Balatro on a piano roll is a cool concept! Creative interpretation of the theme too. I’d love to see this idea expanded on. Some feedback/constructive criticism in case you feel like working on this some more…
Gameplay:
- I don’t think permadeath makes any sense for this game, unlike Balatro, because there’s no randomness. If you lose, I don’t see why you should be forced to replay the first levels in exactly the same way just to retry the one level you failed on. Now, if you added some randomness, like choosing random instruments to unlock or random challenge modifiers or mandatory starting instruments for certain levels, permadeath might be justifiable.
- As you pointed out, the order of placement matters, meaning you can violate the rules if you just do it in the right order. This doesn’t really make sense, although I get that it’s easier to implement.
- I wonder if you could come up with better placement rules to encourage creating an interesting song. Right now it’s pretty flexible so you can kinda make whatever. I was able to cheese every level by spamming crash cymbals.
- Speaking of which, is it just me or are most woodwinds objectively worse than the hi hat and crash cymbals? I was afraid of using them because I thought I would lose (causing permadeath) so I just stuck to my dumb cymbal strategy.
- A free-play mode where you can just make a song would be fun.
The game could definitely use some quality of life features. I know it’s hard to justify squeezing them a jam game, but I figured I’d mention them. Think of these ideas as low-hanging fruit to improve the player experience.
- Option to fast forward playback (increase BPM).
- Button to skip to the next round once you’ve reached the target score.
- Save your song between levels (with a button to delete all if you do want to clear it).
- Left-clicking an instrument should automatically deselect the previous instrument.
- The instrument shouldn’t be deselected after placing it, to make it easier to place multiple copies of the same instrument. Or you could require holding shift or something for multi-placement. Right now it’s annoying to click the instrument, move the mouse to click the note space, and then move all the way
- There should be a way to restart the game/go back to the main menu etc.
- It would be nice if there was a preview to tell you for sure if you were gonna trigger the multiplier for placing an instrument. Sometimes it doesn’t trigger when I think it should or vice versa, which is especially painful when placing something expensive like a guitar.
- I kinda like how you made an unncessarily cool shimmer effect for the backgrounds.
Some bugs/random issues:
- You can place drums on row 1 of the “Woodwinds” area.
- On the first trumpet level, the drum preview sprites were way larger than normal?
- Guitars are considered woodwinds? News to me lol
You’re probably aware of a lot of these things but I just wanted to point them out in case it’s helpful. Cheers!