itch.io

Thanks for the review!

> You can actually always press all 4 Buttons at the same time since there's no penalty to hitting notes when you shouldn't.

Rhythm games either decide to punish "ghosttapping" (tapping without notes present) or they don't. I chose to go with the latter to make it easier for beginners with a hitmiss window of 100ms (lower = easier), however it's true that the notes on easier difficulties are spaced apart too much to get punished. It would require the hitmiss window to be at least 600ms at the beginning of easy difficulty (1min/25bpm/4 notes per measure = 600ms per note), at which point I could simply punish ghosttapping altogether which, to be fair, is more accurate when comparing to actual piano playing.

It's unfortunate... You tried really hard to add a theme to the game, being dragons and dungeons and magic and all, but the PDF design itself doesn't represent it... Try coloring the dominoes (like the dragon and empty dominos) with different colors, or just add more flashy designs to the dominos themselves. Maybe something with a magic circle, I don't know.

It's unfortunate the idea isn't fully implemented.

It's impressive you didn't use any game engine/framework for this.

There's a lack of replayability.

No audio.

Unfortunately too far from finished, so it pains me to give this a 1 star rating.

Your game idea is very difficult to wrap your head around as someone who wants to understand what the final product was supposed to be. I understand the right side of picking a card that determines the amount of your different types of actions in the next turn, but what's beyond that?

It's also difficult to call this a bullet hell, when it's closer to a round based strategy game... The bullet hell genre is well defined as an action-packed genre. Just call it a strategy game where you outsmart your opponents by moving and placing projectiles.

Honestly, when you play the game you have no idea what's happening. There's no round structure, nor is there any explanation for what your goal is. The theme also isn't presented well at all. You merge with a slot machine? Uhhh ok... You combine weapons? That's not obvious at all! I would've focused more on the combination aspect of the weapons and designed the game around that. The intro cutscene was nice I guess?

The web build is quite laggy. Doesn't mix well with rhythm games, which can require high precision at millisecond levels. The timing window for a full-scoring hit in rhythm games is usually somewhere around +-50ms, highly competitive games have windows of +-20ms for the maximum judgement, and some players are consistent enough to hit at +-5ms accuracy under certain circumstances. I don't know how large you chose your windows though. Did you even do it time based or is it position based?

The resulting patterning isn't particularly fun to play (from a rhythm game enthusiasts' perspective), and the notes aren't quantized to the music. But that's nitpicking at a high level. You could improve the gameplay by focusing on 4 towers that can be upgraded, which increases the complexity of the tower's rhythm. That way you have more than 4 "difficulty levels" in complexity (one whenever you add a new lane).

Here's the main issue: How does the player find out what the towers actually do? It matters during the building phase, but the game doesn't tell you. That's ok, in regular tower defense games a player can just look at the tower while the wave is coming and figure it out from the behavior. But the issue is that you can't do that, because you're busing looking at the bottom and hitting the notes. So you never actually find out what they do.

It's also not obvious how the performance during the rhyhm game affects the towers. Do they stop shooting, or do less damage?

Overall it doesn't really feel like a true "fusion" of genres, it's just two games you play alternatingly that don't really interact with each other. You don't think about the rhythm game while building, and neither do you think about the tower defense while playing.

Known issues in the GameJam release build:

• Keysounds don't play... it's a shame, because I actually put quite a bit of effort into making them sound halfway decent...
• Horrible balancing unless you can play rhythm games well. You likely won't get far even on easy difficulty
• Modifiers don't always do what they promise, but that's part of finding out funny combinations yeah?
• The specializations aren't explained well at all. "Jacks" are consecutive notes in a single column. It's also not obvious how much impact rearranging the song actually has on the total score.
• The labels on the keys don't match with the lanes. Please use DFJK like explained in the tutorial.
  
• The tutorial happens too quickly, not enough time to read.

Would benefit from better scaling, use a smaller number of available objects (like 4) with obvious effects (like ones that only do 2/0/0), then slowly add more complex objects to the pool as the game progresses. This leads the player to learn the object effects more naturally.

I would also reduce the number of requests and focus fulfilling a single request with high accuracy. 

Controls are a bit janky, would feel a lot better to control if you enter camera mode by holding RMB!

Tutorial would help a lot! The right player doesn't know how to play the game :(

The player goal is a bit unclear... objective based game direction would help, for example to destroy x item y times

It would be better to view the item stats before picking it up!