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12/19/2022: Long, long, LONG overdue content update! Highlights are:
The vast majority of these updates were intended for shortly after launch, but life and other projects happened. Hope you enjoy! If you find any bugs, please let me know!
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In Maestro Nav, you play as a sound wave! You've been sitting inside of a dusty old stereo for ages, but one fateful day, an old friend comes back to play you. It's a DJ you've known for years, and he needs your help: he's performing for a party, but it's been a while since he's played, and he's feeling nervous. Some of his bad vibes got on the record he was handling, and you need to make sure to dodge them on your way out of the stereo. Also, turns out you're not the only one that's been sitting around in that thing; the stereo's particles have started needing canes to get around, and have started trying new hobbies, like cooking. Space is at a premium inside of a cramped stereo, though, so they killed two birds with one stone, and made themselves some cane spatulas. Don't let them hit you, they hurt as bad as a swing from a geezer's cane and a swat from a mediocre chef's spatula put together! On the bright side, they've been growing some carrots for their new adventures in cooking, and those look pretty good... after grabbing one, using it will heal one of your hearts (of which sound waves have three; common knowledge among audiophiles), but if you hold off until you've got two, you can turn invincible for four seconds, and barrel right through those bad vibes and that stereo junk! With all that headed your way, think you can last through the whole song?
Arrow keys to move up and down (note that you can loop to the bottom lane from the top, and vice-versa), and space bar to activate your ability.
Made for Newgrounds' Flash Forward Jam in 2021, this serves as a personal "goodbye to Flash" for me. The first game idea I ever had after visiting Newgrounds back in 2009 was a Guitar Hero rip-off with licensed songs, drums controlled with a webcam, and vocals via a plugged-in mic (nevermind that I didn't have a webcam yet, and my highest-quality mic was from "Hey You, Pikachu!" on the N64). I thought it would be a very fitting end to the platform that made me fall in love with Newgrounds if I were to loop back around to the first idea I ever had for a Flash game, and never came through with (which is actually a blessing, in hindsight). Plenty of things about that original idea were awful (including the original name: "Maestro Master"), though, so I wanted to just pull out the DNA, which boiled down to one thing: a nice, simple rhythm game! I wanted to flip things around, though: if most rhythm games are about hitting objects in time, why not try avoiding them? On top of all that, I knew I wanted the soundtrack to reflect the time that I came to NG, and the title "Positive Vibes" fit so perfectly, it felt like destiny.
Hope you have as much fun playing thing as I did working on it! There are a few odds and ends I'd like to add in an update, but for the sake of good sportsmanship, I won't be updating until after the judging for the jam is completed, except for emergencies (i.e. game-breaking bugs). If you enjoy this, though, keep an eye out for future features!
Very fun
I like the concept and the whole idea of music is a plus but do think adding in more options more effects and music elements would be a plus So my Initial reaction was that one differant by the end of the game This contains some good visuals and content that was loaded with some excitment It was very acceptable of being a great game entry, It thrived on all the elements and was a top notch submission, Could have a few additions
~X~
Hey, thank you for playing, I appreciate it! And I agree, I think the game could've used more content. Glad you had a good time though!
A very nice game! keep it up!
Thanks so much, glad you enjoyed it! Still planning on getting an update out for this soon enough!
hate it
its not my fault if a rage but its fun but dont play it when you rage a lot
Sorry you weren't a fan!
sometimes the music makes the game for me and this definitely was awesome
Thanks, I'm really glad to hear you enjoyed it!
It's an okay game, but pretty basic. The things you have to avoid come pretty slowly and often it obstacles are clustered in two lanes while one remains wide open so you can just sit there with no risk of hitting something. The different hazards sliding around would probably feel a lot more like music if you had some kind of guide lines indicating which quarter/eighth note they were inside of. That, plus a more aggressive layout of hazards, could force the player to tap along to the beat. Finally, some kind of pulsing from the sprites is a great way to immerse the player in the music. Right now I can imagine it would be pretty easy to play this without sound at all, which is never a good sign for rhythm games.
Balance-wise the ability is kind of weird. I used invulnerability a couple times and restored a heart like once, but since the game is pretty easy these mechanics mostly went unused. There's one really hard section near the beginning but the rest is all pretty easy to do without hitting a hazard at all.
The graphics (specifically the player) are cute but get old very fast with basically no background and only four sprites (player, two hazards, carrot.) The song also feels longer than I would have liked. For something short like this, it might have been more fun to have three 1:30-2:00 songs with varying difficulties.
Technically speaking there are a handful of bugs involving things that should be deleted (the heart and transition animation.) Are you trying to use unloadMovie on these objects? Ruffle doesn't support these yet, so you have to swapDepth to a positive value and then call removeMovieClip.
Yeah, I definitely see where you're coming from with your notes about the musical aspects, especially making the player tap along to a beat; there are a couple points where the player has to do that, but it isn't really consistent enough to get a player into a good flow, I think. I'm getting mixed feedback on the difficulty, funny enough; people playing on mobile think it's super hard, and the people on PC think it's super easy. It might be that the mobile buttons are too small to hit reliably, so there's some artificial difficulty in there; I'm gonna make a note to make those buttons bigger, and see if that evens things out. The pulsing is a great point too; there actually were pulsing animations early on, but I took them out for the sake of getting the game to run more smoothly. I'm planning on untangling some of my spaghetti code that I cobbled together to hit the deadline, and I've got my fingers crossed that that'll get things running smoothly enough that I can confidently put the pulsing animations back, and not worry about lag throwing off the rhythm of items spawning.
Balance-wise, funny enough, the abilities used to be switched (invul was 1 carrot, recovering health was 2). I think the way it's set up now is a little more interesting in terms of the mental "should I/shouldn't I?" play of when to use your carrots, but yeah, I could see PC players not using it that much. Once I get those mobile adjustments in, and I tweak the level design, that might even things out and make the abilities feel more valuable.
Definitely 100% agree w/ the note about the background & art getting old, fast- a scrolling BG of a motherboard (so it looks like you're actually *traveling through a stereo*) was in the works but had to get cut. That's one of the first things getting put back in. As for song length, yeah, I definitely see what you mean. I'm not totally sure if I'll add another song in a future update (maybe an encore kind of thing?), but if I do, it'll definitely be significantly shorter than this one. 5 minutes is probably pushing the upper limit here.
Surprised to hear about the deleting bugs; I didn't see any of that in my testing, but I'll definitely have to take a look again, thanks for pointing that out! Funny enough, I had no clue Ruffle didn't support unloadMovie for a while early on, and I was ripping my hair out trying to figure out what was up when it didn't work. Everything here is using removeMovieClip though.
All that said, I wanted to say thanks for writing such a thorough review! It's really great to be able to get clear feedback like this. Thanks a ton for taking the time to do that, and for playing!
