finally playing friday night funkin' for rhythm game research purposes and damn that game has great game feel imho. It's really cool how the call & response shifts some focus away from visually reading the note spacing and more paying attention to the note sequence and using the call to guide note spacing. Much in the same way thumper or rhythm heaven does. I dont always like playing call & response rhythm maps but they're really good and help make it easier to solve one of the hardest problems in rhythm games I think, which is conveying timing information.
Like in osu!, I often found that "easy" maps were way harder for me than hard maps, because the timing-circles close in on the hit objects so slowly that it was really hard for me to derive timing information from it. I ended up relying on reading ahead (a long way ahead on Easy) to see the timing of the initial object pop-in, or trying to get into the mapper's head to figure out what they're going to map. This was especially a problem with old maps, though I think the rankers eventually starting enforcing consistent time-dependent object spacing for slow maps because of this problem, so you could use the distance between circles to figure it out.
But similarly, in objects-scroll-in style rhythm games, you sometimes get a problem where if you dont space objects out enough its really hard to read the difference between an 8th and 16th note, but if you space them out too much you dont have time to parse the actual phrase as a phrase because hardly anything is on screen. Which is why the best of those let you just configure that to whatever you need (and why SDVX using 3D perspective to give notes more time on screen is genius IMO, on top of using a vertical display). Step-mania also color-codes based on time-division-alignment of the note which is cool
the SDVX perspective thing is really cool too because it means you get more resolution for closer notes where you need it, and less for further notes where you're mainly interested in what order things or coming down in
also i think im settling on the following controller layout (with nintendo button layout):
Left-arrow + Down-arrow + B [= Up arrow] + A [= Right arrow]
L A
D B
as a decent mapping for 4-key rhythm game controller input. And remember, flip A/B there for xbox layout
I also tried left-arrow + right-arrow with B/A mapping to up/down but that did very weird things to my brain and did NOT work out well
- it also doesn't work because you cant press left/right at the same time
but Left+Down+A+B has it so the left/rightmost buttons (L, A) are also the left/right arrow, and the middle buttons are physically lower which differentiates them nicely in a way I dont usually get when I'm playing 2-hand-4-key gameplay on a keyboard in my normal layout
It also lets you roll between L/D in the same way you can roll between A/B, and it lets you hold any combination of all the keys because of diagonals.
One of the problems I had doing the obvious-but-not-so-great option of mapping the entire D-pad to the 4 directions is that friday night funkin' punishes for misinputs, and its REALLY hard to avoid misinputting at the fastest speeds of that game because if you slide your finger from right to left without picking it up you'll often push slightly up or down a lot of the time. Its the tetris misinput problem, but worse.
In theory you can still get similar with L/D on the dpad in LDBA mapping, but i didnt run into it, and because Up/Right are unused you can bias your inputs towards diagonals with those on the initial press to avoid it
Anyways, this makes some surprisingly fast speeds feel good even with just two digits (two thumbs), and i hit some semi-flow rhythm feels on it even though ive never played this game and never played this control scheme before.
