🎹 Neon Tiles — The Wheels on the Bus

A neon-styled 4-lane rhythm game built around the road-trip favorite "The Wheels on the Bus" — the chart was transcribed directly from sheet music and runs through the song's verse twice for a complete singalong cycle. Cyberpunk visuals with a cyan→magenta gradient palette, ambient drifting tiles on the start and game-over screens, and the Orbitron typeface make the wheels go round and round in a brand new key.

🎮 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 unison pulse from a single tap, capturing the "round and round" repeated-note motion.
• 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 — opens with a pickup note ("The…") and runs through the full verse including the "round and round / round and round" climb and the cadence on "all through the town."
• Every note plays at its actual pitch in G major (D4 / F♯4 / G4 / A4 / B4 / D5 — a comfortable singing range).
• Tempo is ♩=90, with each game beat = one 8th note (333 ms) — friendly mid-tempo pace that matches the song's gentle bus-ride feel.

🎶 Burst Tiles for the "Round and Round"

• The verse's signature "round and round" 16th-note pulses appear as unison burst tiles (G4+G4) in measures 1 and 5, capturing the repeated-note feel without demanding multiple taps.
• A pickup burst on the "town" cadence (D4) gives the verse its rhythmic kick into the next phrase.
• 2- and 3-beat hold tiles land on the long words ("through," "town") for satisfying releases.

🚀 Progressive Difficulty + Cycle Flash

• BPM increases by +12.5% per cycle (90 → 101 → 112.5 → 124...). The repeated-pass structure means by cycle 2 you're hearing the same melody twice in a row but at noticeably different tempos and keys.
• Each cycle is also transposed up by a whole step (2 semitones), sending the bus through ever-brighter keys.
• Cycle transition flash: every new cycle pops up a centered banner — CYCLE 2 / ♪ +2 · ⚡ +12% — with a scale-and-glow animation, so the moment you survive into harder territory feels earned.

💢 Visible Miss Feedback

• Tap on empty space, hit the wrong tile, release a hold too early, or let any tile fall off-screen — all trigger a red flash at the relevant tile (and a circle pulse at the tap point), held for 450 ms.
• Plays a dissonant low buzz with downward portamento so misses are clearly audible.
• The game ends after the miss display, giving you a clear "what just happened" beat.

🎨 Polished Neon Visuals

• Hand-tuned per-lane colors along a cyan → blue → purple → magenta gradient that matches the logo.
• Glowing tube borders, soft outer halos, and scanline textures only inside the active press zone so the tappable area is instantly readable on hold tiles.
• Ambient floating tiles drift continuously down behind both the start screen and the game-over screen.
• Animated "neon tile" START button that physically slides down the board into the game on press — no jarring screen transitions. Same treatment on the PLAY AGAIN button.
• Score-burst flash animation on every successful hit.

🧠 Smart Lane Distribution

• Lanes are picked dynamically rather than randomly: the algorithm avoids consecutive same-lane spawns and balances left vs. right side usage.

🎯 Forgiving Hold Timing

• Hold tiles only require 75% of the full duration — releasing slightly early still counts.
• The hold-progress fill uses a soft gradient fade at its top edge instead of a hard line, so there's no visible pass/fail boundary to fixate on.
• The chart's longest hold is the 3-beat G4 on "town" at the end of each verse — a satisfying cadence ring-out.

🎼 Scoring

• 10 points per beat cleared (so the 3-beat "town" hold = 30, bursts count as a single tile each).
• High score saved locally and shown on the start and game-over screens.

📱 Mobile-First Input

• Multi-touch support — different fingers on different lanes are tracked independently.
• Coordinate-based hit testing rather than lane-only, so taps register exactly where your finger lands.
• touch-action: none and user-scalable=no to prevent scrolling/zooming during play.
• Viewport sized in vw units (9:16 portrait) so it scales perfectly across phone screens.
• Mouse-up listener attached to window so releases register even if the cursor leaves the canvas.

🛠️ Tech Stack

• Pure HTML / CSS / JavaScript — zero dependencies, zero build step.
• HTML5 Canvas for the 360×640 game board with hand-rolled rounded-rect