> 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!