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Is my rhythm game really too hard?

A topic by bushafd created 91 days ago Views: 178 Replies: 3

Viewing posts 1 to 3

bushafdSubmitted91 days ago

So with the voting coming to an end in less than a week, my submission Waves Don't Die has been met with pretty positive reception. But there has been one constant theme with the responses, that the game is too hard. To be honest, I didn't want my game to be easy, I wanted it to take at least a couple tries to pass as the inspiration for the game is Rhythm Heaven which is pretty difficult. But have I gone too far with the difficulty? While I do agree with the sentiment that I could have added more indicators for when the rhythm shifts, some have also told me to make the timing more lenient, give more visual cues on when to press, etc.
For more specifics, the input window for my game is 200ms for good, and 100ms for perfect, here is some information for the timing windows of other rhythm games for reference, https://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/thread?threadid=11990.
So here is my question to you, is my rhythm game really too hard? Give it a try if you want, https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2025/rate/4081859.
Also be sure to give some love to the artists because they truly made the game what it is.

POOGLIESSubmitted87 days ago

I can think of two possibilities off the top of my head:

The web version is messing with the latency. Have you tried it on browser to check the timing is what you are getting locally developed?
Selection bias - aka. Your audience is game devs worn out from a month long game jam, fat from christmas dinners, trying to rate as many games as possible >_< Maybe it’s fine but we’re a bad audience lol

I liked lots about your game, but i did think the timing was fairly punishing.

POOGLIESSubmitted87 days ago (1 edit)

Nevermind! I figured it out. You need to extend the grace period to BEFORE the tween reverses direction too.

After replaying and careful examination, I was tapping the key just before the ball hits the wall and reverses, causing a fail every time. The ones i hit were by cutting it closer and closer until i accidentally would edge over into the start of the reverse tween and suddenly score.

Once i noticed what was happening, and conciously decided to press down after the change of direction, the beat became significantly easier to hit. This also explains why i didn’t even realise there was a “good” until you mentioned it, because the only ones i would ever hit were perfects.

It’s still possible that my other two theories are amplifying of course :P but basically my hypothesis is that the people finding it difficult are pre-empting the change of direction.

bushafdSubmitted86 days ago(+1)

With the jam being over now, I've updated the game. I didn't change the timings at all, but instead I added two things to help give the player more information. I added lines to let the players know when to press and the wave particle now changes colors with each color representing a different state. Green lets the player know it is in slower speed, Blue lets the player know that the particle will change speeds soon, and Red lets the player know that the particle is faster. Also you were correct in your first point with the web version having issues, but it is related to the sounds, what I mean is that the song might be slightly delayed in the web version. I've noticed when playing on browser, the music sometimes doesn't perfectly align with the gameplay the way it normally does which I couldn't fix unfortunately.