Feedback about down button, and pro-tip for down-button users

[oposdeo]

One thing I've noticed that I think is a bit of misstep in the game design is how the down key compares to pressing the three other arrow keys at the same time.

If you press the down key, it will only hit if all three lanes are full. If two are full, you will lose your combo, and also not hit the enemies. However if you press the three other arrow keys at the same time, it will instead try to hit all three lanes separately. This means you will still lose the combo for hitting the empty lane, but you will not take damage as a result of successfully hitting the enemies.

This creates a clear advantage for having the three keys, and disadvantages people who have to use the down-key (such as dance pad users) unnecessarily. This issue is extra pronounced in sections where multi-hit enemies such as slimes move up to form repeated down presses. Take for example this pattern of bats and slimes

S-S
S-B
S-B
--B

The bats will move up to create three consecutive down presses. However, if you miss the first bat, then the down key will fail on the next one, causing you to miss the next bat, causing cascading errors even though you are technically hitting what you are supposed to. If you miss the first bat but are hitting all three keys, then you will at least hit the bat in the next lane, and the next two lanes will have all the lanes full. This means "L D D D" makes you take four damage and hit no enemies, while "L LUR LUR LUR" makes you take one damage and hit 6 enemies. Quite the difference in game feel!

Anyways, a pro-tip for people using joy2key or who know how to remap your keys a bit. If you map "down" to instead press "left,up,right", this will confer to you a nice benefit :)

(Side note: On dance pad, I recommend setting the down button to press your three ALTERNATE up, left, and right buttons. This is because if you have a foot down on the right button, then when you press down, it won't actually push right, whereas it will if you use the alt keys.)