Low Notes

Intro

Low Notes is a game of many firsts for me. This is the first Ludum Dare game jam (or any game jam) that I've participated in. I've also never dealt much with music. While I didn't end up creating any original tracks for this game, I did have to learn a lot about audio in Unity as well as how songs are measured in time.

I'm really happy I decided to jump into the game jam, I had a ton of fun with the process and I'm very pleased with the result. It will likely be a project that I continue working on. I'll just need to figure out a better way to sync notes to the music and make maps faster.

Tools

- Unity for all the big work.
- GIMP and Inkscape for art.
- GarageBand for examining mp3 files.
- Trello for task management.

https://youtu.be/mi6Z-6rsr44

Future Plans

I've already gotten some really great feedback from your reviews. There are a few main improvements I'll need to focus on:
1. It needs to be easier to tell which order the notes are in, especially during fast sections.
2. I need to add more juice to make it really feel good to hit notes correctly.
3. Don't change the pitch for every change in health. Only change after a large change in health.

If you have any ideas on how I can improve those areas, please let me know!

Updates

I've taken a first pass at a few of the main feedback items.
- I've highlighted the next note to be hit (highlighting all if it's a multi-note).
- I have a circle linking notes together when they're hit at the same time.
- I've broken the health bar into 4 sections and only change pitch when crossing a section.
- For good hit feedback: I gave the paddles a ton of shake when hitting a note. I tried adding a sound effect but all the ones I tried were disruptive. Maybe there's a sound effect that will sound good, but for now I'll stick with visuals.
- Whenever you hit a note, it a graphic will show how well you hit it. Color coded green, yellow, and orange for how good your timing was, as well as the location whether it was early or late.
- I added a few more color sets including glowing colors with bloom. (Flat color with no glow still exists because glow gets a little intense).

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post a new build since these are new features after the competition, so here's a video:
https://youtu.be/lCy99wA4Hlk

Changelog

April 28th I uploaded a new build because I noticed that the track "Adventures in Suburbia" had a few duplicate notes. You'd hit the note just fine but then the 2nd copy still went through and caused a miss. This has been fixed.