That was a well-done minigame! It’s quite simple and effective, though I think the immersion/goals/narrative/challenge didn’t feel very enticing for me. I think if this had some kind of narrative attached to it, it would become better. Like, even just having a highscore, or maybe we’re a monkey and bananas are falling from the sky, and they fall either in front of me, on the left of me, or on the right of me. If I’m not fast enough another monkey will grab it. This for example would be essentially the same mechanics, but have a narrative with it that would make it immediately more fun and exciting.
I felt that the third level was too hard for me. I got to level 8, but I think the time / “too slow” penalization is too unforgiving. It made me have to try to press buttons faster, but that gave me just maybe under a second to process where the sound came from. Further, people who are unable to have these reflexes for physical disability reasons, or assistive technologies, any other reason, for them it might be physically impossible to even play it. So I think that would also be taken into account.
Lastly, I want to say that I really loved how we could pick our own sound to catch. I found most sounds painful for my ears, but this gave me an opportunity that many games don’t: to choose the sound that was the most pleasing for me! Which was sound 5. Sound number 7 was also not painful, and I think it was the last one that felt fun but wasn’t comfortable enough for me to pick it.
I think the game could improve with some few ideas:
- Narrative and setting (like I mentioned);
- A time setting to let us choose how much time we have to press a key before it’s game over for being too slow;
- A leaderboard - maybe being able to compete with other people, and see how was the best player in the world!
- Not ‘game overing’ if we miss to catch a sound. Just lower our score. I get that these are different kinds of game, so it’s up to you, of course. But for example if the goal were to get to at least [X] points, we could have to play all levels to try to get it; and maybe we could still lose; but it wouldn’t just make us lose because we took 0.5 seconds to react once. It’s less unforgiving while it could still be extremely challenging, depending on the punctuation it allows.
I’m wonder also what’s the maximum amount of points we can get per level. I figured it was 65, because that was my maximum. But I wonder if that’s actually correct or if that was still my reflexes.
Good job! Curious about your other entry, as well.