Some thoughts (and ideas!)

[Tailez]

(note: TLDR summary near the bottom of this post )

First of all - an introduction. I heard about this game about a week ago on gametrailers, when I was just randomly browsing, and I saw a vid of someone doing Through Fire and Flames in this game. So I then decided to look for it, and I found out that it kinda only works on weekends. So I signed up for the beta, and completely forgot about it this week. Only by randomly checking my email on Sunday evening I noticed the game there.

This is what I think could be done to improve the game, from my 4 hour play experience. ^^

First thing I noticed is that there is no "Preview Song" button or something like that. I had to alt+tab out to browse through my songs and find one that could sound good. And that wouldn't be such a bad thing, but the ingame music keeps on playing even after alt+tabbing, thus not letting me preview my song properly. I have found a workaround for that - if you select the Audiosurf Radio tab before alt tabbing, it will stop the music. So here comes the suggestion (or some of its' variations):

1. Make clicking the song (or certain other menu options) just select it (displaying useful info), and clicking it again will start the loading. Now the preview could come in 2 varieties:
 a) After clicking the song, a button (that's normally grayed out) flashes up, and you can click it to play the song.
 b) After clicking the song, it will start previewing automatically after a second or two.
2. Leave the song selecting as it is right now, but make the 2nd mouse button be the preview key, and just hovering over the song will pop up a small info box.
3. Make the game stop any sound playback upon alt+tabbing, so you can preview your songs in Winamp, WMP or what have you. (Not recommended lol )

Right, now with that out of the way we can get to some other usage of the 2nd button! First my suggestion would be to remove the Dual ships, and making every character have a 2player mode. They can be re-implemented in the following ways:

1. When you click your character, a dialog box pops up with an expanded description of the character, his abilities, etc. And for the dual mode:
 a) On the dialog box there could be 2 buttons: 1player and 2player (could be named in a fancier way), and you can clicky them to select. (there could be some extra options too)
 b) Once the dialog box pops up, you can either click the 1st mouse button on it for 1player, or click the 2nd mouse button for a 2player game.
2. Leave the selecting as it is now, and make the 2nd mouse button toggle between 1player and 2player modes.

You probably noticed that both suggestions are just about the same thing. That's because I thought up the 2nd one while writing the 1st one . And I thought up some achievements and score multiplier thingies too:

Colorblind (I thought it up for Mono, but could work for all chars): Hit 95% of all cube thingies.
Stacker (all chars probably): Overfill a column with cube thingies 15-25 times in 1 song. (achievement)
Starburst: Hit 95% of non-grey cubes as Mono or finish a song without overfilling as any other character. (achievement, but could work as a multiplier)

Those may need some polish though. I had actually thought of another idea while I was writing the achievements, but I forgot what it was, so bleh.

And a summary for the TLDR crowd:

1) Add a song preview option
2) Remove the one 2 player character and make all characters have a 2 player option.
3) Achievements

Many thanks for making such a great game and sharing it with us on weekends. ^^

Wall of text crits you for over 9000.

[blacklotus90]

Some great ideas for sure. I agree completely with the track preview idea, with such a large library it's hard to keep track of how each song sounds and that would make it so much easier to find songs that you want to play.

[GigaClon]

I hardily support previews even if its just 10-20 seconds

[Tailez]

Thanks for the positive comments, guys. ^^

Oh and I just remembered the other idea that I had thought up of

It should be possible to tag songs which characters would be best suited for those songs. For example most downward going songs could just get tagged as Mono by default (or you can tag them yourself), so when you want a random song (I saw this idea in another post, and thought it'd be a great match to this), but want it for a specific character, you can have it!

You could add more filtering options too, like genre and the like, but too much would get really confusing for everyone, so some simple ones would be nice.

Also that would make use of the "click and a description box pops up!" idea, mentioned in my original post. So it's a win/win situation. ^^

[NVP-Raz0r]

Tailez, just so your aware 90% of the people viewing these forums don't read text walls.
Anyways, There are some good ideas in there you just need to weed them out.

[Tailez]

Tailez, just so your aware 90% of the people viewing these forums don't read text walls.
Anyways, There are some good ideas in there you just need to weed them out.

There, added a summary for the TLDR peeps.

[That Zero Guy]

thanks for the tl;dr version, i appreciate it a lot.

now, i love these ideas, they're novel and good. song preview is good, but then, shouldn't you know your own songs?

well, i do categorize my songs by artist [by album, soon.], so yeah.

No, not genre. See, as I see it, most songs [or mine atleast], don't have tags for genre. Hell, I think I only have a quarter or so of songs with an album tag. [or less, then it'd be a no quarter thing. get it? heh]

The achievements are great ideas, except Starburst. See, I think the 95% thing only works with Mono.

Really hard to do 95% on other characters unless you know what you're doing.

Which is rare.

[Tailez]

thanks for the tl;dr version, i appreciate it a lot.

now, i love these ideas, they're novel and good. song preview is good, but then, shouldn't you know your own songs?

well, i do categorize my songs by artist [by album, soon.], so yeah.

No, not genre. See, as I see it, most songs [or mine atleast], don't have tags for genre. Hell, I think I only have a quarter or so of songs with an album tag. [or less, then it'd be a no quarter thing. get it? heh]

The achievements are great ideas, except Starburst. See, I think the 95% thing only works with Mono.

Really hard to do 95% on other characters unless you know what you're doing.

Which is rare.

Hehe, thanks for the feedback. =]

Well the song preview is there for when you remember a song sounds good, but not exactly sure what it was, so you click preview and you're like "Yes! That's exactly what I was looking for."

I chose "genre" as an example, you can add any other kinds of filters. Like one where you can filter the intense/not intense songs to play with certain characters (like intense songs = Mono).

For the Starburst achievement, notice the "or", meaning 95% is just for Mono, all other characters just have to not overfill once.

And there is another thing that's been bugging me: bronze, silver and gold medals in scores.

I am not exactly sure how it works on a character-wide scale, but I did notice, that in some of the shorter than x and less intense than y songs I just can't even reach the bronze medal, no matter how hard I try. And in other songs, I can just roll my head on my keyboard every once in a while, and get twice the gold score. The one fix would be to make either required scores for the medals scale with song length and intensity, or keep them as they are now, but reduce/increase the points given for each block (that too should scale with song length and intensity).

Sry for such a suggestion spam though.