Destructive Interference by Rakthalekk

Description
In the year 2XX4, music of all kinds has been BANNED except for the tracks approved by the all-mighty Regime of Exclusive Songs To-listen-to (R.E.S.T.). Play as a member of the Rest-istance, an underground organization of musicians determined to cancel out the obstructive tunes of R.E.S.T through Destructive Interference (look it up).
In each track of the game, you'll need to cancel out instruments by playing a matching waveform - sine, square, triangle, or saw. Reach the goals for each waveform in a track and you'll successfully defeat the EVIL music!!
-> An updated web build with fixes and adjustments is available on itch.io.
Gameplay Tips
- If your gain is getting too high, focus on dodging with Jump/Move! Gain goes down over time, so you can always dodge to recover.
- Each rhythm matches a part in the song. If one part sounds easier to play, try to hit that one first!
- If one difficulty is too hard, try a lower difficulty to get more familiar with the rhythms!
Controls
| | Keyboard | Controller | |----------|-----------------------------------|-------------------------------| | Jump | Space / Up / W | Dpad Up / Joystick Up | | Move | A & D / Left & Right Arrows | Dpad LR / Joystick LR | | Pause | Esc | Start | | Triangle | H | (xbox) Y / (ps4) Triangle | | Square | J | (xbox) X / (ps4) Square | | Saw | K | (xbox) A / (ps4) X | | Sine | L | (xbox) B / (ps4) Circle |
Screenshots

An updated web build with fixes and adjustments is available on itch.io.
Ratings
| Overall | 229th | 3.85⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 406th | 3.4⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 505th | 3.263⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 559th | 3.447⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 15th | 4.7⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 38th | 4.237⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 191th | 3.474⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 327th | 3.789⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 10🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
also realy hard, found it dificult whenever i had to move 2 spaces away and obg arg mode.
my brain just keped forgeting what color was what butotn ocs it didint match my xbox vontroller. mabie having the buton as a nsew on the note could make it lless confusing of not a bit more buisy
But the concept is so cool, but I had struiggles with reading the notes properly, them having different waveforms is a nice idea, but I think the short notes should just be colored squares and the slides, where you have to keep pressing need some lengthy "bar" with the color on the grid so its easier to read (and in these bars you could still animate these wave lengths to keep the theme easily imo!)
Also when there were multiple colors the icons/colors were somehow hard to read properly for me on a whim, them being multi colored full on squares might help but I'm unsure, made it somewhat hard for me to play the last very hard level at least I thought!
Oh and also the jump did not feel intuitive to me, I basically never used it except I really, really had to. I also noticed there were quite some bars/sliders that started before those thorny branch things and then even went further underneath them, but there's no waty for me to jump and hold a note so I didnt know if I did something wrong here and missed something or if this was a genuine bug 🤔
But really cool game I'm impressed you guys pulled this off in just 72 hours! Wow!
Managed to beat all 3 songs on very hard, it was a really interesting and enjoyable take on the rhythm game genre!
I'm a big fan of rhythm games. Played a huge bunch of different ones after finding DDR in the switch of the millenia. I've kinda gone full circle with them and are mainly just playing ITGMania anymore. Felt kinda weird to have the lane picking and colors just being fixed to keys. I constantly had the check the key/color map while playing to make sure which was which while changing colors. Would probably be a lot easier on PS controller where the shapes seem to match. On xbox controller though, the colors are the same as the buttons but they do not match. Would probably make more sense to have the shapes map to PS controller shapes and the colors to xbox button colors to have more of a support for both.
Would probably need some sort of scoring to prevent cheesing and playing all too safe by taking the lanes one at a time. Another small annoyance I had was that there was quite a lot of just waiting all too often. Especially on the ends of songs where you had to just wait for some specific color note to appear. Probably the only use for the jump button though as the noise lanes left behind could sometimes not be dodged any other way like normally they like 100% can.

Lovely art style. Though very bright and busy, it didn't feel too distracting. Sometimes the speech bubbles were covering the side lanes which was a bit annoying. And of course I would like to see more animations on the character portraits instead of just stiff single frames but of course jam schedules can be tough to squeeze such niceties in.
I would have really preferred for the songs to fully play instead of you "playing" the instruments. It makes it so much harder to get into the groove of the song you don't know, can't fully hear all the time and are constantly switching between different instruments.
Anyways, good job! 👍
You bring up some great points. Particularly for the controls, admittedly, the scheme for controller was thought of based on the PS4 inputs due to them mostly lining up perfectly with the waveforms, and the xbox scheme is just the matching button positions on that controller which is just handled automatically by the engine. But the colors lining up would be a great thing to leverage! There *might* be a good way to detect Xbox vs Ps4 in godot but in the time-frame we had it just didn't quite happen.
Also, the songs do play fully even without your inputs, the SFX for each note is just the same waveform matching the pitch which is why it sounds louder. Hope that makes sense! There was an idea to replace each part with a recorded part on another instrument but we ran out of time for that haha.
Thanks again for the feedback!! It's very insightful and hits a lot of great points.
That way there wouldn't be a need to detect the controller at all. Though I'm sure there is a way to do it in Godot. I've only recently changed to Godot from Unity but at least there (and in raw JavaScript) you can get the name of the controller and detect it that way.
The way you made the theme fit by adding the different wave sounds is also a very nice touch!
Excellent work -- well done!