itch.io

Hey, thanks for the feedback. I feel you on all the issues you pointed out. Most of them were something that I had already taken a note of while writing the code, but I decided not to try sorting them out just yet. I've no spare time to put into the project for now and I needed to get the project out for the jam, with warts and all.

Arrows for the symbols were something I was originally going to change before uploading. I knew the symbols as they are now aren't the most readable kind. But, as you develop stuff like this, you get used to the things on screen and become blind to the faults.

The overlapping symbols was an unintended, can't call it a bug, but maybe a coding behavior. I left it in for the most part to make the middle game more difficult due to the lack of symbol variation. What the game expects from you then is to let some of the symbols pass. Essentially if you cherry pick the symbols you can manage to hit in time, you should be alright unless the RNG royally pisses on you. It's not very well explained, but when the symbols hit the right side of the screen, you don't take a hit unless your "score" is too low. I thought about showing the score at first, but then decided to keep it hidden. Roughly speaking you can let as many notes pass as you manage to hit properly. It's a bit of a shitty mechanic, but hey! I was short on time. :D

The right side of the screen is mostly unused, yes. The original idea was to have symbols sometimes come from the right side as well, but the code is such a mess that getting it work reliably for the jam would have taken too much time to fix.

The button layout I think is customisable to a degree before the project is packed. The game is made on Pico-8, a fantasy console, and is very limited in what you can set it up to do input wise. The default keys are z,X and Arrow Keys and I'm not sure if there's any way of changing them from what they are hard-coded to once the game is out.

Most of the faults are from rushed development time. I only had a few days to learn how to code and make a game. The main goal for me was mostly just getting it done, or just getting the game working without breaking. I've never coded a game before so this is all very new to me in many ways.

But all critique is welcome. I might poke around in the game code and fix most if not all of the issues you brought up once I've more time in my hands. The story and dialogue kind of also end abrubtly due to not having enough time, so maybe that'll change too.