I got a nice thorough round of user testing, which is such a great and useful experience! A lot of the feedback was very helpful and I've pushed a new build that makes a bunch of the low-hanging-fruit changes:

• The CRT filter on Strangers is less muddy/blurry now (also less accurate to how CRTs actually were but oh well!)
• The horizontal control on both Little Bouncing Ball and Flight is less "floaty"
• The timeline judder stuff on Little Bouncing Ball isn't as severe (as people kept on interpreting that as the game 'stalling' or dropping framerate or whatever)
• I also fixed a hard-to-reproduce crash bug that one of the testers ran into and which I happened to manage to reproduce while quick-testing some of the above changes
• I also removed the visible strobing caused by the timeline judder on Little Bouncing Ball; this was added as a temporary experiment due to some feedback from hearing-impaired players, but it was too distracting for some people and reducing the severity of the judder makes it less necessary anyway

Another common complaint was about how the score "doesn't do anything," which is something I've heard from other playtesters in the past. Trust me, scores are there for a reason! I just haven't gotten to implementing it yet; that will be part of final polish for the full album!

I've also had a few people complain about being unable to select a track using the mouse. The main menu is very, very temporary right now and while I hadn't planned on supporting the mouse for the real thing (since the mouse isn't usable anywhere else in the game, by design) it's something I'll consider for the long term.

And, the playtesters had some other meta-UI feedback as well, which was already on my list of things that I'm planning to deal with at a later time. While it's a little annoying that players can't just read my mind about my long-term plans, it's at least validating that what I had in mind is probably a good idea going forward. (The main one was wanting something more unifying to make it feel like the games have anything to do with songs on an album and that the album is a single cohesive unit. This is definitely something I've thought a lot about and is even in my original design documents!)

Anyway, I was really happy to get this feedback and while I haven't had the ability to work on Refactor for a while, this gave me a bit more of a push to want to continue this weird project of mine, so hopefully this gives me the push I needed to get back into it. Because I mean, wow, I haven't actually made a new game since Flight, which was in... January?! Holy hell.