We are open to suggestions, but not ones that involve recreating 50% of the games code base.

Fair enough. But what about skipping the Speech-to-text part? Hitting the notes could still be the Guitar Hero aspect, and the sound could be a pre-recorded diddy on a synthesizer of some sort. And hopefully still have the ability to write lyrics, even if the game can't play them beyond putting them on the screen.

I mean, the way it is now makes me think the player shouldn't even be allowed to pick a specific singer.

Well the main issue is having to create a whole different system for the performance. The way it works now is via patterns.

Pattern 1A, Guitar Tempo 80 has an audio and a note file.

Now say you have a pattern you create in the song creation via Midi.

First part, I have to find a way to setup midi output via user created pattern files and also check keep it compatible with the pattern system in case they use both.

Second part, having notes place depending on the scale of the midi and also pre-generating the 3 difficulties. Easy has no chords, medium has reduced notes, and hard has everything.

Just from reading those two parts, you can imagine that there is at least 2-3 months of work in that alone.

If we hadn't already invested as much time as we have into the song creation, it would be an excellent idea, but at this stage of development... it would just be too much work with little to no reward for us.

*Edit*
I am not trying to come across negatively. I believe in being honest with customers just as I would like for devs to speak to me if I was the customer.

Whoops, I just realized I had that backwards. I meant Text-to-speech, not Speech-to-text. Nevermind that, though.

Yeah, I see. Forget the MIDI integration part. I'm now saying to pre-record those as patterns as well. The lyrics would be just for show, although giving the player a means of figuring out a syllable structure (aside from just using their ears) to attach some words to a pattern would require new UI stuff. The notes to play during the mini-game would still obey the pattern, not the lyrics. So, yeah, that would look janky if the player doesn't understand syllables and can't count notes. If you want an example, look at the song mini-game of Tomadachi Life (although that game uses Text-to-Speech).

The game does already allow for leaving in silence, too. So it's not like we'd be forced to shove melodies into every single second of the song. Also, chords can be achieved in singing through harmonies. So chords are technically allowed, heh.

Regardless, all of this does present a sizeable chunk of work in any form that it's implemented. So I understand it being daunting. It just feels like such a large thing to be missing, so I hope *something* could be implemented to give the singer a role.

We might eventually fill something in for it if there was enough demand over the rest of the games features. As it stands though, I have approximately 3-4 weeks of 12 hour days just to finish the drums/bass. This is of course on top of everything else we have planned. Keep your hopes up though, I'm sure you'll be happy with what we are bringing to the game.

In case it interests you, we now have a public way for you to track our development and accepted suggestions.

https://trello.com/b/G0QAyLE6/rock-god-tycoon