Ambitious, great job.

That was really fun! I sucked. but still really enjoyed it! well done!

This was fun! Nice reference that fits the theme. I only just started watching the original Dragon Ball a few weeks ago. Well done.

Haha nice game ! Some beginners in the team you said ? Well, well done guys!

Needs more levels :p Such a cool tribute, gets really intense towards the end! Very good job by the team!

@wubbaduck it might be slow at times, but you'll be in for a treat when you stick with it. Enjoy the show!

@classico-gilt Very happy you've seen the tribute! Did you really manage to finish hard? I couldn't :joy:

I really love this genre, very coolly done!

Although I don't like this type of game, I think this game is pretty cute and interesting. Good work!

It's quite interesting, fun, but banal

I love these kind of music games. It's a pity the keys for the game are not particularly convenient. And so there is a good dynamic. Good job

Fun genre and cool music - great combo! Thx for game)

To be honest not a very interesting game. You did a good job at getting it to work properly tho, and the design is neat.

Nice little rythm game. Well done.

That fine!))

As a DBZ fan, I enjoyed this! Very cool game!

A very nostalgic tribute to Akira Toriyama. RIP ;(

This is definetely not a summoning game and is literally just guitar hero. Youre lucky its really really fun haha. RIP Akira Toriyama

Good fun, well executed. I don't know anything about DBZ though so I don't understand the connection to the theme 😭

The music is good and the actual implementation of the Guitar Hero mechanics is really well done. One simple criticism is that you can just mash all 4 keys at the same time and still get the score, but given how hard it gets nearer the end it's probably good this exists or I wouldn't have lasted 60 seconds 😃

@petitcoke @zablas @alpalcalad Very happy you enjoyed this tribute! :cry:

@teddyreid Being (not) able to simply mash all buttons was a discussion point! So that's great feedback!

At first, we had a version were you would just miss when you clicked too early. But that felt too unfair so we allow mashing, but you won't get any combo. And since your score multiplies with the combo for each note, it's a huge difference.
But if you don't care about the score, you're right. Also, it's not clear enough that the score scales with the combo. We also had some other ideas as well. If we decide to iterate on it further, we'll keep it in mind! :)

@teddyreid Btw, in Dragon Ball you collect 7 crystal balls, called Dragon Balls, to summon the dragon Shenron so that he can grant you any wish. Goku's the protagonist, the guy you see in the health bar UI. So it's about collecting 7 Dragon Balls, summoning Shenron, and seeing what he wishes for.
That's the connection to the theme. That's why you need to hit the 7 special Dragon Ball notes to get the real ending. ;)

If you have the time, watch the show! Though a bit outdated here and there, it's still an entertaining show today. :)

@alpalcalad Yeah, we were talking about using summoning as gameplay and/or theme inspiration.

We quickly came up with Dragon Ball and I really wanted to pay tribute to Akira Toriyama. And we thought, let's make use of our composer and focus on music, as music is a big factor in creating emotions in games and focus on that!

Plus, since we did not have much time we could save time on research and focus more on creating a game that feels good. So yes, we focus on summoning as a theme rather than gameplay.

Thanks for the feedback, happy you had fun with it. :smile:

excellent dragon ball content

I enjoyed the game. It had been a while since I played something rhythmic, so I had fun. It was very difficult for me, but my friend breezed through it without losing a life! Although I almost finished it, I got stuck on level 6. The calibration is very good.

Well this is nice, the music is great and I'd like to beat it at least once to the end, but unfortunately my keyboard is ancient, kinda cheap, and only supports pressing 2 arrow keys at the same time, making the sections with rows of 3-4 notes super hard to hit, and they are frequent enough that it's nigh impossible to tank even if I arrive to these sections with full health.

I can go up to 3 with WASD but it's still not great and I only realized that was an option after 30+ attempts with the arrows so wasn't too keen on switching hands/position.

I tried mostly the normal difficulty mode and got these during my best attempts (reached about 3 dragon ball) :

Went to easy mode but again lost when the section of rows of 4 arrives. I can hit one pair then the other two but yeah it's just adding a lot of difficulty when I'm already terrible at this kind of game lol.

I also keep getting confused with the key layout, for some reason it's really not intuitive for me, just to make it a little extra harder hah.

But, there are combinations of keys that allow 4 to be pressed simultaneously on my keyboard, and I bet most keyboards have some layout that could work.

**So, my suggestion is to allow changing the keybinds.** I think the point of this kind of game is nailing the patterns and timing more than using a specific mapping on the keyboard anyway.

If you end up making an updated version that allows that, mention me in a comment, I might give a second try.

Otherwise you could add options to change the damage for missing or pressing with a bad timing, and/or the regen for playing well. Right now it doesn't forgive even a few mistakes and it takes a while to recover. Having an easier setting would help.

Or maybe even consider checkpoints. I'd really like being able to just restart at the last dragon ball or maybe the last calm section. Maybe this could have a significant cost on the score-side so it still incentivizes getting better. I might be able to finish if I practice enough, but having to re do the first 1-2 minutes with minimal mistakes again and again only to lose in 5 seconds when the complicated section arrives is tough.

I feel like especially for jam games, it's usually preferable to make a game too easy than too hard, although having a challenge is nice it's frustrating when there isn't a way around it. Well I'm saying this as if balancing was easy but well as the dev it's always very hard to gauge how difficult the game is, especially when handing it to players who don't have the same kind of gaming experience.

@patatenouille Wooow! Thanks a lot for taking the time to play and write the very detailed feedback. Also congrats on getting this far with such a keyboard!

We were discussing adding a 2 button mode so that there won't be any instances of 4 simultaneous notes. I wasn't even aware that it's possible to get up to 3 when using WASD. Also, I wasn't aware that there are combinations that allow 4 keys on such keyboards. I'm very curious about which combinations allow 4 keys. And if there was a keybinding feature, how would you set it up?

Implementing proper keybinding would be more effort. But if you have a keybinding in mind that does not conflict with any other that works with your keyboard. It would be a very quick 'fix' it, by simply adding those keys.

Just to share some more details. To support 2 buttons properly, we'd need to adjust midi files, add an option for it, and trigger it properly. That's the most but cleanest approach.
To get around having to change our midi files, I considered 'fixing' it via code only. Whenever there are 4 notes, I'll just ignore 2 of those. This might work, but ends up with less quality since we can't define which 2 buttons should be used instead of 4 for any given occurrence.

That's why an alternative keybinding sounds like a very nice solution as well!

Also, I agree, that GameJam games should be too easy rather than too hard. I was even considering naming our difficulty levels normal, hard, and extreme and having the easiest setting as default. But then we ran out of time to give it some more thought.
I felt like easy should be easy enough though. But I also like rhythm games, so our balancing might be off here... also I forgot that not all keyboards support 4 simultaneous key presses. During development, I was even wondering why other games don't require it. Now I know... :grinning:

@xazens I have an AZERTY keyboard, and from some quick testing it seems mine supports those groups at least

Combining the left and right areas I can even go up to 6 keys, maybe more when using special keys like space and return !! x)

Also I discovered that if I press two arrows then the other two before releasing the first two, only the first two are active, but if I press 3 or more at the same time, none are active ! :joy: The firmware is probably confused what keys to use so it just nopes out of the question and does nothing lol.

I can change the language to qwerty so you can use that for reference instead azerty, preferably I'd use QWER, ASDF, UIOP or JKLM I think.

However this is likely to be completely different for each keyboard model, or at least the different constructors. So a layout that would work for me might not work for others.

Using unity it shouldn't be too hard to make a runtime rebind system though : instead of using the legacy input axis manager which can't be modified at runtime, you can use ``Input.GetKey(KeyCode)``, passing a variable in parameter.
Then, you need a way to change this variable, you could have a dropdown that just contains all the enum values which should be easy to populate in code, though not the best in terms of UX it can do its job.

The easy difficulty is definitely easier and I could probably finish it with enough tries but I got frustrated with the rows and stuff so I stopped after just one or two attempt haha.

Your keyboard sounds wild! So you're asking for a level that requires 6 buttons? :joy:

You're right and I'm already using `KeyCode`. We don't have proper UI elements for the drop-down but it would indeed do its job. :thinking:

I was even thinking about switching the the new Unity Input System, but that would be too much. I like your suggestion. I'll think about it. Might also be that we come up with 2 button levels instead. I'll let you know when we have something.

Again, thanks for the effort! :)

I like the game! It's easy to play eventhough I sucked at it! But it's cute, and I love the art!