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.

There are so many interesting patterns to consider.  Some examples:

Roll across all 8 buttons

A 4 button pattern: this one would be sdhj<->fgkl

Different beats: quarter note on the left and eighth note on the right, or actually maybe half note and quarter note

You can do any kind of double beat or even triple beat patterns, where you have to follow 2 or 3 beats at the same time.  (That's one of the things I like about Stepmania 2 players.  Doubles has 8 keys, but even on doubles you never get to do 2 different beats at the same time.)  Part of the challenge in the game would be learning to read the notes, and there are so many different ways to place notes, even when it's the same notes with the same timing.  There will also be different colored balls that will move at different speeds.  Right now I'm thinking probably 6 different speeds in total.
The last feature isn't something specific to this game, but it was my plan for the next rhythm game I made to put in a chart showing the timings of how far off you hit the notes.

Something like this

As a player, it'd be nice to know the information it would give, such as if you tended to hit notes early or late, and how early or late, and how consistent you were at getting the right timing, and so on.  And personally, I've wanted to know what the distribution would look like.  Is it normal?  Are improvements reflected by a smaller standard deviation?  I've been interested in modeling and simulating the performance of a DDR player, and this information would be really helpful for that.

My thoughts on programming: Well as of now I have the general idea of how I'll do it pretty well laid out, but I haven't started actually coding it.  If I could get myself to work on it seriously and efficiently, I think I could have a working game in 3 days.  However, I haven't been able to do either recently, so my guess is it'll be 1-2 weeks before it's working.  It's also possible that I find that I have no motivation to code it at all, and it won't be done until the end of summer.  But, I do believe I will make it eventually, just because of how much I want to try it.

One last thing.  I know I've never shared any of the games I've made online, but it's not really because I don't want to.  It's more that I've never been part of any coding or game design community, never read any of their forums, never learned the topic "sharing your programs online" in any class I've taken, I mean I've hardly ever even shared files online at all.  However, the thought that this might be a game that I will share with others will be in the background as I make the game, so that I might avoid some of my own arguments of, "Well I didn't do everything to completion because I never planned on sharing this game, and now I don't feel like finishing any of that" or "Well it's 1200 lines with no comments and all the variables are random 2 letter combinations," and so on.  And then if it all works out I'll say, "Hey, I actually want to share this game," and I'll look up all the options more seriously and stuff.