| I profoundly appreciate your positive and detailed response. So let's starting addressing your considerations and questions: 1. The playing doesn't quite line up with the music at times: You absolutely nailed. In this particular gameplay the penalization when you miss a concrete note is so low that you hardly notice that the song and the playing is async playing. With this I mean that you GENERATE sound only when the note placed somewhere in the grid is touched in a determined interval time before that note would appear in the real MIDI.So for example:
A4 appears at 01:30:234. The player would then be prompted with a color gradient animation 1 SECOND before that (in this case: 01:29:234 in the gameplay). So the gradient intensifies until 600ms before the note appears in the MIDI (this threshold was built via experimentation and several neurological research about time response to visual stimulus). So the player now CAN touch the note to be perceived by the system as WELL PLAYED. If the touch is placed in this interval the note would be effectively reproduced at the associated time in the REAL MIDI. This system design choice was made because with this manipulation the overall sound quality was reproducible and constant among every play and close to the real MIDI (song). 2. Metronome: Once again, you nailed it. If you go to the beginning of the video you will see that we already thought about the learning curve of the game. So there were 3 MODES respectively, each one with a different tempo. Easy: tempo is x0.5
Moderate: tempo is x0.75
REAL: no tempo modification from the real song, so this would mean equal bpm. Also the gradient animation and the time interval given to the user in these different modes would change according to the coefficient that manipulates the tempo.For example in the easy mode the interval goes from 1 second to 2 second and now has 1200 ms to touch the note in time. The sound is also affected by the tempo, so as you would expect the song is played slower. 3. Free mode: We had and used it internally for research purposes. Like how we should arrange the notes over the grid for the most natural hand position. But we didn't release it because we wanted to lead the user instead of throwing to the market another beats application hahaha. We got inspired by guitar hero but for the launchpad instead. Hope you find this reply good enough, have a great day! |
Also, with the appearance of the colored and numbered tiles, I realized that this reminds me of the Dirty Dancing video game, though your game is much more advanced (excuse the angry reviewer):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92BXrRaPSWU&t=533s