Looking for playtester -rhythm game

[grafik2d]

I have this game that is about ready to go gold and I would like to have people to give me some feedback. So I can polish the game a bit before it's official release on newgrounds.

link: http://rhythmgamenation.com/

Description:
It's a guitar hero clone that uses youtube videos for the tracks. User can build new tracks with their favorite video and submit so everyone can play them.

Controls:
In normal mode you play by holding your keyboard like guitar, holding the 1,2,3 keys and strumming with the arrow keys. In laptop mode you don't need to strum, just press 1,2,3 keys when they reach the bar.

All comments and suggestions are welcome.

[grafik2d]

Not a single reply in 6h did I do something wrong?

[GeoKureli]

At 3/29/14 07:18 PM, grafik2d wrote: Not a single reply in 6h did I do something wrong?

Just started the game, gonna write as a I play. first thing I noticed, the highlight button sound is the most piercing thing I have ever heard, tone it the fuck down!

Played the FF IX song, thought I did pretty well, got a whopping 0,000,000 points. The lanes were lighting up and everything, not sure what went wrong. no instructions found, giving up, angrily. 0 points is inexcusable, I eat rhythm games for breakfast, so either it's a bug, or you're game's margin of error is retardedly small.

you're game looks cool, using youtube videos is neat, you're song charts are decent. fix that stuff and I'll play it again.

[grafik2d]

Just started the game, gonna write as a I play. first thing I noticed, the highlight button sound is the most piercing thing I have ever heard, tone it the fuck down!

Will do, I kinda overdid it to make sure you can ear it over the main theme.

Played the FF IX song, thought I did pretty well, got a whopping 0,000,000 points. The lanes were lighting up and everything, not sure what went wrong. no instructions found, giving up, angrily. 0 points is inexcusable, I eat rhythm games for breakfast, so either it's a bug, or you're game's margin of error is retardedly small.

So I just tested it and it looks fine, so my guess is you were playing with laptop mode set to OFF. Basically Laptop mode is like DDR and normal mode is like Guitar Hero. My next project is going to be DDR control all the way.

You can switch mode anytime by clicking the button at the bottom of the screen. The instructions are under the game, but most people who played don't read them. I really need to figure a way to make people read the instruction

[GeoKureli]

At 3/31/14 08:31 PM, grafik2d wrote: Will do, I kinda overdid it to make sure you can ear it over the main theme.

it's better now, but still aweful. it's not as loud any more but the tone is still too high, and the shape of the sound could be shorter and simpler.

So I just tested it and it looks fine, so my guess is you were playing with laptop mode set to OFF. Basically Laptop mode is like DDR and normal mode is like Guitar Hero. My next project is going to be DDR control all the way.

That was definately my issue, and the default mode is a mind fuck, but I'm sure there's an easier song I could start with, if not, make one, in fact make the first song something a baby could pass. I had a similar issue when I tried to make a rhythm game. I got good at it really fast because I had practice when I was making it; all my levels were really hard to others because of that.

Other notes. the blue flash on strumming is cool, but it seems to cause lag. maybe shortening the length would help. In general, streaming a video and having a rhythm game is a tall order, lag kills.

Could job on syncing the notes up, I'm in chrome, which is different from other browsers because its flash player had audio lag. rhythm games needs to be set up a special way to work in chrome, and your worked fine. There was some lag spikes that made notes jump a bit.

All I can say is work hard on optimization and make sure your enterframe performance is light. You seem to be pumping out content for it pretty fast, so your game should be really popular.

[GeoKureli]

At 3/31/14 09:05 PM, GeoKureli wrote: it's better now, but still aweful. it's not as loud any more but the tone is still too high, and the shape of the sound could be shorter and simpler.

just remembered my headphones at work are way worse than the ones at home. it's probably the same as last I heard.

[grafik2d]

Thank you for the comment, I haven't uploaded any change yet, I'm working on a tutorial/mode selection screen so people can compare both mode in action. The guitar hero mode makes more sense when you hold the keyboard like a guitar, but no one does it.

The final fantasy song is kind of a stress test to see if the timing would remain consistent with that much notes. I know I need to make more songs thought I really suck at track design. It's partly why I wanted to include the track editor in the game so people could make better track than me and keep the game fresh with new content.

I'm still not 100% please with the smoothness of how the note rise but I can tell you I squeeze everything I could given flash limitation and the fact that the youtube video is streaming as the song is being played. I might try to switch to blitting and bitmapData on a future upgrade.

I haven't tested in chrome only fire fox and explorer and they seemed fine. Explorer actually looked a bit better but that must have been my imagination.

I post when the new version will be uploaded.

[GeoKureli]

At 4/1/14 09:14 PM, grafik2d wrote: I'm still not 100% please with the smoothness of how the note rise but I can tell you I squeeze everything I could given flash limitation and the fact that the youtube video is streaming as the song is being played. I might try to switch to blitting and bitmapData on a future upgrade.

I've never looked into this, but I'm going to have to soon for work. Apparently flash has 3 main layers. displayobjects show up on top, under that you have layers rendered by Stage3D, under all of that there's something called StageVideo. Which is GPU drawn video. if you make sure there's no display objects over it, you could increase performance by using stageVideo.

First tutorial I could find

[grafik2d]

At 4/1/14 10:21 PM, GeoKureli wrote: I've never looked into this, but I'm going to have to soon for work. Apparently flash has 3 main layers. displayobjects show up on top, under that you have layers rendered by Stage3D, under all of that there's something called StageVideo. Which is GPU drawn video. if you make sure there's no display objects over it, you could increase performance by using stageVideo.

First tutorial I could find

That sound pretty cool I'll definitively check it out this weekend. I also made a couple of change to better inform the players about what they are suppose to do, and I also tone done the mouse over sound for the buttons. Overall the changes I made this week really improved the quality of the game.

[RobThanatos]

At 4/1/14 09:14 PM, grafik2d wrote: I haven't tested in chrome only fire fox and explorer and they seemed fine. Explorer actually looked a bit better but that must have been my imagination.

I wouldn't bother testing it with Chromes inbuilt flash player. It's terrible with rhythm games because the flash player makes everything out of sync.

I had no problems with the sounds the menu buttons made or anything. I failed the first song I played, but achieved a few points. You should probably have it on laptop mode by default, I don't know. I can see a lot of people getting confused there because they don't read anything.

In the song selection, whenever I hover my mouse over a song, the background music stops. I don't know if I'm meant to be waiting for a preview song to stream or what. I waited for 30 seconds in silence, and nothing.

[grafik2d]

At 4/4/14 11:43 PM, ImmaKitty wrote: In the song selection, whenever I hover my mouse over a song, the background music stops. I don't know if I'm meant to be waiting for a preview song to stream or what. I waited for 30 seconds in silence, and nothing.

Yeah it's suppose to star streaming a preview of the song thought sometimes it can't find the video so there is just silence. I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with that.