything lol. I only had about 2 days because of work and I spent most of it on the art, so the gameplay side barely got any testing or balancing. It shows.

The web desync is a browser audio thing, but I'll see if I can do anything about it.

I definitely want to keep working on this and patch it after the jam, and your comment is basically my to-do list now. Really glad you liked the art and still had fun with it. Thanks again, and looking forward to trying your game! <3