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[stevesan]

Hey guys,
We finished our rhythm game, Beat Juice Radio, and response has been pretty lacking. Now, being my first "indie game", I'm not gonna get too discouraged by this, but I would like to learn a thing or two. So please check it out, the 1 player and 2 player modes, and gimme some feedback! Cheers.

Play on Kongregate, in-browser unity

Could we have done anything to make the bronco mode more fun? Is it too hard, or too easy? Or, is the basic idea just not that interesting to begin with?

[Gainsworthy]

It was posted on Indiegames, I've already checked it out. I dig, dude! Absolutely don't get discouraged. Game is groovy, has a nice visual style and sounds lovely. Adding a little bit of randomness to the beat generation is great - I dislike rote-memorisation as substitute for learning.

Conversely, I'm terrible at these kinds of games, so I can't even get to 200 on the lowest difficulty. Or 150 on the higher ones. The idea's fine - games have already made millions and millions of it. It all comes down presentation, audio and tasty tasty feedback.

The feedback loop is great - it feels awesome to nail a beat, plus the losing song is fantastic and brilliant and makes failure not-so-bad. As mentioned,I couldn't get too far in, but In An Ideal World, I'd recommend adding more stuff. More opponents - not just the Luchadude. With each, Re-skin the playfield, and change the audio along with it, ala Lumines. Maybe add more Player Characters, and give each a Power - nothing too strong, but something to make reaching The 200 a little more manageable.

Regardless, it's a cute little game, fun to play. Unless you want to build it up into a much bigger game, I'd be happy as-is.

[Seiseki]

The way it's presented, it's a bit confusing..
At first I had no idea what to do, when to press buttons, what buttons to press..
I think the old classic DDR arrows would make more sense than JKL, because that way you can show arrows instead of colored dots. The entire twisting infinity sign layout makes it hard to predict what's to come, I still have to wait until they line up properly to actually tell what's gonna happen.

The songs were quite boring, there's no drive, just slow and even piano sounds instead of 'pop' 'blam' 'dunk dunk' *epic saxguy* *boom boom* *nyanyan* (yeah, that was random).
So why should I play your game where I get some tunes like.. dee doo dee diii du..
When I can imitate a rock legend in guitar hero?

I also think that in games like this you can't have enough juciness.
That goes for both the sounds you get when pressing buttons and also graphics that go with the rythm and pops, flows, bounces, etc.

[spolvid]

I like it! Like Gainsworthy said, the juiciness and feedback is great. Pulling off a tricky string of notes feels super satisfying with the sound effects and camera shake.

Things to make it better:

Get rid of the "ASD" markers for the enemy in single player. It's unnecessary and is confusing at first.

Add some kind of indication for when you hit a key without a note underneath it, like Guitar Hero does. It'll make the interface feel more responsive, and make it so that the player can tell if their fingers are on the right keys without having to actually look at the keyboard.

Currently, you can complete a phrase without actually being on beat. This results in it not sounding very good and not being very satisfying. I would say either reduce the timing window or fudge it so that even if the player isn't exactly on time, it sounds like they are. Guitar Hero also does a similar thing.

Hope this helps!

[yosh]

Well that's not so bad!

But more than anything else, you should mainly change the "life" system.
Force the player to start over again each time he misses a single note is tough and highly frustrating.
You should maybe think about something more or less similar to guitar hero, a system based on the player current performance.

Concerning the game itself, I'm very fond of these kind of atmospheres  that you can find in games such as Jet set radio, PaRappa the Rapper etc...

[stevesan]

Thanks for the feedback folks! I think we did a pretty good job making a solid rhythm game, it just lacks stickiness.

I do agree about the lives. It's something we went back and forth on. We did have a version with lives but without check points (ie. stars). This is much more like normal rhythm games. But we felt that it would be frustrating to go for really high scores, since each attempt would require you to start all the way over from 0. Perhaps this was an unwarranted concern, since that's how all rhythm games work anyway, and maybe we should've just increased the difficulty slope on the individual songs so you're not going through super-easy stuff too much on lower scores.

More content definitely would've been good. But our artist had limited time. I'm pretty happy with our 6 songs though, and all the layers they have!

And yeah, making it a little less confusing with an overlay tutorial would be good. I might just go ahead and do this actually..

[paste]

Is this what became of the game I saw at the GGJ in NYC? Looks pretty cool now, glad to see something came of it

[stevesan]

Is this what became of the game I saw at the GGJ in NYC? Looks pretty cool now, glad to see something came of it

Haha yeah it is. We kinda changed the name Which team were you on?

[stevesan]

Oh nevermind you were "Shadow of the Hipster" Awesome bro...yeh 3 of us from the original team and mooosh decided to finish it to something more complete, and BJR was the result.