I like the idea that the strawberry travels along different paths depending on which button you press or whether you fail the timings. I think the notes that you are meant to hit plays a nice melody with the backing track.
There is a massive difficulty spike between "easy" and "normal":
- I think you are on the right track with the "easy" difficulty. There's plenty of spacing between notes to adjust between button presses and looking ahead for the next one.
- the "normal" difficulty feels like there's too many notes being introduced sequentially. Reducing the number of notes for the "normal" difficulty may help give the player more time to look ahead and react to the next required note.
As a general note for both difficulties, there is less time to react to notes that come from the lower levels when the strawberry is falling downwards. This is due to the camera view being biased to be above the strawberry's head height. It may help to have the camera pan downward slightly when the strawberry is falling. In addition, slightly increasing the valid timing window may also help when handling rapid sequential notes.
I think another potential issue is something that I also encountered when I tried a similar control layout for my game during this game jam: I also tried to use keys that were clustered together horizontally and had a key per finger (SDF, and JKL). I would end up using the wrong finger when I tried to press different keys quickly. I experimented a little and found that using keys that were slightly spaced apart (WAS, and IJL) reduced this issue , as well as using spacebar.
I like the art style for this - The skipping strawberry and colour scheme gives the game a jubilant feel. The bloom effects feel a bit too bright, so it could be toned down a little.
A sweet, fruity music game.