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Sindrel Song - Some Final Fixes and Concerns!

6 years ago2,539 words

I've FINALLY almost finished Sindrel Song! For real this time!! I'll probably start testing early next week, if I can get some final tweaks done over the weekend. Here's a video showing the game as it is now, plus some rambling about thoughts and concerns I've had while finishing it off.

I should have got to this point days ago, but I've been really dragging my feet with it due to the familiar, frustrating fatigue. I've neglected a whole bunch of things because of that. I'm worried that once I start testing and releasing this thing, I'll have to make some huge life changes and challenge a lot of avoidance habits my mind uses (neurotically) to keep safe, so I'm wondering how being so tired all the time will play into that. I can't say I'm looking forward to it... though I've been working on this for what seems like a billion years, so I am of course happy to finally finish it! And to have not abandoned it!! Yet!!!

Here's a video! It's Course's stage, which I don't think I've uploaded before? I uploaded her song in sheet music form, ages ago, though.



And here's a screenshot of that video so it'll show as the preview image, as usual:



I finally got around to getting a better screen recorder! I've got something called OBS, which was free and incredibly easy to set up and use; I think someone mentioned it ages ago, but I just assumed it'd be way harder to set up than it actually was for anything other than streams of fullscreen games, so I kept putting it off.

I also had to get and figure out how to use a video editing program (Lightworks) to chop the video down from about 7 minutes to under 2; that took longer than I'd like, though I have a better idea of how to do that if I need to make videos in future (I might make a trailer soon). I can't export beyond 720p without paying for it, though, so the video's blurrier than I'd like. Oh well, it's not like many people will see it anyway, I suppose.

There are a lot of things that need polishing, still. Most of the animations were rushed, and they've been left at a quality that wouldn't be obviously wrong if left in, but which I'd still like to refine or redo if I can find the time later (it takes longer than you'd think, though, to create a pleasing animation). The hands playing the instrument are jerky, because they dart instantly from one to the other without a transition; I might return to that. And I'd like it if the background felt alive in some way, like with swaying trees, random animals, or something, but obviously those aren't exactly features that top the priority list. I'm so much of a perfectionist that I could tweak things like that for months, but it's probably best that I don't. I'll only try to if I have some time on my hands during testing.

The same goes for painting the skies to look more interesting than a flat gradient; hopefully I'll find time for that, though if I don't, it won't matter too much. And the title logo! I'm currently using a quickly-drawn mock-up for that. Little things!

A while back, someone suggested that I change the colour of the listen/sing bars from red/green to the theme colours, purple and yellow. That's something I've done now! While I used red and green for the stop/go connotations, in this, purple is death/night and yellow is life/light, so purple being when you're meant to be silent and yellow being where you're active makes sense, I feel.

The lyrics appear on that bar, but sometimes they spill out if they appear at the end. It looks ugly, but fixing it would be non-trivial, so I'm not seeing it as crucially important. Speaking of those written lyrics, I thought to include them way back when the game was based entirely around listening, so there was nothing else to look at. Now, there's a ton of stuff to look at, so I'm wondering whether people will even see and read them. Adding them to the bar instead of just the speech bubble was one attempted solution for this, but I don't know if it's possible to come up with anything better because of how much concentration ends up being focused on the note visuals. Maybe they'll just be seen as an annoying distraction, vying for attention that can't be spared. Perhaps it's something that I'll end up tweaking based on player feedback. And having them audibly voiced isn't feasible, for what I hope are obvious reasons! (Annoyingly, human voices are one of few assets that I can't create by myself... But simulations are getting better!!)

Hmm, after listening to Course's song again, I notice some things I'd like to tweak, so I might do that later.



I enjoy playing this game, a lot! One of the reasons it's taken so long is because I spend a lot of time just playing it rather than making anything, even though I've only had six songs in the game for months and I know them all off by heart now. I see this as a good thing, that I want to play it, but I've been wondering a lot how much of my enjoyment is idiosyncratic, and how much of it other people might share. Maybe it appeals to an innate music sense, to intelligence (which is related to ease of learning), to trait openness; maybe a huge portion of my enjoyment comes from the fact that I made it? Maybe the average everyman, pulled from the street and forced to play it at gunpoint, wouldn't enjoy it very much at all. Maybe they wouldn't 'get' it like I do. I don't know. I can't know until people play it obviously, but I can't help but wonder.

I spent today (well, yesterday, since I've taken a while to post this) adding the final song to the game, after composing it a few days ago. It's the first new song I've added in months, and I was quite excited about playing it because I'd get to actually experience learning it in a way that I can't with the songs I've already long since mastered. With those ones, I can complete them every time without difficulty; I had to actually fail at Course's stage several times for the video to produce a more interesting progress graph at the end... but even then it looks silly because it starts at a high value before jumping down. But here's the graph from my genuine attempts to complete this final song:



I've been playing the game for months and I composed the music, so I definitely had advantages there. I imagine most players would take more than these 11 attempts. I'm not sure how much of a concern this'll be. (Notably though, for some of those I couldn't get any further because of bugs in the song.)

I have a mobile game that I used to play a couple of years ago, called "Dancing Line". It's a music game, a rhythm game I suppose, where you're a flowing/growing line, which you can redirect the course of by tapping. It's super simple; if you tap once, the line changes direction by 90 degrees, and if you tap again, it returns to its previous orientation. You have to tap in time with the music's rhythm in order to avoid obstacles. Hit one, and you have to restart. Levels have a couple of checkpoints, but you have limited lives, and if you run out (and don't pay, of course), you have to restart the whole thing from the beginning (when I played it at first, it didn't even have these checkpoints; you had to restart the whole thing after every mistake).

The levels vary a lot in terms of difficulty, and for me, most of them took several attempts. Some maybe two or three, but others I was stuck at for days before I finally finished them. But I'm mentioning this because it's remarkable that I was stuck at them for days; I didn't quit and uninstall the app because I couldn't beat everything without really trying. I failed a lot, but each new attempt only felt more exciting because success was far from guaranteed. I stuck with it more than other apps because of that.

I suspect Dancing Line's achieved enough success to keep going due to aggressive advertising both for their game and in it, neither of which are paths I'm likely to be going down. It's made by a (Chinese, I think?) team, and feels hollow and artificially Produced in the way many mobile games do to me, but which seems to be what works. Mine's a labour of love; very idiosyncratic, not designed by committee to appeal to consumer trends or whatever. Also, it's probably best not to describe Sindrel Song as a 'mobile game' anyway. I'm planning to release on multiple platforms, but I very much prefer to play it on PC myself.

When playing Sindrel Song, I've had real adrenaline rushes like I've not had from many games before. That's probably because of the kinds of games I play, more than anything; I imagine people who play actiony shooter kinds of games in groups, where your actions have real consequences on other people, might get a buzz out of that from time to time, but I've mostly played single-player games that involve leisurely navigating menus, which isn't exactly exhilarating. With Sindrel Song, though, the adrenaline rush comes from getting a little bit further than last time, but knowing that my lives are limited; just another slip-up, and completion will be out of my grasp once again. I hadn't felt this in a while since I'd mastered all the songs, but I did today with this new one; my keyboard's got a lot of sweaty keys! I was literally shakinnnngggg!!!! I started hyperventilating and had to be taken to the hospital, where they diagnosed me with "playing Sindrel Song syndrome" and also gave me a medal for finishing the song. I'm not making this up. It seems silly that something like this would evoke a response like that, but it did, and I wonder if it will for anyone else.

I really want to keep the difficulty a part of this game, because of that. But I don't know how many people will be receptive to it. Dancing Line seems to have done well for itself for years, which gives me hope that people might be open to something like this. But I'm also expecting people to be frustrated if they can't win on their first attempt, as I feel I've seen that more often.

I can imagine people suggesting I add some kind of easy or practice mode, either with infinite lives, slower timing, or whatever. And I've been thinking about that a lot. A problem though is that once you've learned a piece, you can't really forget it, so if you miss out on truly challenging yourself by doing the easy version, you can't later go back and do the more difficult one without already mostly knowing it. But maybe most people would prefer easy victory than the satisfaction of a hard-earned one. I'll be particularly interested in how testers feel about this, after they've actually played the thing (which is so different to watching a video).

I could also do simpler variants of the songs, but that's far more technically challenging.

I've been wondering though if it's just a matter of learning, which anyone could do with practice, or whether this is testing a skill that's not at all universal. Many games test spatial or problem-solving skills, and gamers tend to fare well at them because they've played a bunch of similar games in the past. I imagine most of us have seen non-gamers struggle clumsily with even basic character movement. Do I have a knack for music because I've been composing for years, which other people without that experience wouldn't share? Many - most? - people play instruments though, so it must be a skill they have, probably even more adeptly than I do... Another thing I'll be curious to see in testing, anyway. (I remember this coming up in comments on a post a while ago.)

I'm curious about how exactly my mind is remembering melodies, actually. There's this well-known rule of thumb that our short-term memories can handle "seven plus or minus two items" at once; any more than that, and something else has to go. But many of these melodies are much longer than seven notes long, and I seem to be able to remember them without too much strain or difficulty. Not effortlessly, but it's definitely not like remembering a string of, say, 20 random words. But I think it's largely because it's not a random collection of unrelated bits of information. The notes are all linked, they flow; each one prompts the next.

I notice that I tend to remember melodies in terms of their jumps or direction changes, rather than a sequence of notes. So if I had the example melody "3 4 5 2 1 2 3", I'd remember the start (actually I wouldn't have to, as that's prompted), an upwards flow, a jump from 5 to 2, then down and a turn around at 1. So rather than remembering 7 items, it's more like three or four. I find it interesting, psychologically!

It certainly taxes my brain, feels like a real mental exercise, but I like that a lot. But then I like thinking. Perhaps other people play games so they don't have to?

Oh, I forgot to mention: Course's stage is one of the harder songs, from near the end; I've already posted videos of Remedy's and Hammer's, which are the easier ones. Throwing a new player directly into this one would be very likely to put them off!



I've talked about much or all of this before, I know, but as release is right around the corner, they're all very much on my mind. Also I couldn't remember what I'd said in comment replies or posts so I thought I'd collect some things in one place.

There's probably more I could or should say, but I'll leave it at this for now. Over the weekend, I need to make a few small changes before it's ready for testing; I'll write about that and my intentions for it on Monday, unless something completely unforeseen comes up. I also feel like I should set up www.alorafane.com, at least in some basic sense; it's a bit silly that that video contains a link to it, but there's currently nothing there. I'll probably work on that today...

I have a long list of other stuff I want to sort out before releasing something openly - setting or cleaning up my various accounts, mostly - so I'll be working on that during the testing phase. I feel a bit swamped, but I'll do what I can.