Game update

So the game was "playable" after 2.5 days of semi-serious and not that efficient work on it, but I had to type in every note track manually at that point, so I only made a test chart with a couple notes, and then I went to work on an editor.  That took a while but in the end I'm happy with how it looks (it's far from perfect yet but it does work).  So I finished that a few days ago, but then I realized I had to use it to make a chart before I could even play the game...  So I completed a chart two days ago.  For stuff that's still to do, well, there's a results screen, life and a life meter, editor improvements, implementing the song selection screen from Triple Beat into this game (I liked that one and I definitely don't want to make something like that again for a long time), creating high score files and then a file system for everything, and then work to make everything look nicer, minor adjustments and improvements, etc.  Oh and charts for songs.  I suppose that's pretty important too.

Scoring... I guess you could say the scoring I'm using is kind of a "feel-good" scoring.  DDR's scoring is 50% for greats and osu!'s is 33% for greats.  Well I'm giving 80% for greats (may change to 75% though, it was 70% initially).  First, if you're hitting the notes around the right time, I think that's pretty good.  And second, a higher score for greats puts more emphasis on not missing notes.  Then, the low end scores (similar to good and almost in DDR) are worth 30 and 15 points.  There's a way early penalty of -8 and finally a top rating (like DDR's Marvelous) that is worth 100 points, while the perfect rating is 4 less at 96.  The timing for Marvelous is pretty tough, with the hope that it will make a perfect score really difficult.  And that is something I want so that scores will always be improvable, and not so close to perfect that when you miss a single time it's like, "Well now it's just impossible to beat my high score."  What?!  No, I'm not frustrated with osu! or anything!
On the flip side, I intend to make a very insulting difficulty rating.  Hey, if I can nearly fc a song after playing it for a day, then that means it probably shouldn't be rated higher than a medium 4 (on a 0-10 scale) level.  And then easy will be a level that's easy.  For me.  And then I can watch people say "Hey, I'm pretty good at rhythm games so I'll try starting on medium" and then they fail in 5 seconds.  And I'll name the easiest level ultra-beginner with difficulties like .1.  With that said, I can't wait to see the hard and insane levels.

Also, I was going to make a video of what I have or at least take screenshots, but I don't feel like it at the time...  So maybe later.  It actually looks a lot like what I had for the rough drawing of it.

My Next Game

All right, so I'm really excited for this next game I'm making (more excited to play it than to make it, but I'll never get to play it if I don't make it).  My hope is that I will like it more than Pipelining and Triple Beat.  I liked both of those games, but Pipelining felt a bit repetitive and luck based, and Triple Beat no longer seems like a big change from normal rhythm games to me.  With Triple Beat I also ran into the problem that it was weird to have to hit a button off beat to change screens, but it was also weird to have the button to change screens be part of the beat (or at least I think it would be, but I never really tried it) because there's no indicator for changing screens, so when playing you would probably just hit it off beat anyway.  Anyway, the next game.

So it'll be an 8 button rhythm game.  And before you say something about me liking to have a lot of buttons in my games, let me say that it gives so much more options for what you can do with the game.  But I could always also just use only 4 buttons for one specific song, or just 6 buttons, or something.  At least, I'll probably keep the ultra-casual-beginner levels to 7 buttons max.  But yeah, 8 buttons (unless I don't like it and feel like changing it to 6), probably mapped by default to the keys S, D, F, ..., to L in a line.  A strategy could be moving your finger position to avoid using your pinkies or to just use your index and middle finger depending on where the notes are.
Now, there will be 8 hit icons, one for each button, in a line in the middle of the screen.  Then there will be balls that follow tracks through the hit icons, and when a ball moves through the hit icon you press the corresponding button.

Rough drawing of the main idea

The ball reverses when it reaches the end of the track, and the track lasts for a specified amount of time.  Well, that's the main idea; the rest are just the cool details that make the game interesting and more fun to play.