Thanks for the great feedback. I taught myself JS and HTML, so yeah, gonna fix the panning logic and the other stuff you said.
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To be clear, I think your panning logic sounded great to me!
I noticed that you’re using Howler, so you may have less control over the sounds as you would with the Web Audio API, but there are some things you might consider to make it smoother. For example, there is a version of each sound for each channel (left, right, and center) and they stop and start whenever the player changes lanes. I would try to keep them playing, associating each obstacle with a new sound instance of the centered version, and change the pan of the instance itself when changing lanes. (Maybe you’ll need to tweak other parameters like volume and filtering too.)
The nice thing about this approach is how it would allow you to have four or five lanes instead. There’s more continuity! That could open a lot more possibilities in your game design. (This is based on a second read of your code, but you know it much better than me!)
Hello,
I've updated the game now to only use one sound for center, left and right and to pan this sound accordingly to the left and right, that fixed the volumes as well as well as the not hearing the canes and skateboards on the left and right properly. The sounds of not hearing the coins before picking them up is intentional since you only should hear when you collected coins. I'm more used to mainstream online games I guess, even if I'm blind since birth I played a game on a german website where you flew with a UFO and you collected stars and dodged commets and you only heard the "ding" sound of the stars when you collected them, so maybe that's why I'm used to such things and had this idea in mind as well.
Thanks for the update! And no worries, there’s no need to justify your design. The UFO game sounds like a pretty cool piece of your game’s DNA!
As you continue on your game development journey, one of the most important skills you’ll be practicing is how to process feedback. You’re going to get a lot of feedback like mine, which comes from a place that doesn’t fully understand your game like you do. As someone who makes pretty weird things, I encounter it every day, and find that a lot of it is mostly matters of taste. (Or bugs!) And here you succeeded in filtering what everyone is saying, incorporated whatever you found fitting, and released an update today. Congrats for your first update for your first game!