I'm glad you liked it! :)

The reasons I chose to make the player have to hit spacebar to collect the wordboxes are twofold:

• As you said, it brings a bit of variety to the gameplay apart from movement
• It's an active action (namely speaking), and I wanted to represent that with a separate button press

If the collection is not getting detected it might be a collider issue, I'll look into it. In the meantime, though, I can tell you that the game checks for the spacebar being held down, not for it being pressed. So you could theoretically play the entire game with the spacebar held down, or more realistically, hold it down a bit before you reach the wordbox. That might help. :)

As you say, player speed could use a boost and a progress bar would be nice. It's in my list of planned fixes. 

Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback!

Forgot to put a hint in during the opening dialogue as to what to do when first gaining control of the player. I'll definitely try making the intro more clear after the ratings are over, but until then all people can really do is trial and error. I value any feedback I can get, though! 

Also, the context for how it fits the theme can be seen in the intro dialogue or summarized in the description of the game. Thanks for playing!

Good idea, should be easily implemented. I'll look into it when ratings are over! Thanks for playing! :)

I'm sorry to hear that. I've had a lot of people saying it's difficult, but when you're the one making the game you eventually know it like the back of your hand which makes play testing really hard. I have a lot of things I want to fix after the ratings are over and I can edit again, and implementing difficulty modes might be something I could see to. I'm glad you liked the concept though. Thanks for the feedback! :)

The hands are currently running on static animations that just loop over and over again. Since the notes are randomized and are spawned pretty fast it would probably make the hands really janky if I pulled them towards where the notes appear. I was however originally planning on integrating a midi system where the notes being player are the actual notes being played in the song. It made it a bit too easy, but I might be able to do something with it in the future that could possibly support your idea of moving the hands appropriately.

In any case, thanks for playing and I'm glad you liked it! :)

Variety is always good. I just have an array of phrases and it picks a random index each time, so I'd just have to add more phrases to it. The wordboxes automatically fit to the content, so it's an easy fix. Colorblind modes are also something to consider, I'll look into it when ratings are over!

Thanks for the feedback and thanks for playing! :)

Glad you enjoyed it!

The link to the theme is definitely more story related than gameplay related. Although there is a bit of it in the gameplay as well, what with collecting wordboxes to encourage him and bring down his stress level etc. 

In any case, thanks for the feedback and thanks for playing! :)

Oh, that's cool! Thanks for the showcase! :)

I'm glad you liked the song, it was a blast to make! :)

Decreasing the velocity of the green notes is a good idea. After playing it a few times since the submission deadline I've realized that I think the player moves way too slowly as well, and when editing is enabled again I'll probably upload an update with a greater player velocity (if it feels like an improvement when play testing). These two fixes should help mitigate the issue.

Being repetitive is also something I'll try to do something about. I have some ideas that don't break the piano concept, but I had to balance making the game with university, so I didn't have the time to make anything too advanced.

Thanks for the feedback, and thanks for playing! :D

I was thinking I might make the player sprite flash green when collecting the green notes to make it more obvious. It might be a bit disruptive to make the entire screen pulse green, especially considering how much is going on around the player at the same time.

Thanks for the feedback, though, and I'm glad you enjoyed it! :)