Game Submitted (+ Crash Issue)

The game has officially been submitted to the GMTK game jam...

I'm writing a devlog because I like doing things like that!

On my end, this game was heavily inspired by Project DIVA, hence the Miku results screens and the button sprites.

There are some issues with our submission... After the deadline extension, I rushed to add particle effects and a sound effect. But after that, the game was suddenly crashing at the end of the level. Supposedly it has to do with RAM, and it does seem like it crashes less when I'm running less programs. Anyway, I didn't have time to fix it before the end of the jam, but I think it was a renderer issue. I switched to forward_plus and now my export is running smoothly without crashing.

Now aside from that, there are other problems with the submission...

When the level ends, the game simply closes. In hindsight, it'd be really easy to just make the level repeat, but I didn't think of doing that.

There are no menus, and there's only one super short level. Also, the end of level 1 is abrupt, and it's unclear the level is over. It'd be better if there were at least tiles blocking the right side of the last platform so it's clear there's nowhere else to go.

There are also some program design issues--like, the way I implemented the note timer animation is atrocious. And scoring could be easier by just using the enum values as the score increase instead of saying, "if perfect, add 3 to score"... score+=accuracy, where accuracy is an enum, is so much easier...

If we keep working on the game, I'm sure we'll fix these things... and hopefully I make devlogs while doing so.

By the way, here are the things I'm hoping to add:

• Two more levels
• Level select
• Main menu
• A button trail
• Cool level design leveraging the button trail thing
• An indicator of where the next note is when it's offscreen
• Checkpoints so when the player falls off the map, they respawn at a checkpoint
• Custom backgrounds
• Custom music (huge maybe)

The button trail idea basically entails showing a grayed-out trail of the next few buttons. This would allow you to know which shapes are next, and it would look cool. It could become a gameplay feature in instances where it's possible to jump to two different platforms, but the order of buttons affects which one you go to.

If the next button in the trail weren't a circle, and, say, the left target matched it, you'd have to go to that platform after the right platform.

I honestly have no idea how to implement the trail, so we'll see.