Great work, this is really coming along nicely! I really like the perspective mode, but didn't care so much for the animated backgrounds. The backgrounds seemed a distraction at first, but because they are all color and the creatures are b&w it's pretty easy to ignore them.
Thanks for playing and leaving your feedback! My intent with the animating backgrounds isn't solely one of distraction but also just to add to the visual interest (hopefully) for the player. Some of them are designed to be a bit more distracting than others for sure though. This game has been interesting to think of mechanics because I've noticed a wide disparity in feedback from players as to which style of challenges they find easy/hard. It has a lot to do with however the player handles pattern recognition and noise suppression in their own way.
I think they could be made more difficult to ignore, by mixing in some higher frequency black and white distractors. I'm not convinced this would be much more fun though(?).
I had this on my potential todo list. To confirm you mean like for example little wiggling spots, blobs, detritus that would also be in black and white and their for distraction right? In my notes I have an intention that I would use odd objects like (for example: streetlamps.. trashcans.. benchs.. etc) but that would be wiggling and rendered in the odd alien style I'm already using. I'd definitely only use that as a later challenge difficulty I'd imagine.
Also, I couldn't put my finger on this before but: it would be really nice to show the wrongly clicked distractors next to the target one. This would help the player see what they chose wrongly, and avoid the "hey what was wrong with that choice" confusion. Maybe you could even draw the last wrong distractor in red beneath the target to make this more clear.
I would be worried about UI clutter though as there is already such a premium on visual real estate. I'll think about it but I am expecting the player (who actually wants to play more than once) will begin to quickly grasp the creature types as I have seen a bunch of the in person players who have played 10+ times start to do and enjoy. It seems players have been having fun coming up with their own reminder names to reduce the noise / enhance the search pattern. I'll keep it in mind though in case I think of a way to put it in.
One final suggestion, is that it might be cool to have one creature per section that only appears in one level. So in addition to looking for the current level's twin, you are looking for a section twin that is only hidden in one of the levels.
Like a bonus creature? I had some notes about a possible bonus creature mechanic that I believe is maybe what you are getting at. Wasn't sure what you meant by a 'section twin' unless you are just using the word 'twin' for 'creature'. Would the bonus creature always look the same maybe or be shown ahead of time? If I'd have to show a second bonus creature in the UI all the time that might be problematic... but I was consider some kind of thing like this to do bonus...
Bonus Example: Each creature could have the potential for what I think of as a 'bonus tell' where if the player is watching closely perhaps they blink or quickly open and shut their mouth or some other twitch that is subtle but that if the player sees it they would get bonus.
The whole issue of bonus brings up another concern of mine in that what do I do in a time based game? Simply deduct time? Makes me wonder if I shouldn't try to come up with a score metric but I like the elegance and non-abstraction of it being real world seconds so players can imagine the speed/skill of other players on the leaderboards. I guess I would just consider it like a 20 sec bonus off your time (or some number etc.)
Here are some other challenge ideas I was pondering and I welcome feedback on these (I'll start with the ones I have)
CHALLENGE IDEAS: (roughly in order of potential difficulty)
1) STATIC FLAT - Creatures increase in number and decrease in size appearing over flat non-animating backgrounds.
2) PERSPECTIVE - Creature increase in number but are scaled and scattered in perspective over landscape backgrounds. Overlaps occurring cause player to have to look closely to see which identifiable pieces of creatures are sticking out and have to use process of elimination to find the twin.
3) ANIMATING FLAT - Creatures increase in number and decrease in size appearing over flat animating backgrounds. The animating backgrounds add visual interest and a small level of distraction/noise.
4) MOVEMENT BASED - The creatures can start to hop around a bit left and right. I'm thinking this should be over the perspective landscape backgrounds for best affect.
5) NOISE - So far creatures have been homogeneous. In this challenge mode the creatures are pooled from all 30 subtypes. I've tested this and it offers a different kind of search and fun. I'd make this back to using flat animating backgrounds again.
6) HARDEST (RANDOM?) - In this mode the creatures would move, (potentially) be non-homogeneous, and the twin and target wouldn't be keep on a consistent axis like all previous levels. The axis flipping should prove to be fairly difficult because I was nice up until this point by always aligning the goal/target the same. This would be on the perspective backgrounds again. Seems I'm flip flopping background type every challenge mode and I like that for variety. I might make it randomly alternate flat/perspective too as well as mixed/non-mixed.