🎹 Neon Tiles - Jesus Loves Me

#rhythmgame #game #music

A neon-styled 4-lane rhythm game built around the beloved children's hymn "Jesus Loves Me" — the chart was transcribed directly from sheet music and carries the verse-and-chorus through its full stanza. Cyberpunk visuals with a cyan→magenta gradient palette, ambient drifting tiles on the start and game-over screens, and the Orbitron typeface dress the Sunday-school staple in arcade neon while keeping its quiet, hymnlike heart intact.

🎮 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 — One tile in the chart fires a quick two-note flourish from a single tap, capturing the song's only sub-quarter pickup figure.
• Pause — Space or P
• Mute / Unmute — M
• Quick start / restart — Press D while any overlay is showing.

✨ Features

🎵 Real Score, Real Pitch

• 16 measures of melody (the score's first 2 measures are an instrumental intro — stripped from the chart so play begins immediately on the first sung note "Jesus").
• Every note plays at its actual pitch in C major across the song's six-note diatonic range (C4 → C5).
• Tempo is ♩=90 in 4/4 time, with each game beat = one quarter note (667 ms) — the slowest tempo in the batch, sitting comfortably in hymn pulse where every quarter note has room to breathe.

🎶 One Tile per Quarter Beat

• The chart uses a quarter-note slot mode — 1 tile = 1 quarter note — so the visual rhythm reads exactly the way you'd count along: "Je-sus loves me, this I know..." one tap per syllable.
• Half-note phrase endings ("loves me", "this I know") land on 2-beat hold tiles, marking the natural sentence breath in hymn phrasing.
• A single burst tile at m14 captures the song's one sub-quarter ornament — the F♯ neighbor tone leading into "Yes, Jesus loves me." It's the chart's only moment of decoration.
• The final "loves me so" cadence has been shortened from an open whole note to a dotted half note + quarter rest so the song lands with a clear rest rather than ringing into a void.

🚀 Progressive Difficulty + Cycle Flash

• BPM increases by +12.5% per cycle (90 → 101 → 114 → 128...). At a hymn base tempo, even cycle 4 stays inside singable territory.
• Each cycle is also transposed up by a whole step (2 semitones), lifting the song into ever-brighter keys.
• 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 (so a 2-beat hold = 20, a 3-beat dotted half note = 30).
• 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.
• Chart auto-generated from MusicXML via a custom Python converter, plus a custom post-processing step that strips the 2-measure instrumental intro and shortens the final whole note into a dotted half + quarter rest.

💡 Things to Try

• This is the slowest chart in the batch — great for warming up, or for relaxing after a high-tempo Yankee Doodle run.
• The leading 2-measure intro rest has been stripped, so play starts immediately. The first tile is G4 on "Je-" of "Je-sus" — no waiting.
• Listen for the single burst tile at m14, just before the "Yes, Jesus loves me" refrain. It's the chart's one moment of sub-quarter decoration in an otherwise quarter-note-clean line.
• The final dotted half note + quarter rest at m18 is a deliberate hymnal landing: hold "so" for 3 beats, breathe, then the cycle restarts a whole step higher.