Rhythm Lines Update

The game actually turned out as I envisioned it.  I see it as a solid concept for a rhythm game.

Video with me playing the 2 hardest songs so far:


The game has a lot of freedom in where notes can be positioned.  Not as much as you might expect though: you can only have horizontal or vertical lines, and, due to how the information is stored, you can't have horizontal lines unless they connect to the note in another column.  That's not something I'm going to add in either, unless I completely remake the game.  The game and the editor were relatively simple to make specifically because everything was based on the fact that you only need to know the note timings and the columns, and the program will know where to draw the lines.  I could maybe add in diagonal lines, but it'd be tough, and I think the game is fine as it is.
The freedom that the game does have in note placement is good and bad.  It's easy to make a bad chart (have the lines go off the screen or the lines intersect confusingly or go through notes you don't actually hit, etc etc...), but you can also create interesting and challenging patterns, or patterns that are specific to the song.  It can be fun just watching the notes move around, especially on a song like Drum Lines with 4 different simultaneous beats all having notes to go with them.

I changed the scoring.  I knew the old scoring was putting an emphasis on hitting notes, but I didn't realize until I played it how much I personally disliked that type of scoring.  So, being my game, I dropped the point values for the middle ranges, so you can miss a few more notes but get a better score if you did a lot better with your accuracy in general.


The game is pretty hard.  You know a lot of people always see me do good at my own games and they say, "Well that's because you made the game."  But a lot of the time that doesn't matter.  Like in Pipelining, having made the game doesn't really give me any advantage other than knowing the very specifics of timings and scoring and such.  Making this game doesn't give me that much of an advantage either.  But, having made the charts themselves gives me a really big advantage.  I can get some sense of that when I play !rorriM (mirror) mode and suddenly the songs are really hard because I don't know the patterns as well anymore.  Memory and practice on specific charts is going to be significant for this game.  Not to say that it's not a factor in other rhythm games either though.  I'd say DDR is one of the easiest rhythm games to just play a song the first time and be able to do it if you're good enough at the game (the only exception being songs with pauses or bpm changes).  For a game like Beatmania or probably Guitar Hero, there could be difficult patterns for a specific song that you might not be able to do first try.  For a game like osu!, there are often hidden notes or confusing patterns that might require memory.  This game is a lot like that, as there could be things that are hard to predict on a first play, only even more so for this game.  Surely you could get good at this game, but it might be more of a matter of getting good at the individual songs, rather than the game itself.  That's not really the way I prefer it, but oh well.  Anyway, I'll have to wait until someone makes some more charts.  Of course it'll have to be someone who has access to the editor and a very good understanding of how it works, and how to make a good chart and all that.
With that said, I think it'll be tough for other people to pick up.  But then again, if you were pretty good at rhythm games and learning new things, I think you could pass a 1 difficulty song pretty easily, and probably a 2 difficulty one too.  If I made more charts in the 2-3 range it could be fun for someone who, you know, didn't make the game and all it's charts.  That 4 was pretty hard though.  And then I can't even pass that 5 one with mirror on.  And the 9 on Drum Lines... I think it deserves it.  I'll have to drop the rating if I ever pass it though.

The song select and results screens are all right, but I would describe a lot of the images as just placeholders to be replaced by better ones eventually.  And because they aren't things that make the game more exciting or interesting or fun, those better ones aren't going to be made (by me, at least), because I don't dislike the current ones that much.
I added in that timing data graph.  It's pretty useful.  I think I'd need to play a song with more notes to see if the graph looks normal (Gaussian) to me.

Last thing... the songs themselves.  I have a couple brand new never before heard songs, and a couple classics and other songs to add in to complete the undisputed best collection of songs in the world.  After that, I'll go on to some other songs.

Well, I guess there is that thing about, you know, sharing the game with other people.  I said I would pay attention to not coding thousands of lines with no comments... yeah I couldn't do it.  But the song list was chosen for another reason, and not simply because they are the best songs in the world.  Once I fill out the difficulties for the songs, I guess that maybe I will have to look into seeing what I might want to do if I were going to consider trying and sharing this game.  Maybe, you know.  I said maybe, you know.