The Library

Gorgeous visuals and the music was really good (kind of important in a rythem game). I wish there was some kind of tutorial or controls page cause it took me a minute to figure out how to begin a song. I also found it oddly difficult to hit the notes that right at the beginning of a new page. If you continue development on this game I would suggest making one long scrolling line instead of the separated pages displaying the notes as it made coordinating the key presses very difficult. Other than that, great job! Really original submission!

This game has so much potential. The graphics and the music are easily the highest points of this game. But please fix those two issue first:

1. The stages are too difficult for beginners to rhythm games. Why not take a page from Dance Dance Revolution and include multiple difficulty levels for each stage?
2. Besides the earth, wind, fire, and air stages; aren't there any more of them?

Wow, it's really nice ! The sync between music and keys are almost perfect, and the room slowly changing during the play is a great idea. Good entry !

Very good looking, coherent art style, good music, solid game play.

Found it very tough to follow the notes when switching to the next page and it would have been so good to have some sort of score/% of notes hit at the end of a song, so I could replay and try and do better!

On the whole though, fantastic, really well polished presentation, a complete little package.

Well done! Thanks for sharing!

Fantastic! The only critics that I can imagine is a little bit hard. But music, visuals, smooth gameplay, absolutely wonderful.

I like the idea of this game, and rhythm games are notoriously difficult to make, so cheers for the attempt!

There doesn't seem to be any consequence for missing beats... I ended up just letting off the keyboard completely to see "what would happen" and, well, nothing happens. The game lacks a losing condition.

Good notion to sneak your tutorial in the "pull the book out of the shelf" moment, but it lasted just a little too long to not get tedious after the first couple of book pulls.

The music choice was good and fit the art theme of the lone musician among bookshelves.

The music scores could benefit from a "scores remaining" counter of some sort. The "next score"/"score replacement" animation had a bad habit of disappearing with notes still in between them, making it hard to follow the start and end of each score. There was one song that started with notes too close to the "push arrow to begin" phase, making them impossible to actually hit.

Fantastic game! Love the atmosphere, art, music, gameplay. Reading the upcoming line of notes is a fun mechanic. I really adore this game, great job.

I've already told you my first impressions so I will explain my thoughts a little deeper now:
> Really awesome graphics and audio.
> This leads to a very nice atmosphere, with the polish of the title screen too.
> Find how to begin a partition is not obvious, but I doesn't get stuck for too long personnaly, so for me it was playful and let you time to be in the mood, so it's cool.
> I have begin with the Earth music, and found it really fast and difficult, too much for the first approch with the gameplay, even with the good affordance with the leaves = arrow keys.
> The Fire music should be a perfect beginning, very appreciate this one.
> I found the timing a little weird, like you must press just before the note, but i'm not sure for this one, it's maybe just me. Ah, and the dark note at the right made me believe that I fail a note each time, not very intuitive this one.
And I think that's all, great relaxing experience, good job !

Astounishing visual and musical work! Just wow. I normally advice against doing rythm or music based games for jams but this is just great! My only complaint would be that I wasn't sure it there was a "lose" state or some kind of penalty for me missing notes. Apart from that I really, really enjoyed the mood and how well synchronized were the arrows with the music. That must have been tough to do! The idea of an enviroment changing maybe as part of some external puzzle apart from the music minigame its a really cool idea worth giving more of your time to develop. 10/10

Good stuff bro!

So great! we played it in the Moosen stream and loved it. the music was, to quote chat, "lit".

Fun little rhytm game, I really like the visuals and the songs, great stuff. But I had this bug that the screen went white after finishing first song, so I had to restart to try the other ones. Also it would be nice if it did a summery of how I did at the end of it (maybe it did, but the bug stopped me from seeing that).

Wow, great job. A really fun rhythm game with beautiful art and music. The difficulty was right where I would want it to be, as a fan of rhythm games. Fantastic work!

The music in this game is absolutely awesome - it's really engaging. At the end of the game, I felt like I had played through a long adventure, even though it really didn't take that long. Great job on the mood (which was also helped by the graphics).

Gameplay, however, was very frustrating. The transition between pages inflates the difficulty artificially - I oftentimes found myself completely losing a song because I got off sync at the beginning of a new page.

Aside from that, I found the up/down chords hard to play, especially when not very well isolated - it required me to move my hand off the keyboard and back on to switch between these chords and other notes, which was really frustrating.

This game has a lot of potential - it really just has a few small gameplay flaws.

ALL FIVE STARS from me! beautiful. I was horrible at it but it was still fun!

This is so cool. Nearly impossible by moments but really beautiful and sensitive. The music is great! Good work !

Pretty surprised to see a rythm game during LD, as it can be quite long to balance and synchronize...But here it's well executed!
One Room is a pretext here, but it's not an issue as we seem to go for a journey through the Music itself.
Well done!

Amazing art and music, and the game plays great, hard but thats not a bad thing, just need better fingers :) great work

A work of art! The visuals and the audio are flawless, the controls are also greatly implemented and most importantly you created the feeling that I was the one playing that music, 5/5!

this is an amazing unique entry, and I'm super impressed. the art is beautiful and the overall mood is just perfect

Awesome music, I love the room progression as you go through the books.

Wow.
Gorgeous graphics, great music.
Difficulty of the original version is indeed to high.
But even though I am pretty bad at this type of games I enjoyed playing it a lot.
Well done!

Definitely one of the more polished games I've seen this LD. The "hard" variants of the songs were definitely more enjoyable than the easy ones; my only complaint is that it was that the music was so orchestral that it was oftentimes hard to feel a beat or rhythm to it, which made it hard to time. The other thing, is that there is no penalty for pressing the wrongs keys, or all the keys in order to just get the notes correctly. All in all, was super fun.

Cool concept! Sometimes the sequences are too hardcore, but overall it was fun to play. :)

EYYY another entry about a library! ;) :D

The music's real good. It's great to hear music that isn't so percussion based, and more emotional and atmospheric being used in a rhythm game. Gameplaywise (and this is judging from the original), I didn't really feel like it worked as a rhythm game. It is too difficult for a casual player, and the peripheral just makes it so that the notes kind of "creep up" upon you. I like the idea of this formatting though; thought it was really creative to "read a book" in the same way a rhythm game was played.

I take it the issues may already be fixed in the postjam, but because they added new features, my ratings are based on the original version itself. Which overall, is pretty well done already, in terms of the ideas for the gameplay, the graphics and the music (those two being top notch). I'll check out the postjam in a bit.

~Random-storykeeper

what a wonderful experience and great use of the theme. Thak you!

Oh WOW!!! A VERY SOLID ENTIRE PACKAGE!
I love rhythm games, man! and this is really good... the visual, the music, gameplay, everything... I give it overall 5/5!
it would be really nice of you continue development of this... the mood is perfect as everything in UI is animated ... I loved that book selection

Beautiful game, but wasn't really fun.

thank god you cannot lose because towards the end of earth and the whole water song I seriously struggled :D

Really in love with the art, specially for the colour, and for the whole room starting to change, that was a really nice touch. The music also was great, the songs were not too long or too short, so it didn't feel repetitive or boring.

As someone else said as well, the beginning for some reason takes you by surprise, even though the simple mechanics, I'd say that it is for the sheet flipping.
Anyway awesome entry, music powa!

Beautiful game! With great songs too!
Keep rocking!

This was a nice little game, I really liked the music that played and the watercolor effect and also how the room changed as your played.

One suggestion I would have would be to have the beats line up more with the notes the player needs to hit.

Great job!

This one is so stylish. From an artistic standpoint, it doesn't get much better than this. Graphics and music are brilliant!

The idea of transforming the room through music is terrific, there are many nice touches like the "score" being made up from words and removing the books from the shelved by wriggling.

What could be improved from my point of view is the gameplay. Better visual indicators for when a key was hit correctly would add to the feel of the game.

Unfortunately the controls are not temper-proof: I was able to finish the water song with almost no errors just by spamming the keys. Since there is no penalty for mistakes it's easy to cheat.

Also the reward for getting segments right is purely visual but it is disconnected from the actions. It doesn't become clear throughout the game how to actually reach transformation points. Is is by playing a section correctly or by getting a certain number of notes right? Maybe some better visual and aural cues about when a success was achieved might improve the game.

Overall it's easily one of the most stylish games I played during this LD, great job!

Wonderful game, truly! I was always pretty awful at sight-reading, so I fumbled a few times on the water level, but the gameplay and the music worked really well together. Initially, the art wasn't really my thing, but as the scene changed, it really added to the game from the background and started to grow on me.

The first two levels were my favourites, I think. I was happily surprised when the second piece of music wasn't just a cheap variation on the first one!

Games like this need a well written score to make it worth playing and proper integration of said score into the levels to make the player actually feel like they're properly involved with the music. The Library has both of these things and I would love to see this fleshed out (both mechanically and musically) into a full game!

Really enjoyed it, great job! :D

Good graphics, nice gameplay, good music. My only beef is that I think the interface of two panels of music was more confusing than it needed to be.

in my opinion this is the best game of this ludum dare! I love music graphics and idea!

Beautiful for both eyes and ears.

The way it was switching to the next note strip made it kind of difficult to know what keys to press next...but then I'm terrible at music/rhythm games.

Wonderful moody and pretty poetic game. Aesthetics are unique and lovely. There is some clever details in the gameplay and the polishing, like the indicator on the line just under the current one that fades in, or the funny controls when you choose a book. It's really fun and pleasant to discover, the difficulty curve is well balanced during each soundtrack.

Really great game, some levels were hard to play. The only thing that was annoying was the fact that we can spam all keys to win a level.

Beautifullly ephemeral! The atmosphere, the music and the changing environment made it all magical. Thank you for making it!

As others have said, I had a bit of trouble getting used to the change of measures. It took me a song to actually realize that the end note of a measure was duplicated at the beginning of the next.

Also, whenever I did not play the correct note, the song seemed to be interrupted or delayed slightly which was too distracting. I was playing on a Mac.

In terms of difficulty, I thought it was adequate. I started with Air getting 71% and the rest were 90+%, so I think I got used to it :)

Would love to see the soundtrack available somewhere! Overall, beautiful game!

Love it! Brings back old stepmania memories

Awesome! I love rhythm games of course :D Really solid and fun, and the music is really great, nice work there. The only real issue in the jam version is the lack of feedback, but that was fixed pretty well in the post version. (same goes for reading the next page) Some of the notes didn't quite match up with the music but that was pretty rare. I thought the difficulty was fine although I imagine it might be a bit hard for some people. Another small improvement might be to add gamepad support - some keyboards don't play nicely with simultaneous input on keys like up+down, although mine didn't have any issues. Graphics are great as well. All in all a really fun entry, awesome work!

Lovely game! I included it in my compilation video series of the Ludum Dare 37 games, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/pmGwBmW3Ksk

I also included this game in an article of my favorites! http://fireside.gamejolt.com/post/jam-favorites-ludum-dare-37-gwqmcmek