I just found out I'm terrible at rhythm games! This was a cool little game. I'm really impressed that you had the time to program all this AND write two songs. I like the second one best!

This is excellent. Two game songs and a title loop! Lots of killer work here, good show.

Nice one :)
Flashing lights are the best!

I suck :)
Maybe it's too hard even the first level in easy way, but it's a pleasant entry. Musics are beautiful. Thank you ++

This is greatly executed, however it was next to impossible to get used to the controls.

That may be only me, but having green assigned to 2 fingers on each hand, my brain couldn't match up the colors and the finger. Relying only on the position made it harder.

And also, this is great music :)

Impressive work, been thinking about making a game like this someday. As an audio geek I had to look at the source... I hope for your sanity that GamePatterns.as was generated by a tool :)

Wow, that was supossed to be easy? :D Funny anyway .

This was really great! :)
Had at first an problem that he web thingy didn't have the focus, so all my keyboard input did nothing.
I'm not very good at these things but still got up to 132 points on easy.

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone!

@tanjent Actually, it was all written by hand on stream (you'll note I even have some hand-written notes in there). If I were to make a full game like this I would definitely have a tool to import raw data from MIDI and another tool to edit and fine-tune it.

@all Regarding difficulty: I know it's really hard (sorry). It was WAY more challenging than I anticipated to make the "easy" patterns. The "hard" patterns practically wrote themselves.
In fact, I should probably rename them from "easy" to "normal", create "easy" as a step down in difficulty, and add "beginner" as a step below that too.

For some reason none of the keys work until after I've pressed space once. That's minor though. Very difficult at first, but very fun once I got into the flow of it. I would've liked button prompts or clearly delineated lanes that the bars travel down, but the staggered size and colors of the different bars helps a lot.

I'm a sucker for really good rhythm games, and this game is pretty damn cool. My only beef the complete absence of stimulus-- there's no real indication whether you've hit the note, or even that not hitting the notes is a bad thing.

It's also not obvious what city represents what key; you can't color coordinate ala Guitar Hero and writing out the keypress would look tacky, so this is a hard problem. Maybe have each city have a little billboard with the corresponding key on it?

Also, I know everyone's going to say this, but awesome music here.

OMG! Well done guys!

Oh man, this is really hard. Really enjoyed the music. Could've used a few more response animations, sometimes it was hard to tell if I hit or missed a note. Also would've loved to see the falling bars skinned as aliens or something to match the theme, might've made it harder to correlate the notes though. Great job though, really impressive work.

RAAAVVVVEE!

Only bad feedback, is that the game can be easily hacked, just mash all keys.

score 0/192 wow its hard! great songs tho

Pink Floyd lazer light show to defeat the technicolor recntagular alien horde. Rock out.

Fun and simple, enjoyable music. Well done.

I am sooooo bad at these games... Even the easy mode was hard on me. I can't manage guitar hero with 3 keys, so here with 7 it's catastrophic. But the game is really nice, and I'll always admire people making game synchronized that much with music, that's not an easy thing to do! Well done!

Good tunes, cool to see two different stages with two difficulties each. Pretty fun!

Since there wasn't a punishment for pressing keys off-beat, you can get a high score pretty easily by mashing all the keys.

(Developer here)
Thanks again for all the comments!

I know difficulty is still an issue. I would love to offer lower difficulty options, but I also don't want to show more work than I was able to accomplish in the 48 hours. I knew it would take about 3-4 hours to add another difficulty level for each song so I chose not to, given other priorities.

Similarly, things like art for the notes/aliens, hit/miss animations, a "combo" counter, sensitivity detection (e.g. "bad", "okay", "good", "perfect"), and so on were on the list. However, I had prioritized those things lower than other features like a second song track and decent menu navigation.

Keep the comments coming though! It helps confirm for me that the issues I had next on my priority list were the correct issues to address next if I had more time.

Nice! Love a good rhythm game, I was struggling a little bit to get the notes to land, maybe I'm just bad

It's like missile defense meets Guitar Hero! Awesome! Very well polished, and the music was very catchy. Great job!

I like the music

I'm so baaaad! Or is the easy mode too hard? ;)
Great musics, just need a bit more feedback when you achieve a note (or did I miss them all?) ^^

Loved the music, did have trouble switching to space from the home row though :P Did find I had to click in at the start of a song to make it take key input. Overall good use of the theme!

Like most people have said, very difficult, but great music, sleek look, and fun, if challenging to play.

Such an awesome job, making the music and then sequencing it to the game must have taken so long! The music was good to mash to, but I am no good at rhythm games.

Great music, but I suck in type of games like this. :)

Gosh, I'm so bad at rythm games! Very nice tracks!

To fast for me :-) , very cool music!
Well done!!

This is really cool, so I'm going to start with some criticism. =P

When starting a song, it wouldn't recognize my keystrokes until I clicked the applet with the mouse. This was after clicking through the menus, so it wasn't a focus issue in the browser. It meant I always missed the first few notes.

The notes approaching each turret should really look different from each other. You might be able to reuse colors/shapes between the left and right halves, but one side should have different sprites for each location. The two green bars (S/F and J/L) really confused me.

It looks like the game doesn't penalize you for false presses and doesn't pay attention to timing. I played hard mode on the first song and mashed all the buttons the whole way through and got 324/408. It would help to reward the player with feedback about how well they hit a note (like the DDR perfect/great/good messages) and then use that data to make a comment about the player's performance at the end. It would at least be good to show more feedback when a note is hit or missed.

It looks like you're from the FTL School of Difficulty Ratings, where Easy is Normal and Hard is Impossible. =P Easy could use another 10% nerfing for new players. Impossible seems to throw you into the deep end with chording, which is pretty advanced. Some keyboards may not be able to hold down more than a couple keys at a time, too, which might get in your way when using a lot of chords.

On to the good stuff. Cool rhythm game! Hard to believe you had time to compose 3 songs during the compo, let alone create the note timings. According to your source code it looks like you made it easier on yourself by picking a straightforward BPM and time signature. The tunes are great. I'm still listening to the music while I write this. =)

The game is very complete. Menus with on-hover effects, full loop from menus to gameplay and back. Interesting choice to hide the score until the end. I think it makes me really want to finish a track to see how I did. I couldn't detect any de-syncs in the music, either. All the notes seemed spot-on.

I like the concept of a rhythm version of Missile Command. Defending your city with rhythm. The menu and game art looks good. You could go further with the city and the theme of neon EDM-driven nightlife.

Top notch entry! Nice job!

Oh, and timing feedback would also help players figure out where they're supposed to hit the buttons. I *think* it was when they crossed the red line, but I started playing thinking it was when they hit the buildings.

(And maybe I should read the comments before I post. =D)

Pretty big jump from easy to hard, but the music is good and you chose good keys.