Early Access: Synth Sliderz

Games
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I just released this in early access on Itch.io - Synth Sliders for PlayDate - EARLY ACCESS by Aricus (itch.io)

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Screenshot 2024-01-22 161722

​Do you feel like rocking a bit on your shiny new PlayDate? I present to you Synth Sliderz, my personal take on the Trombone Champ game for our little yellow box of fun. Using the accelerometer, you will tilt the PlayDate to match up the oncoming notes and press A or B to play a note. It's like Guitar Hero, but with more sliding and a lot less accuracy!

The first release consists of the following songs, and song packs will be released on a monthly basis for probably 3-4 dollars for 10 more songs.

99 Red Balloons
Africa
All-Star
Bad Romance
Beat It
Can You Feel The Love Tonight
Cliffs of Dover
Creep
Every Breath You Take
Final Countdown
Hallelujah
Heathens
He's A Pirate
Hey Jude
Hotel California
I Walk The Line
In The Valley of the Mountain King
Never Gonna Give You Up
Ring Of Fire
Take Me Home, Country Roads
Under The Sea
Wonderful Tonight
Yesterday

I'm currently finishing up polishing of some of the minor things that still annoy me. But it's pretty much 99% done right now. I might sneak in another few songs, we'll see if I have time.

In the future I may add in held notes, I had it at one point and the PlayDate hated having so many sprites on the screen. I might revisit it to see if I can figure out a better way to do it.

Scores are calculated on the note sprite hitting any part of the selector sprite, so it's pretty lenient, which isn't a bad thing because trying to hit all the notes by tilting the play date is HARD. And it's supposed to be, half the fun is how bad it sounds when you're playing!

This IS early access, there might be some jankiness etc. I will be adding some features as it goes along such as

  • Held Notes (hopefully, but so far PlayDate doesn't like having all the sprites on the screen)

  • More songs

  • Maybe more effects on the screen

  • Debating letting players change the track to play any of the other tracks in the song

  • Turning on the crank instead of tilt. Currently this works in the code, but there is a bug with the SDK and the crank can't move fast enough to hit the notes. PlayDate is working on fixing it and once it is, I'll add the crank in.

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This looks really cool, nicely done.

Did you always having it work with the accelerometer or did it try it out with the crank at any point? I guess maybe it would be too easy with the crank or something?

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I actually have it that it works with the crank and the tilt, but there is currently a problem with the crank/sdk that prevents it from working if it moves too fast, and it doesn't come close to the speed I need it to read at. Apparently they know about it and have been working on a fix for over a year.....I'm still waiting.

The code is in the game for the crank, but I'm just waiting for the fix to happen.

Here's the post that talks about the crank issue:
Really noticeable input delay with getCrankPosition() - Playdate Developer Forum

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