Mainframe (and other personal projects discussion)

[res7less]

Sorry for the late reply, but when I saw the post on wednesday, I had not time to read it and forgot it later on until it suddenly popped up in my mind today.

Yeah, pretty practical to have multiple skills, that sure helps a lot in creating such things as games. I wish my skills in those areas were above basic I know my way around the popular tools like Photoshop, 3ds max, UE4, Flash and Sound Forge well enough, but to create content from scratch I sadly lack that something that artists have, where they are able to put visions from their minds onto something, be it digital or analogue. I can only admire people, who are able to create beautiful artwork or music.

I listened to your tracks and liked the tunes themselves and the mood you're intending to achieve with them. Being a fan of the chiptune genre (along with hard rock and metal ), I heard a lot of nostalgic 8-bit music and got many tracks in my playlists, be it PC or car. I don't think I would classify your music style under chiptune, though, but I probably lack the composer lingo to be able to explain what exactly was standing out. I'll just use a question mark wherever I'm not sure if it's called that way. I think the chords(?) themselves were kind of buzzy(?), intense, concentrated, vibrating(?). Is there a way to make them sound softer somehow? Like, more harmonic(?). I think you're using the same principle in all the tracks. Ugh, so frustrating not to be able to put to words something you're trying to explain in a non-native tongue I hope I'm not being too critical, it's just that stupid habit of always wanting to improve things. If you wish, I could ask the composer of the game Shadow Tactis: Blades of the Shogun, the developers of which I happen to be acquainted with, for his opinion on the tracks. I'm not sure if he's knowledgable around chiptune, though, as he usually plays all the instruments of the music he does himself. Great game by the way, especially if you liked Commandos back in the day. Well, I'm rambling at this point, so I'll just call it a day here. Keep 'em updates coming!

 

[The G-Meister]

I think the chords(?) themselves were kind of buzzy(?), intense, concentrated, vibrating(?). Is there a way to make them sound softer somehow? Like, more harmonic(?). I think you're using the same principle in all the tracks.

I think that's just my style these days. Every since I made that main theme and discovered what you can do with chords beyond the basic stuff you hear in pop songs these days, I've tried to go all out with clashes (inharmonic chords that aren't standard at all) and weird note combinations. I mean, with how much I've listened to them already, the chord sequences seem pretty familiar I guess if you had time to listen to them more often you'd know what to expect...

Wait, that's basically the principle behind my game It's supposed to be confusing, strange and unfamiliar yet being grounded very loosely in a few things people can relate to (the inputs). Totally intended to make the tracks like that all along!

I don't particularly want to seek professional feedback (although I'd appreciate it if it was given), especially when I haven't got a game with which I can integrate them to actually show you what my intentions are

Also, this is off topic. Feel free to take any tangents you want (and most certainly tangents about videogames. I like videogames )

 

[res7less]

I didn't mean as in style, but more as in intensity, that makes you want to turn the volume down, I don't know how to better explain it. As I said, I liked the tunes themselves, the melody if you will, but the intensity of the chords themselves creates some sort of acoustic vibration which feels unpleasant in the ear (again, don't know how else to explain it). Perhaps an analogy will do: it's like watching a movie you like on a TV that is too bright - you like the movie, but the TV hurts your eyes. Something like that? There is a music style called Noise, where intense, distorted or eerie noises are part of the style, but can't imagine this is the direction you want to go into. If it's supposed to be music, that supports a mood or atmosphere in a game, it shouldn't disturb the player by its intensity. That's all I can say It's your call, of course.

 

[The G-Meister]

Assuming that the volume isn't just too loud, do you feel it's more of an imbalance in the instruments, or something like all of the instruments feel like they have that distortion/white noise sound behind them? I mean it's supposed to be pretty intense, but then again I'd like people to be able to listen to it at high volume and not have their ears hurt

I can solve both of those, but I'll be reluctant to make a change with only one person's opinion, especially when music is a very subjective topic. If it's physically painful to listen to though, and the tunes can't be heard when you turn it down to a respectable volume, I'll give it a look. Also, the Arcade tune on my Soundcloud that's very similar in composition to this is my most downloaded track, so I'm not sure if it's just an issue you might be having (I doubt it is, just on the off chance).

 

[res7less]

Well, it doesn't physically hurt or anything, it's just that vibrating noise of a chord that makes it so intense. It's most apparent in the Challenge music and least in the one called Title. It's like the chords don't play simultaneously, but have the individual notes(?) of a chord a slight delay of like 50 milliseconds from each other, which creates that unpleasant vibrating sensation. At least that's how I perceive it. It reminds be slightly of a short track from Undertale, where there is a similar vibrating sensation at the start of it, but I don't perceive it as unpleasant or intrusive.

 

[The G-Meister]

I think I see what you mean. In that Undertale tune, do you get that effect from the first time it changes note? If so, that's an effect that generally happens if you get two similar instruments playing the same note, or notes of various octaves apart (this is what an octave is). What happens is the air waves overlap with each other and the note part of them coincide with each other to either make it sound louder or quieter. That louder or quieter-ness then forms a resultant wave that's quite different from the original two, and will "vibrate" much differently to any two other notes. Look up superposition of waves if you're interested, it's a physics thing

The reason you'll notice it most in Challenge is because I specifically used those octaves to get a louder and more solid note out, to make it more harsh and less melodic, fitting the theme. On the other hand, when I made Title, I specifically made the main two tunes such that, at any point, neither of them is playing the same note as the other, such as to remove the possibility of those clashes, and make a much smoother, happier and melodic tune.

So if that's what you think it might be, it's intentional. Hopefully that clears things up

 

[res7less]

The reason you'll notice it most in Challenge is because I specifically used those octaves to get a louder and more solid note out, to make it more harsh and less melodic, fitting the theme.

Ah, so it is intended then. Well, in that case it's part of the style and a subjective matter. It's really hard to tell, though.

Edit: By the way, interesting video. Now I know how to explain what I meant. Around 2:30 you can see how two waves are sent simultaneously. If we now view the chords as a composition of similar waves, which are sent to the ear, to me it sounds like the waves of the music's chords are slightly apart, not simultaneous. At least that's how I perceive it.

 

[The G-Meister]

There is a very slight gap between notes as well, due to how quickly they attack. The reason that might be slightly out of sync is because it's difficult to get that good precision with GarageBand's dials, and I tend to put the attack up just a tad to avoid harsh clicks at the start of each note. At least it's something I can change at will quite quickly on all the tracks, if it develops into more of a problem

 

[res7less]

Actually, I have an idea, let's just do this: @LuckyLionStudios

He seems like a nice person and he is most certainly able to give you a much better feedback than I ever could. If he wants, of course.

 

[res7less]

Just a small heads up, because there may be a funny thought.

After having implemented every single class bonus, I recently implemented auto-combat for testing purposes. You know, to let for example a two-handed warrior fight against a dual wielding rogue for 50 rounds to see who wins most and eventually needs a bit more tweaking to be stronger or weaker. Ideally, 8 fighters should be able to face off against 8 enemies without crashing, so I wanted to run a couple of performance tests to find out if it can be done. Repetitive processes that restart themselves are known to be somewhat problematic since they like to cause call stack overflow, so despite having inserted a small timer of 0.05 milliseconds, there might have been a possibility for a stack overflow crash if there are too many fighters attacking.

The fun part was that I was using the weakest type of fighters in order to have longest possible fights to test, the mesh of which are just faceless dummies. The second fun part was that while disabling effects and animation to increase performance, I didn't remove the shaking hit noise (not audio noise, the other one). The combination of those two things made it look like this:

So optically, it looks completely dumb if you don't have the background information I have just provided. If seeing this without any context whatsoever, it looks like one of those weird YouTube videos people get shown for "try not to cringe" challenges, where you go "What in seven hells is happening right now?" In truth, it's just an outtake of such a performance test.

Hint: You may find Waldo.

Here is one of the full performance tests just to complete the picture. You may notice that I added two more buttons, one being to initiate auto combat itself, and the other being a weaker version of the load-button, that I needed for auto combat in order to revive already present fighters, instead of completely wipe everything and load the saved data onto an empty battlefield.

Edit: Oh, and YouTube didn't double the videos this time for some reason even though I recorded and uploaded everything with the very same method.

 

[The G-Meister]

Well, it's been a while.

It's amazing how much progress you get done when you're not monitoring a forum and multiple discords like an eagle over it's hunting ground. Preying on the opinions of unsuspecting forum users and striking at deadly speeds using the disappointment that their bugs have already been found or that their ideas won't work with the balancing of the game takes up a surprising amount of time (as did writing this paragraph, apparently).

What have I done in that time? Basically, revise and code, filling in the gaps with YouTube. Last time I posted, it looks like I'd just got 60fps going. Well, now that system has been fully implemented into a rendering system, and animations are working like a charm. And to take it one step further - I have the basis of a random level generator! While it did take the most part of a week of thinking about a lot of maths and not actually writing much down, eventually I got there.

Events have also been completely redone, meaning this random level generator is completely functional as well. If it was in a polished state I'd totally publish it now, but I'd at least like to get a menu and a load of options in before that, plus the basis of music. Surprisingly, that won't be that far away. When I said we'd be making significant leaps in progress now, I wasn't joking

One thing I have realised though - even the simplest of puzzles are incredibly difficult. Even with each letter to match (from here-on called "tabs") having only 3 different options and shuffling all the buttons around, it gets seriously confusing seriously quickly. It's remarkable how bad my short term memory is.

This means we're gonna have to implement a couple things to make the game not necessarily easier, but most definitely more accessible. A couple things I have in mind are for the auto-notepad to always be present and allowing hovering over a tab to find which inputs affect it. It's nice to know at a glance what letter you have to match when you've been through all of the tabs, and having a vague indication of which buttons you have to press will significantly ease the amount of stuff you have to process all at the same time.

I've also had a fantastic idea of how to implement a story around the central game concept (that you don't know what a button will do before you click it) which fits with the initial story start I wanted to go for, so that's something to look forward to.

So what's next? I have a whole summer ahead of me, and practically nothing to do except a few parties. I've decided I'm gonna attempt to code as if it were a job - at least 7 hours a day. To add on to that, I'm gonna attempt to stream for at least the first couple days to see how it goes. So if you wanna watch me code, head over to https://www.twitch.tv/the_g_meister. I'll probably go live at 1pm BST (12pm UTC, for conversion) tomorrow morning at latest, after I've got OBS set up.

While we're here, let's at least give a bit more art out. Here's the title page, currently in the middle of production:



As always, click to expand images, they look a bit eh without. I've enlarged the size of the text a little yet again to make things look clearer. I've also gone back to the circuitboard layout idea, and it's looking much better with a re-visit. Please excuse the stray % - I use that symbol to show the current selection because I've completely reworked the painting system to work entirely within the layering system, so it doesn't need any extra special functions, which is cool.

On that topic, I've managed to make it do smooth line and box selections dynamically as you move the mouse, and compound selections as well (by holding CTRL). Might do a video on that at some point. All renders cleanly at 60 as well. The brush tool has also been improved to dynamically extrapolate a line of letters if the cursor moves more than 1 square within a frame, so it's smooooooth painting.

Here's what the demo currently looks like. Fairly standard from what I've shown already.



Also, I've set all big letters display using their smaller letters, mainly just for a laugh. However, I've now realised I can screw people over by changing the letter the big letter is drawn in, which should throw a few people off. sigh I really am evil.

Here's a couple people shapes I've attempted. Fairly anime at the moment, looking towards making it more general cartoon-like in the future. Semicolons highlight jaw line, for reference purposes only. Probably gonna shrink people down from this size eventually too.



And that's about it for now. As I said, lots of progress done, and much, much more to come.

See you on Twtich

~G <3

[Edit]: Gonna have to start a bit later - just remembered I've gotta go into school to hand in some textbooks tomorrow. New start time about 1pm

[Edit 2]: I've decided I really can't provide good entertainment while coding. Sorry to disappoint.

 

[res7less]

I just hit the follow button on your Twitch channel Looks good so far!

Also, I especially like how "Options" is called "Control Panel" and "Exit" is called "Shut Down".

 

[The G-Meister]

Ohai. This thread exists

Yet more leaps and bounds have been made in regards to progress, despite the fact that I've been playing Pokémon Gold and drawing practically solid for the past 3 and a half weeks. Only just got round to fixing the battery in the cartridge, so I've been sapping up that sweet, sweet reminiscence I've wanted to for the past few years now. Well worth it

Anyway, back on topic (I didn't realise you could go off topic of off-topic things ). The menu is now integrated into the game and is fully interfaceable, allowing you to close the program, launch the game itself, launch the editor and enter the settings menu. Talking of the settings menu, I've got a system that allows you to specify a load of components which it then arranges in the list, top to bottom, and hovering over them puts their description at the side. Sub-menus and on/off buttons are working nicely, still have to find a good way to implement sliders to my satisfaction, as well as things like radio buttons and drop-down menus. As I want such an in-depth options menu in this game I wanna make sure I get it right at this point so I have less work to do later, however that means slow progress on it for now.

However, that's nothing compared to the main meat of the program which I have pretty much fully working now - a random level generator that takes a difficulty number from 1-100 and converts it into a level based on a seed. It does this by using the specified difficulty as a number of points which the game "spends" on certain added elements of difficulty. These include the swapping of buttons and the extra commands added to buttons on top of the initial increment/decrement commands. Increments and decrements of values larger than 1 are now possible, as are set commands, and locking of buttons (not of tabs yet). Somehow I managed to spend 14 hours taking that from planning to implementation in a single day

In terms of the layout of the demo, we now have a couple big changes. The auto-notepad is now always present, but no-longer gives you summaries of the letters you've found in the tabs, only the positions the tabs are currently in. It's a very helpful summary, but you still need to go through the process of deciphering the latter to match. That is, unless you're given it. There's a 50% chance that you're given the letter you need to match on the right now, and in return, the game is given 5 extra difficulty points to spend. We've also given the layout a fresh lick of circuitboard - here it is along with some of the features I've just mentioned:



This is good fun and all, but it's the crudest version of the difficulty system I could implement, meaning it still has a load of quirks. The biggest flaw at the moment is that some levels are actually impossible to complete, happening even more regularly on the higher difficulties (past 60 or so). Increment/decrement commands for the same tab on the same button cancel out, effectively wasting difficulty points. The list goes on, and I have a sheet with about 8/10 things to change on which I haven't quite got around to.

I have an ideal system in mind which is much safer, in the sense that it allows the game to only spend points on combinations of things it knows won't lock up. However, the volatility of this system makes up for it's flaws in the sense that it allows me to discover interesting systems based purely on what happens to crop up. One such thing was a system I've given the pet name of "bait" - you're given the letter to match, and it's present on one tab when you start. Most people go "ah, I don't need to change that one" and rightfully so, however most if not all of the other buttons change that tab to some degree. Just sets people up for disappointment

However I can't just explain all this and not show you anything, so I'll try my best to get a recording out tomorrow at some point. It's very late here at the moment, and I apparently decided writing an update while tired was a good decision . I'm not quite ready to upload a .jar out onto a public forum yet, but when I get the demo in a complete enough state I'll probably pop the build here, and subsequently move off the forums to somewhere else, only dropping occasional updates. That's still a long way away though.

For now, it's trying to find the programming vibe again. It's creeping back after these three weeks off, but I'm off to the University of Bath to start a Natural Sciences degree in a week or so's time, so we'll see how all that goes!

~G <3

P.S. Oh, and have a shiny Nidoran Male and some forest lady designs. That's where those 3 weeks went.

 

[The G-Meister]

A couple corrections of tired me:

Somehow I managed to spend 14 hours taking that from planning to implementation in a single day

I meant just the locking, not every other type of button command too. The combo of all of them probably took a lot longer and across many more days.

so I'll try my best to get a recording out tomorrow

Turns out it took me two days to get around to recording, and three days to get around to doing some minor edits. Regardless, it's here now

I advise watching on a smaller scale than you might normally watch a video on, if only because it makes the letters made with letters easier to see. In the actual game I'll eventually have a first-time-setup rescaling option that factors this in so don't dwell on it as a major problem

Hopefully that fills in the gaps that I didn't with the post above, however I'd advise reading the post as well as watching the video if you're just skimming through.

Enjoy,

~G <3

P.S. As soon as I get a team together to trade over to Pokémon Crystal of course the first shiny I try to breed goes massively over odds. Just hatch shiny already the Seel, there's still 5 other Pokés to go

 

[The G-Meister]

You know what's sad? I never caught that shiny Seel.

I hatched and I hatched and I hatched. But none came. It's likely I may have even released one as the shiny and normal variant look very similar in most light sources. I guess that's what I get for using outdated hardware. According to my spreadsheet I am within the 1% of unluckiest people to hatch this many eggs without a single shiny Seel. The odds are 1/64. I'm at about 400 hatches. And you know what's even more insulting? I got bored of Seels at one point and switched over to Exeggcute. I got a shiny in 10 eggs. Why, game? I just want to play Crystal with a team of shinies

Ahem, excuse my further off-topicness. After writing that last post I'm pretty sure I didn't do any game dev at all until shortly before my Winter break started. However, in the last couple months progress has once again, gone through the roof.

The first thing I did after booting up Eclipse was try to build Minesweeper. That prompted a minor rebuild into expandable 2 dimensional arrays of booleans (trues/falses, 1s/0s) instead of the fixed variant I had been using previously. After a lot of simple yet surprisingly difficult to think over maths, that's all working, as is Minesweeper. It's lacking a heck of a lot of GUI but it works a charm and brings back all the memories <3. I'd totally release it here if it had summa that GUI so the size of the field and number of mines could be set from inside the game rather than the code, but hey, here we are. It's totally going in the final tech demo build though, don't you worry about that.

Here's a lil' screenie to wet your appetite.



As usual, click to expand ima-WAIT! That's actually no longer necessary (unless you can't actually see the characters) as we'll get onto now!

(There was a gap over the Christmas period where I played Heat Signature and drew for 2 weeks solid, then exams happened.)

About a week ago I finished exams. Since then, not only have I managed to watch the first season of Daredevil with my housemates, but it has also been the most productive programming week of my life... actually I can't remember if that was the week up until the burnout over the summer but still.

In the process of removing a bug, I had to rebuild the rendering loop to incorporate timers. Timers run loops of a fixed period of time and update when the rendering loop gives them a kick. However, during that rebuild I removed the "Thread.sleep(...);" code in favour of running the loop the whole time. After reading an article saying that any thread using Thread.sleep(...); is wasting resources, I want back to the original article I read along with that knowledge and my programming experience, and now I can get the game to run smoothly at 60fps using the most intensive antialiasing option... on my laptop only apparently. Not on my desktop which has a GTX 1080 - it lags profusely when the antialiasing is on and it gets worse the bigger the window is, huh. I'll have to look into that.

What was the bug? Locks and keys overwriting each other when they enter/leave. Now, using timers and a lot of extra code, locks and keys (and all other items I might want to add to buttons) now enter and leave effortlessly, one after the other. And when multiple keys/locks are present on a button, they now loop, so you can see all of them without having to remember!

What prompted the removal of the bug? A heckin' megaton massive goddamn rebalance! I took the notes I made when playtesting over the summer and decided to act on half of them. Lock/unlock pairs now cost less difficulty points, from 10 down to 6 - they're only really worth 10 when a button locks itself (though this is still waiting to be implemented). I may also have dropped the difficulty points of the "Set" command (sets a particular tab to a particular letter) from like 6 down to 3 or something, I can't quite remember.

The most important of the lot though was the rebuilding of the system so each button can only have 1 command on each tab. This means not only is it much less likely that the level will lock up as one command counteracts another (EG first command increments tab 1, then the second command, still on the same button, decrements tab 1, rendering the button useless), but now commands that counteract each other are no longer wasting difficulty points - meaning difficulty 100 is actually (like properly this time) difficult!

That happened somewhere in between the Winter break ending and my exams finishing. Regardless, the system is a heck of a lot more fun and challenging now. It still locks up occasionally (excuse the pun), mainly now with buttons managing to create chains of the now much cheaper locks, which mean two buttons are both locked by each other, and also holding the other one's key. I've also had the increment and decrement button both move up/down by 2 instead of 1, preventing access to the middle character in a tab which is only 3 long. But hey, it's a heck of a lot less volatile.

I also managed to get music working at some point, and oh god does it sound good. Here's a couple videos of what I'm on about. The first is a mock start of a trailer, which is like, most of the work I've done on this project so far coming together into something awesome. It feels that way anyway. The second is a stretch of 5 levels around difficulty 20 , to show you what it'd be like in the actual game. (I tried 30, 40 and 50 and all of them took too long, locked up or were too difficult ).

I did stop briefly on one of the levels towards the end, only because I wanted the next section of the music to be heard. It will skip the section if you have finished before it moves on, just to point out.

Gah. I think that's it. I've likely missed something out but whatever. I've still got the programming vibes for now, along with a few more days until the next semester starts, so I'm gonna use that to my advantage! And, possibly grind some more Seels and continue working on my adaptation of Heat Signature to tabletop RPG format because it's that damn good.

See you in god knows however long,

~G <3

 

[res7less]

Nice work, mate! Glad you not only made advances to your project, but also got all your exams out of the way. Hope the results are to your satisfaction! I checked out the video and the game seems to be in a very playable state. I was gonna comment on the music, but seeing how excited you're about it, I'm not gonna spoil it by subjective feedback Overall it seems like you're happy with it and that's the main thing!

Oh god, anti-aliasing. Guess I'm not the only one getting haunted by it in my dreams as if it was a Vietman flashback. I think I mentioned it once somewhere that I had negative experience with it back in the day and there was more of such facepalmingly (yeah, that's totally a word now) frustrating experiences when messing around with fonts for the SoG translation; Teddy can confirm. It's not like your game absolutely needs to run on 60 fps, but having lags on latest video cards is not ideal, of course, and I hope you'll be able to find a suitable solution in due time.

Also nice one on building Minesweeper out of the blue, heh!

PS: As much as I like the good ol' Pokèmon games, I was never a fan of hatching shinies. I obviously like the game because of its turn-based combat system and I never had the patience to for that egg-business. However, I wish you to be able to exeggcute the perfect hatch to seel a shiny's fate!

 

[Teddy]

Teddy can confirm

Teddy can confirm

Also, good to see progress and congrats on being on the sunnier side of the exams (until the next set looms ahead)!

 

[The G-Meister]

I was gonna comment on the music, but seeing how excited you're about it, I'm not gonna spoil it by subjective feedback

Oh, I think I'm well over the hype of getting it done and dusted now, so please do say something if you have something to say. I have it muted a lot these days when I'm working on it as I haven't figured out how to change the volume (in the code, not on my PC! ).

And thanks for the well wishes, both of you! Semester 2 starts tomorrow so it's possibly back to slow progress again, but thankfully there's a good few months until the next set of exams.

 

[res7less]

please do say something if you have something to say

Alrighty! To be frank, I think the music is too intense. Now, I know, I know, the theme is hacking, so probably working under pressure, or about to trigger an alarm et cetera, but that music is just building up so much pressure due to its intensity and insistence, that I don't think anyone will be able to concentrate on the job at hand.

Assuming there is a time limit, I could very well imagine the usual music cross-fading into that music at about 20 or so seconds left, because then it compliments the pressure. But otherwise the game mechanically (at least to me) suggests a puzzle game, and puzzle games are generally way more laid-back and chill.

I don't know, of course, the ratio between the shown gameplay and the things inbetween, like dialogue or whatnot, so perhaps it's not as often as I assume it is. But if the game consists, let's say, 80% of cracking the codes supported by that music, then I automatically think all the things mentioned above.

That's the subjective feedback I mentioned earlier

 

[The G-Meister]

But otherwise the game mechanically (at least to me) suggests a puzzle game, and puzzle games are generally way more laid-back and chill.

Yeah, from what I've shown so far I can very much see the correlation there, along with how it wouldn't really fit in to a laid back puzzler. However, I think with the fundamental nature of the concept (being the anonymity of the inputs), there's a degree of ambiguity which isn't the same as in most puzzle games.

In a traditional puzzler the player knows before they enter the puzzle what their actions will do, and often what the aim of the puzzle is. The difficulty then comes about in working out how the puzzle is completed - connecting your actions to the problem. In fact, the first part extends to most games if you think about them in terms of puzzles. In racing games for instance, the "how" is also very clear, but the difficulty comes in using the inputs to achieve that how, until the player "gits gud".

In this system, it's a bit of a mish-mash between a racing game and a normal puzzler. The "what" part is often slightly more ambiguous with the lack of indication of letters to match, and the "how" even more - what the inputs actually do and what symbol is supposed to be matched is often left ambiguous, leading to a lot more work having to be done in the space of a single puzzle.

And this comes across when playing it. The game is really damn hard, and (as you might be able to tell) I've been thinking a lot about this recently, along with how I can implement the core concept in a way which encourages a degree of input mashing to get familiar with the buttons.

Don't get me wrong though, there will certainly be more puzzle like challenges, without a timer - and no way will they have this music on However if we have the contrast of a simple, laid back puzzle to the time-constrained stress-fest, I've gotta watch out that my 1. I get my audience right, and 2. I don't give them all heart attacks during the transition!

Thanks for speaking out - looks like I've got a couple genres to pick between (or more cleanly mash together!)