I realized recently that I broke guitar mode completely a few releases ago. When I went back to fix it, I decided to focus on the mode and finish it to a level where it feels complete and fun to play and that's just what I did.

This includes new Gems and Button models, along with different states and particle systems to react to the different states in game. I was having a hard time with this because for drums I went with literal representations of drums for each note. This concept doesn't work for guitar, so I went with representation of the guitar controller buttons. They are placeholders as I really just needed something to implement all the necessary features, but I did put in care to make it look and feel good. 

When all instruments are complete, I will revise the full look of the game as a whole and hopefully provide a system for themes. Themes right now are difficult because the animations, color changes, particles etc, are handled in code. The source models can be replaced however as long as names for models and textures remain intact. 

The scoring for guitar is also very different and there were a lot to do in this area. Giving the right amount of points for sustains was specially important. Points are awarded by beats, not by time, same with over drive. So a sustain of 1 measure in part of a song, might last longer/less in a different part of the same song do to changes in the BPM. Because of the sustains, I had to rework the way I calculated the possible score and therefore the cut off for stars, because of this I also updated the same for drums to be more accurate. 

Guitar also had a lot more conditions to consider. Like pressing a fret down causes a missed note in some conditions, but not in others, etc. I think I covered them all pretty well. Keyboard is still different in several ways so I have yet to do it. For now you can play keyboard as if it were guitar.

Finally I did a bunch of fixes. several aren't noticed but one does change gameplay a bit. When reaching a multiplier, the note that triggered it didn't receive the multiplied score. Rock Band doesn't do it this way, they immediately apply the multiplier to the note that triggered it, same with overdrive. This became really obvious on guitar because if you reached a multiplier on a sustained note, So this is a big change across all instruments.

next up, Keyboard!