🎹 Neon Tiles - Mary Had A Little Lamb

#rhythmgame #game #music

A neon-styled 4-lane rhythm game built around the first song most children ever learn — "Mary Had a Little Lamb" — the chart was transcribed directly from sheet music and runs through both verses of the 8-bar tune. Cyberpunk visuals with a cyan→magenta gradient palette, ambient drifting tiles on the start and game-over screens, and the Orbitron typeface remix the schoolyard standard for the synthwave era.

🎮 How to Play

• Tap / Click — Tap tiles on mobile, or click them with the mouse on desktop.
• Keyboard — Use A S D F for the four lanes (left → right).
• Hold notes — For taller tiles, keep the key/finger pressed until the tile clears.
• Burst tiles — Some tiles fire a quick two-note flourish from a single tap, capturing the song's dotted-quarter + eighth swing.
• Pause — Space or P
• Mute / Unmute — M
• Quick start / restart — Press D while any overlay is showing.

✨ Features

🎵 Real Score, Real Pitch

• 8 measures played twice (16 measures total per cycle), transcribed directly from sheet music — both verses of "Mary had a little lamb / Its fleece was white as snow..." through to the final cadence.
• Every note plays at its actual pitch in G major across a tight 4-note pentatonic-feeling range (G4 / A4 / B4 / D5 — that's it, the entire song lives inside a 5-note window).
• Tempo is ♩=120 in 4/4 time, with each game beat = one quarter note (500 ms) — comfortable nursery-rhyme pulse with a clear quarter-note grid.

🎶 Sub-Slot Bursts on the Iconic Swing

• The song's rhythmic signature — "Ma-ry had a" (dotted quarter + eighth + quarter) — is preserved as a sub-slot burst tile that fires both pitches at their correct rhythmic positions from a single tap.
• This pattern appears 4 times per cycle: m2 and m6 ("Mary had a" / "fleece was white as"), each played twice via the repeat.
• The original score's pickup anacrusis (a D5 8th leading into the first downbeat) has been converted to a rest so each pass starts cleanly on m2's B4 — no awkward partial-measure pickup.

🚀 Progressive Difficulty + Cycle Flash

• BPM increases by +12.5% per cycle (120 → 135 → 150 → 169...). The tight 4-note range means the chart stays readable even as the tempo climbs.
• Each cycle is also transposed up by a whole step (2 semitones), lifting Mary's pentatonic walk into ever-brighter territory.
• Cycle transition flash: every new cycle pops up a centered CYCLE 2 / ♪ +2 · ⚡ +12% banner with a scale-and-glow animation.

🎨 Neon Polish

• Cyan → blue → purple → magenta per-lane gradient, glowing tube borders, scanline textures inside the active press zone, ambient drifting tiles behind every overlay, and an animated START button that slides down into the game.
• Visible miss feedback: red flash + dissonant low buzz with downward portamento on any miss.
• Forgiving holds (75% duration counts, soft gradient fade at the top edge) and smart lane distribution that avoids consecutive same-lane spawns.

🎼 Scoring

• 10 points per beat cleared, with bursts counted as a single tile.
• High score saved locally.

🛠️ Tech Stack

• Pure HTML / CSS / JavaScript, zero dependencies, single self-contained .html file — drop it anywhere and play.
• HTML5 Canvas + Web Audio API square-wave synthesis (with separate envelopes for burst sequences).
• Chart auto-generated from MusicXML via a custom Python converter, with automatic repeat-barline unfolding (the song's "play twice" structure is unfolded directly into the melody array).

💡 Things to Try

• This chart has the tightest pitch range in the batch — just 4 unique notes (G4, A4, B4, D5). Watch how the lane algorithm distributes only those four pitches across all four lanes for maximum variety.
• The 4 sub-slot bursts at m2 and m6 are the chart's signature — they're the only tiles that fire more than one pitch per tap, so they stand out rhythmically as the "swing" moments of the verse.
• The original D5 anacrusis was converted to a rest, so play starts cleanly on B4 at m2 — listen for the silent first quarter-beat of each pass.
• By cycle 4 (transposed up a major third) the song lives in B major and the original G4 → D5 window is now B4 → F♯5 — same shape, much brighter sky.