I loved it but I loved it more unstructured as a puzzle game in the first few stage rather than playing on time to another composition. Which is to say playing with physics and noise entertains me a great deal. Im not sure if your choice of background structure is helping or hurting you. I also tried to break it a number of ways and it did not fail, so that was pretty cool. This game gives me a lot of ideas and its a lot of fun so thanks for that!
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Glad you liked it! Initially I wasn't going to make it a rhythm game at the end, but rather an animation/music video in a similar vein to "Pipe Dream" from Animusic or "Marble Machine" by Wintergatan. However, time was low and I couldn't make anything interesting for the instrument to play so I decided to end it with a rhythm game instead.
But a more unstructured and open sandbox approach sounds really interesting! I could see it being like a 3D version of Hanenbow from Electroplankton (DS)!
Im a musician, and also fall heavy into the 'exploratory' playtype, so perhaps it was natural for me to try to use it like an instrument. I remember Electroplankton, tho my favourite was the Korg DS1 cart which I used extensively for many years in recordings. I remember Wintergatan composition as well, tho for me it reminded of the `Ferris Bueller` intro scene. With BouncyCatchy I found it interesting to trap the marble to get very quick triggers (the dot chart at the bottom turning into a line) or use indirect reflections from the edges to force the marble to travel in different ways. It was very deep and rich interaction that could be lost in a more formal structure. Like, really the *emergent* play of this game could be SO strong, like Minecraft-level. Also I can see the benefit of minimizing 3d movement, I found it extremely intuitive coming in blind largely as the result of being fixed to the two axes of movement, that was a very clever and an invisible sort of interface development. It might be interesting to play with the compass widget for a scaling difficulty, multiple marble 'voices', multiplayer coop mode, or adding a special trigger that causes a chaotic waterfall of marbles.. you know, for funsies!