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SAGE 2024 - Demo PJ the DJ: SAGE 2024 Demo

I like the idea, Parappa's singin/voice actor was suuuper good too, but the gameplay itself is a struggle. I'd imagine it can be fixed, but it needs alot of work as it espeeecially requires a lot of resyncing and gettings things properly lined up the beat and tempo of the music. I tried to ofcourse press the buttons to the beat, since that's how rhythm games (even Parappa and Um Jammer Lammy) work, but with how the game is built it was actually easier to mute the music and just press the buttons as they show up, but that's ofcourse not how a game like this should work. The DJ disc scratching sounds also need a bunch more variety and pitch changes so that it would match the song/singing better, right now it's just like random sound effects over the song.

The input HUD at the top of the screen could also be like atleast 200% bigger, there's no point for the main input segment of a rhythm game to be so small, it gives unneeded difficulty and lack of accuracy to the game. Difficulty was weird in general, there's a few too many random buttons to press, to the point it almost feels like the game insists every line of inputs has to use every button on the controller, and it gets messy and lacks style pretty fast.

Overall needs a bunch of work, polishing/redoing alot of the graphics and animations, and yeah fixing all the audio-related problems. Also could really use a skip buttons for the cutscenes, when wanting to just get into the game to try and see what it's like it's annoying to have to just waaait. Skip for the tutorial would be welcome too.
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J Lawal
J Lawal
Thanks for your feedback, I only put this together in about a month so the game itself is still extremely primitive. A few quality of life issues and the HUD could be fixed easily but I don't know about the charting. I had to do all of it manually which is why it's the way it is. If I was able to create an chart editor it would probably turn out better. I'm very new to game development and this is the first project I made completely from scratch without using anything as a base so there wasn't really a basic outline on how to recereate parappa's mechanics so everything here is an approximation of the gameplay from the actual series. I think if I want to fix all of these issues I might have to switch to something like gamemaker or unity as it allows for more freedom.