Beat Flip

This is a cool idea but it's WAY TOO HARD!!

Took me 3 fail of not understanding anything and going into easy to finally understand how everything worked. The rules weren't really helpful, even though the concept is not that hard.

I ended up trying every difficulty, and I'm not sure if hard and very hard are that much harder than normal. Easy is too easy (only two blocks means it'll always be inverted), but every other difficulty is just too much.

The biggest issue is that even if you say you're at the bottom, you're in the middle of the screen. There's so little time to act! First you need to identify the shape that's appoaching, then you need to see what's your shape and THEN come up with a set of move to solve the puzzle.

When you just have to switch or move it's ok, but when you have to do both it's just too much, since you have to recognize your colors are inverted. By the time you switch, your instinc will already have kicked in and tried to move squares in the right place, but since it's the opposite, after switching you end up in the wrong place.

And all that happens within a second because you don't really have the time to see the shapes coming. Maybe I'm just slow, maybe you have killer reflexes, but I really think it's too fast for most people. For me the game should have used the width of the window instead of half the height to be playable. And then instead of adding blocks, you could have accelerated the game in hard, and do 5 blocks + speed up for very hard.

I know it's hard to balance game and do playtest during jam, but always try to aim at something too easy for you.

I'm still struggling to determine why this was such a struggle for me XD I'm generally decent at rhythm games; Guitar Hero on Expert was a favorite of mine for a while.

For some reason, when I see the black/white mirror set, my brain doesn't register that as "wrong". It feels like my brain is saying "hey, those white blocks fill in the black boxes". I wonder how this would've played with a different colour scheme.

I also wonder about a couple things: what if you could 'see' farther ahead, and what if you got a small 'grace period' after missing, to help your mind recover from the mistake. I almost always made a 2nd mistake after the first, just due to being thrown off, mentally.

Also, maybe if it was score based, instead of 3X and game over, it might increase the fun / reduce stress of mistakes. Shrug Just some thoughts :)

It's an interesting idea, for sure. Thank you for making Beat Flip! :D

PS. I uploaded a video of my playthrough

I struggled quite a lot to play this haha - not because the game is bad - but because I'm bad :D Took me quite a while to figure it out, but once I finally got it ... it was good! (Although, I was still bad :D)

Cool idea. Some better instructions or tutorial style parts might be good - and I'd like more time to react (but, that's just because I'm bad :D).

The music is the highlight of this game, and helps a lot with playing it. I found starting on normal difficulty to be very rough. It may be better to start players on the easy mode style of challenges for a little bit to give them a chance to figure out the game. Personally, I'd like something between easy and normal. It didn't take long to figure out that just hitting space on beat would succeed every time on easy.

I don't like that the game calls me a loser when I mess up :(

In all seriousness, I did enjoy this short little game. It really hurt my head, but I could see how someone could get really good at it.

The instructions were a little bit lacking for me, I understood the concept but some extra explanation would have helped. Particularly, it would have been nice to know that you only need to perform one action to "solve" a puzzle, since I would have been way less stressed on my first few times playing it (unless, of course, that changes once you get higher up, I didn't do very well at the game so its entirely possible that this changes later on).

It does seem to me that the game is built for normal. Easy mode is way too easy. Mainly because pressing space solves literally every puzzle. I played one game of hard. It was hard. I haven't played very hard. The idea of that scares me.

Overall though, this is a solid, well-polished, finished game. I don't know if there are many improvements that aren't nitpicks or would take a while that I can talk about here. It doesn't really push the envelope that much, but for a game jam sometimes that's okay. Smaller games have the advantage of a lot of polish, and I think you used the extra time you had wisely.

This was a challenge, but i found myself getting better after playing for longer. an interesting concept!

Concpet is nice. Really awesome you had a difficulty setting so everybody could enjoy this game! I think some other options would be interesting. Like making the beat slower rather than just lessening the block size. Maybe slower beat longer blocks. More lead time to the impact too. Felt more like a puzzle game than a rhythm game but the sound is a good cue to when you've run out of time.

Nice concept, but I feel like it could use with some more polish. Also more time to react to the obstacles would be great.

There should probably be more lead-in time for each of the tiles as they come up to bat. Could use different music for each difficulty as well :)

I tried very hard at first and it was too much for me but when I started on a lower difficulty and worked my way up it was much more enjoyable

I had some trouble understanding what to do at first. It doesn't appear to exactly be a rhythm game; you do have to flip the tiles by the time the next beat hits rather than when the next beat hits. This made it feel more like a puzzle game to me, which is why I had a hard time playing the game.

There isn't really a clear way to see what the next tiles to the right or left will look like. I ended up trying to guess and if the guess was wrong I wouldn't have time to try and shift the tiles again.

I think this could be a good puzzle game if there was a visual indicator for what the next tiles to the left and right would look like if an input was made (like tetris, where you can see the shape of the next few blocks). Some full music could help flesh it out too~ if this was a game I made I'd call it a prototype and keep experimenting from there.

Thanks for submitting!