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(1 edit) (+2)

Okay, this game is great, but I have a bone to pick over a few things.
1. There is a significant difficulty spike from level 1 to level 2: it's much longer, there's way more complicated stuff thrown at you, and as Sadazen pointed out, the yarn seems to sometimes go out of sync with the music, making it very difficult to get down.
2. I think it's pretty unfair to penalize players for tapping the wrong key, especially when you introduce hitting two keys at once in level 2. I would've never gotten past that level had there not been a system to restore health (thanks for that).
3. My biggest complaint, why are the key presses randomized? I feel like that's completely antithetical to a rhythm game to randomize everything. This makes continuously retrying the same level over and over again feel so much worse because I can't memorize the patterns to get better, I can only really hope that the RNG is more favorable.
4. This is more minor, but I feel that the yarn lines and the pixel square needed to be, like on top of each other or something (think guitar hero). As it is I spent all my time looking at the left side of the screen and couldn't pay any attention to the square, so I couldn't see how far into the song I was.
With all that being said, the music is great, the art is great, it has a fantastic atmosphere, and I did find myself wanting to replay it just so I could get through it. I just think it could use a little bit of tightening up.

Also I found a bug in the game where if you spam a key and immediately lose at the start of a level, half the time the game seems to screw up upon reloading, making the square where you see the image and one ball of your health vanish (they're still there, but for some reason they're invisible.)

> There is a significant difficulty spike from level 1 to level 2:

Yep, you’re right. I wanted the first level to be almost like a tutorial that would go by easily, and then for the game to ramp up from there, but it’s a bit too steep of a jump. It’s tricky to gauge the right difficulty for a game jam!

> I think it's pretty unfair to penalize players for tapping the wrong key

This one we had to do, because otherwise players could just spam all keys over and over to get through every level. It does kinda mean that things snowball a bit though. Maybe I'll find a way to make it less of a penalty than ignoring a note entirely, maybe half a life or something?

> My biggest complaint, why are the key presses randomized? I can't memorize the patterns to get better, I can only really hope that the RNG is more favorable.

So there definitely is randomness but if it helps at all, the randomness is constrained. The frequency of the notes is controlled by a difficulty curve that I tuned for each song to try to match the intensity of the music to the challenge of the stitching. Here’s the curve for the second level: 


You’re totally right that it takes away the strategy of memorizing the song though, I only mention the curve stuff so you know that it’s not fully an RNG situation!

> I spent all my time looking at the left side of the screen and couldn't pay any attention to the square, so I couldn't see how far into the song I was.

Ugh, yes 100% this one hits. I struggled with this too, all this work building out the pixel “print out” thing and then the player never looks at it. Overlapping is a good thought, maybe I’ll try that out!

> With all that being said, the music is great, the art is great, it has a fantastic atmosphere, and I did find myself wanting to replay it just so I could get through it.

Thanks so much for playing it so thoroughly! I hope you make it through the 4 levels, I believe in you!