🎹 Neon Tiles - Home on the Range

#rhythmgame #game #music

A neon-styled 4-lane rhythm game built around the state song of Kansas — "Home on the Range" — the chart was transcribed directly from a piano sheet music and runs through the full verse-and-chorus once, with the score's repeat-back hook stripped so the cowboy ballad plays straight through to its final ringing fermata. Cyberpunk visuals with a cyan→magenta gradient palette, ambient drifting tiles on the start and game-over screens, and the Orbitron typeface drop the buffalo-and-antelope frontier waltz into a synthwave campfire.

🎮 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.
• Pause — Space or P
• Mute / Unmute — M
• Quick start / restart — Press D while any overlay is showing.

✨ Features

🎵 Real Score, Real Pitch

• 32 measures of melody (pickup + verse + chorus). The original score has an m1↔m32 backward repeat with a 1·2 ending that hooks back into a second verse — the chart skips the hook ending so the song plays through once and lands on the final fermata cleanly.
• Every note plays at its actual pitch in C major across a wide melodic eleventh (G4 → G5) — the widest melodic range in the batch.
• Tempo is ♩=100 in 3/4 time, with each game beat = one eighth note (300 ms) — a moderate waltz pulse that fits the song's easy-loping cowboy feel.

🎶 Hold-Heavy Waltz with Pickup Start

• The chart is hold-dominated (56 of 75 entries) — Home on the Range lives in its long sustained syllables ("home", "range", "play", "day").
• The signature pickup G4 quarter on "Oh" ("Oh give me a home") starts the chart, so the first tap is the song's first sung word.
• The final C5 held for 12 beats at m31 is the longest single tile in the chart — a deliberately merged fermata combining the score's verse-ending "day" with its 3rd-ending closing hold into one ringing 3.6-second sustain.
• No bursts. The melody is built entirely from 8th- and quarter-and-longer notes, so every tile is a clean tap or hold.

🚀 Progressive Difficulty + Cycle Flash

• BPM increases by +12.5% per cycle (100 → 113 → 127 → 142...). Cycle 2 hits a brisk trot pace; cycle 4 gallops.
• Each cycle is also transposed up by a whole step (2 semitones), sending the prairie melody into ever-higher ranges.
• 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 dotted half note = 60, the final 12-beat C5 fermata = 120 points on 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.
• Chart auto-generated from MusicXML via a custom Python converter, with a --single-pass option that skips the 1·2 volta ending and lands on the 3rd-ending fermata, plus a custom post-processing step that merges the verse-ending C5 with the 3rd-ending C5 into one 12-beat hold.

💡 Things to Try

• Feel the 3/4 cowboy waltz pulse rather than counting individual tiles — ONE-two-three carries you across the bar lines the way a horse would lope across the plains.
• The chart starts on the pickup G4 "Oh" — no count-in. First tap is the song's first sung syllable.
• This is the longest chart in the batch (32 measures, 75 tiles, ~58 seconds). Pace yourself; the song has built-in rest spots at every phrase ending.
• The widest melodic range in the batch (G4 → G5, an octave-and-a-fifth). By cycle 3 you're climbing well past the second octave.
• The final C5 held for 12 beats is the song's biggest moment — a single tile worth 120 points if you hold it cleanly to the end. Let it ring.