Score: 3
"As a developer to a developer..."
date: July 19, 2007
Since you're using AS3 and this Flash is decent, I'll give you only constructive criticism. (Though I would've wanted to vote higher.)
First off, a rhythm game HAS to have the notes synced to the songs. You didn't have that. The note was supposed to be hit at least half a second after the beat was played. I REALLY didn't like that. Blaming lag won't help you because you're using AS3. I use AS3 also and my game's "off-syncedness" is not as great as yours.
Next... You tried to use computeSpectrum to change the height of the bars. Good idea, if only it worked correctly. Throughout the first two songs (since I couldn't handle more), only the W bar was moving significantly. Bad idea?
Another big problem about the game is that you made the range between missing it and getting it TOO small. I've mentioned this to a lot of other rhythm games but this one just has it too drastic. When one of the notes touch the "marker" (or the thing at the bottom, dunno what it's called), it should be allowed as a hit, especially since it was off beat by so much.
Another problem was the preloader. I know you said that the preloader is delayed in some browsers, but that's not true at all. How you made the preloader was wrong. (Wow, big words?) All your music files were probably "Exported on the first frame." It shouldn't be. The preloader is on the first frame. If you export it all on the first frame, your first frame would be like 3mb where as the rest is just .4mb (example). Uncheck all of those exports and manually put all the songs on the second frame (on Stop, so nobody will hear it). If you don't do this, the preloader will never function correctly.
I must say, however, the graphics were well done. Good job at that.
July 19, 2007
Author's Response:
Thanks, I appreciate the review, there are a few things I feel I should clear up however.
In regard to the notes being offbeat I have tested on multiple machines and in those cases the note timing was very precise. However I have had some reviews that have stated the opposite, so I guess I can only say that on some computers it works as it should, others not so. This is probably also true with what you say about about the height of the bars.
And secondly with the preloader, for the record I did set in the publish settings to export the library assets on a later frame. This however did not work as it should have (it still exported on the first frame) so I unchecked the export on first frame box for all my sounds in the library and attempted to export them by placing them on the timeline. This resulted in errors however. I spent hours attempting to fix this issue, but because time was becoming very limited I decided to cuts my loses, heavily compress my sounds, and just export with a faulty preloader. I am not trying to justify that the preloader was faulty, but I did in fact consider that the sounds were being exported on the first frame.
