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[LevelUpJordan]

Hi! I've been recently trying to get back into the gamedev swing of things now my year of uni has finished and thought I'd start with this.

GAMEPLAY GIF:

http://minus.com/i/bwaSbcBmm0gZy

LINK:

http://levelupjordan.itch.io/platformershmup-prototype


The game is customisable in a similar way to Luftrausers where you mix and match different perks, this is very early on so it looks pretty rough but I'd still appreciate feedback on general gameplay, over/underpowered weapons and performance.


You lose when your combo hits 0, that's not really explained in game at the moment. Again, sorry.

Please tell me how you feel about the prototype, whether it be positive or negative.

[ThisIsAvery]

Player Controls

The player controls are SUPER tight - awesome! It feels great just moving back and forth. I could control my jump easily after only a few seconds of play.

Cannot stress enough how great this is. It's 90% of most games.


8-way Shoot

The choice to only allow shooting in 8 directions is... interesting. Using the default Machine Gun my body was screaming to let it shoot in any direction, especially because I was using a mouse to aim.

I think the worst part is that to aim accurately, you have to position yourself in a certain location. However, this competes with your need to avoid bullets. Using the machine gun it felt like it was sometimes "impossible" to effectively hit certain enemies, because I wouldn't have a good angle on them at the time.

I'm not feeling any advantage from limiting the aim to 8 directions, but I don't have your design thoughts internalized so I shan't rush to judgment on it.


Enemy Differentiation

The different enemies are very distinct and varied - great design!

One thing you could do to improve this further is make some slower/faster, or exaggerate the difference that exists. They all seem to have about the same speed currently.

The next step in differentiation would be to make different types of attacks. You don't want to overwhelm the player, however - the current amount of bullets is about right. But you do want to make him react to more varied situations. Right now the vast majority of the player's interaction is with the exact same bullet type.


Primary Weapon Balance

The Machine Gun, Shotgun, and Laser all feel inadequate. I believe this goes beyond a lack of graphical/audio "oompf". It actually feels hopeless to just keep the total amount of enemies down with these weapons. With the MG for example, I can barely keep up with the ground enemies, and the red fliers eventually just fill up the air. Since you're dodging a lot of the time, only a portion of the MG and Laser damage the player throws out are meaningful.

The Shotgun actually feels like you can effectively aim it most of the time, but it's way-reduced damage makes it possibly the worst of the bunch. Also multiple shotgun pellets hitting the same target don't appear to deal increased damage, compounding the decreased rate of fire penalty. Idea: a very-fast-projectile, more-limited range shotgun (but long enough to hit the red fliers) with improved damage and a bonus for multiple pellets hitting the target.

The laser felt disappointing in that, not only does it not travel instantly, but it deals less damage than the MG. Killing even the ground enemies felt "difficult" with it. Idea: a laser that travels instantly, deals better damage than the other weapons, but runs off a charge, perhaps. You could add a smaller line all the time to aim with, if that's a problem.


Bounce Gun

Way overpowered, comparatively. You can basically just aim diagonally and it will fill the stage with bullets that kill all the enemies.

This is partly because it's the only true "fire-and-forget" weapon, but also because each individual bullet has a much higher probability of hitting an enemy than the Bounce Gun's decreased rate of fire.

That is, the MG fires bullets and say 10% of them hit. The Bounce Gun deals the same damage (I believe) but fires 33% slower (or whatever). However, Bounce Gun bullets have say a 33% chance of hitting a target (over 3 times as much), and can also hit multiple targets per life. Made up values but it illustrates the concept.

I would try a Bounce Gun that has limited range (so you can say, hit the roof and get it a quarter or half the way back). The goal is to allow rewarding "trick" shots but disallow filling the whole level with fire-and-forget projectiles.


Player Projectile Speed

Universally, the projectiles fired by the player are slow. This is generally more unrewarding to the player. There's only small benefit/reward in the player making a "great" shot on a moving, far-away enemy (it's also very infrequent).

The enemies don't need to be given a fair chance to dodge the player projectiles. The player should feel empowered from owning tons of enemies with his rewarding weapons. If you look at other shmups you'll see they virtually all have very-fast player bullets.


Movement Perks

All three of these are super-differentiated and they all feel super-great.

Gravity Boots on the ceiling is bat-shit cool. The controls mess with my head. I might experiment with reversing gravity boots movement controls while on the ceiling. You'd do this after the player released the left/right button when he moved from the wall.

Secondary Weapons

Time Warp and Black Hole both feel interesting and useful. It's good that Time Warp gets more projectiles because Black Hole actually reduces the enemy count. I'd experiment with Time Warp doing some damage, or adding a DOT.

Matter Gun feels virtually useless, especially because your own bullets kill the walls, and aiming accurately is already an issue. Worse, you have to land on the tiny 1-block spot to actually use them.

I couldn't get the Teleport Gun to work, apologies. I pressed right-click but no projectile fired, and I never teleported anywhere. Tried clicking around with it, and moving around after clicking. No dice.


Difficulty Progression

It doesn't feel like the difficulty ramps up ever, other than situations where you actually can't keep up with the spawn rate. Or if it does, it takes longer to ramp up than it does for me to get bored of a build.


Aim Changes While Moving

Since you actually aim at the mouse, you can be moving along, and then your aim will change 45° at "random" times. Something the player wants to do is move along and lay down a stream of bullets in a certain direction. But currently they have to move the mouse correspondingly in an invisible 1/8th arc of the screen to keep up this behavior.

I would experiment with only updating the player turret's aim when the mouse actually moves. If the player isn't moving the mouse, the turret keeps aiming in the current direction regardless of the mouse location.


Long Pause

On my machine the game would sometimes (2-3 times per game) pause for several seconds. (Windows 7 64-bit.)


Hidey-Spot

With the Gravity boots you can camp out on the underside of the large square and effectively nullify ~90% of the enemy bullets.

[LevelUpJordan]

Thankyou for this really in depth reply, it's fantastic!


Player Controls

Thanks, that's good to know

8-way shoot

I'm probably going to change aiming so that you can aim anywhere you want.  The reason I changed this is that I personally struggled with free aiming but I'm not much of a keyboard and mouse gamer.

Enemy Differentiation

Thanks again!

Right now I've only differentiated enemies by movement pattern and aiming (some shoot at you, some shoot directly down etc.) but I do hope to add things like bullet types and different enemy speeds (I had thought of this though!)

Primary Weapons

I definitely need to tweak the balance, hopefully with free aiming you should miss less which might make the machine gun and shotgun more powerful, it's just something I'll need to experiment with though.


Bounce Gun

Just before publishing I tripled the bounce gun's range because I felt it was really weak, I think I overreacted

Projectile Speed

They are pretty slow, my thinking however was that the bullets were hard to see when they moved really fast, I guess that's irrelevant though because you're not watching your own bullets.  I also don't have the best eyesight

Movement Perks

Good to know, I agree left/right going in the opposite direction is confusing on the ceiling

Secondary Weapons

The matter gun seemed really cool in my head (building makeshift bullet umbrellas, changing enemy direction) but the execution isn't there yet.

I broke the teleport gun, it's fixed now and I'll update the link, thanks!

Difficulty Progression

This is something I'm not sure how to fix, the enemy count should increase as the game progresses.  I could maybe change the spawn rates of hard enemies, but I'm not sure which ones are most difficult. Or maybe increase their speed?

Another idea I had, which will hopefully address the camping spots is a mechanic where standing on a certain area for too long will make spikes come up over that area.  So as the game progresses there are more and more spikes around the area.

Aim changes while moving

Hopefully free aiming will address that

Long Pause

That's worrying, I'll definitely look into that

Hidey Spot

By having flying/wall/floor enemies I hoped everywhere would be covered but I guess not, maybe the spikes I mentioned earlier will help.

[LevelUpJordan]

I've updated the links fixing the teleport gun, making the laser gun more powerful/instant and introducing free aiming.  All feedback is appreciated, negative or positive.

[Xienen]

I agree with Avery on the movement. Feels pretty solid! And the free aim was definitely a must! Glad I didn't have to play without it I also feel that the bullet speed is pretty slow...I believe most shoot 'em ups have your bullets go a good deal faster than the incoming bullets and I think that'd really help the potential frustration levels with the game as the enemies come pouring in.

It also seems like there's some built in skill to score balance inherent in the game. The enemies spawn at certain intervals, so you need to clear out the old wave before the new wave starts spawning, otherwise you'll get bombarded and die. Very good on that front.

I was using a crappy portable mouse to play the game, so I'll give it a go with a real mouse/computer when I get back home and give some more feedback on the possibility of the game being too easy.

Overall, a solid start to the game, certainly a project worth pursuing in my opinion. 

[LevelUpJordan]

Thanks for taking the time to give it a try!

I'll definitely up the bullet speed for the next build.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts with an actual mouse later

Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks again

[Quicksand-S]

Disclaimer: This is written from the point of view of someone who doesn't play bullet-hell shooters and generally avoids 2D platformers with mouse-aiming like the plague, so I'm lacking experience with this style of gameplay.


Movement

-The gravity boots work great, but I found myself really wishing that I could press Up and Down to move along walls. I think that would feel more comfortable, and you kind of have to be comfortable when dodging so many bullets.
-The wall slide is kinda cool, but maybe a bit fast to feel strategic (ie. if I slide, I'm nearly always going to go to the top of the wall rather than stopping at specific points). I also found myself often sliding up walls when I didn't want to or wasn't expecting it.
-The jetpack seems quite good, but because of a bug (mentioned later) I avoided it most of the time.

-Depending on what you pick, it seems some areas of the level are rendered useless. For example, I couldn't get up to the platform on the right using the wall-slide ability. I can get very, very close, though, which makes it a bit frustrating.


Weapons

-The shotgun felt basically useless. I felt it had too much spread and not enough speed or damage. You weren't kidding when you said it had a long reload speed. I think it's too long, though. Have you considered giving me two shots before reloading? (When I start a match, I do seem to get two shots, but not after that)
-The machine gun felt all right. It doesn't fire as rapidly as its name would suggest, though.
-The laser gun deals far too little damage to be useful. I feel like it should be stronger but run out of power after a while and have to recharge.

-The teleport gun is strange. Its incredibly long cooldown originally made me think it only worked once per match. It also doesn't always take me all the way to where I clicked. If I can't teleport to an upper platform from the ground, it's basically useless.
-The black hole gun wasn't as satisfying as I thought it would be. I think the range could be increased. The first time I used it, I didn't think it was even sucking in anything. The biggest change I'd recommend, though, is that the projectile should be blocked by walls. As it is, I was never sure where the black hole would open up.
-The matter gun has a similar issue in that I never knew where the first block would appear. Other than that, though, it's all right.
-The time warp gun has the same issue, and I hate how its size is restricted by the walls/ground. I didn't see any real use for it.

-Despite the decent variety in the secondary weapons, I didn't find any of them useful in the slightest.
-The low-speed projectiles I fire make aiming at anything in the distance pretty difficult. I didn't really like that, because it kind of limited me to one of two playstyles: spray-and-pray or get-in-close-and-actually-aim. I like precision, and I expect that people who love bullet-hell games probably would to.


Other Comments

-I'm not a fan of games where Up is jump, but it works for games using the arrow keys. Using WASD, though, I kept hitting the Spacebar like I do in most WASD-controlled games.
-It would be nice to be able to start a game with only a primary weapon. I kind of wanted to try playing without any special movement skills, but I wasn't allowed to.
-It might be a good idea to make the gun change position when facing left or right, and to do it before you get too far into development.
-I feel like maybe the game should be more empowering. Let me slice through a huge number of enemies with the laser. Let me blast enemies with the shotgun and watch them go flying. You can always spawn more enemies to replace the zillions I destroy, and I'll still have to avoid bullets while doing it.
-I didn't like not being able to quit during a match. When I ran into bugs and wanted to try another configuration, I had to wait to die or close the whole program. Not ideal.
-I'd recommend making a HUD of some sort. Even just a simple, text-based on would be nice so testers can see their weapons recharging/reloading.
-Most bullet-hell games seems to use the "only the center of your ship/character matters" style of collision-detection. I wonder if that would work well here.
-The level seemed to fill up with enemies very quickly, but that may only be an issue because of the things I mentioned about the weapons.


Bugs

-I tried the gravity boots first, and then selected the jetpack for the next round. I ended up with both. Even closing the program didn't change that, but somehow I got rid of the bug later on. I'm not sure what did it.
-Sometimes secondary weapons I selected weren't given to me in the game and I was stuck using the one I used previously.


I feel like it needs direction/focus. It's a bullet-hell game without the ability to be precise in your movements and it's difficult to aim accurately at distant enemies. You've also got all these different abilities and weapons, but most don't seem to benefit the player in any way right now. I had the most luck, and the most enjoyment, just jumping around on the ground floor with the machine gun.

It's a decent start, though. The basic movement feels all right. There's some good enemy variety (although I wish more were different sizes and had different weapons). I didn't encounter any frame-rate issues at all.

[ThisIsAvery]

Cool update, happy to check it out again.

Overall, a solid start to the game, certainly a project worth pursuing in my opinion. 

I agree wholeheartedly. You've got some key aspects down. There's no reason the game couldn't become really, really fun.


8-way shoot

I'm a little sad to see it gone so quickly. If you had a strong vision for it I think you should pursue it.

Though in your previous build, I feel it wasn't doing anything for you. The rest of the game feels designed for free-aim, too. It feels much, much better with free-aim currently.


Projectile Speed

If it's hard to see the bullets, you can address this with visual effects like air streaks or little trails, etc.

Just a guess here, but if you were having issues with bullets moving through enemies due to moving so far in a single frame, you'll just have to hunker down and fix it. Implement a collision solution that slides the bullet across all the space in-between frames. It's a common problem so you should be able to find good solutions through Google.


Primary Weapons

The MG feels good now! All that changed was the free-aim, yes? The Bounce Gun is much more in line, though still a bit better than the MG, I think. The main reason is that it can keep the red fliers cleared out with very little direct effort, whereas the MG requires much more player time to do so which takes away from clearing ground enemies.

As a note: I'm the type of player that would naturally gravitate toward the fire-and-forget weapon, so I'm likely to highly favor the Bounce Gun, generally. I do think it is objectively "better" than the MG right now though.


Shotgun and Laser

The Shotgun and Laser still feel disappointing. I wasn't able to keep ahead of the enemy spawn with either of them. The laser in particular now, is just boring - you just point at a guy and then wait ~3 seconds for him to die. I would now experiment with upping the damage and making it stop at the first enemy. (Instantaneous may also not be the right answer!)

A huge part of this is because there are no effects yet (it's hard to know you're even doing damage with it), but I do think there is a basic DPS issue.

When you play the game yourself, do you generally use the MG? You should force yourself to use the weapon you dislike the most when you playtest. It encourages making every playstyle viable.


Early Weapon Balancing

Balancing the weapons a lot right now is probably a waste of time. You're likely going to make level, enemy, and spawning changes which will affect the balance later. I would get them roughly close for presenting (buff shotgun and laser!), and then work on other things like more enemy differentiation and pacing (see below).

Right now, though, I might also play more with the laser to make sure it has a design you're likely to keep through most of the project. If you can get the weapons to a place where you only have to tweak stats before release, that's valuable.


Wall Slide

Playing some more, the Wall Slide on the long vertical walls feels a bit unresponsive. I got used to it more after a while, but compared to the crisp controls on the ground, it feels a bit "sloppy" moving around on the walls. I think this is due to the increased max speed plus the decreased impulse - it just takes too long to switch directions, and it's hard to make smaller movements.


Jetpack

It's not clear at first that the jetpack is limited to three boosts. When I played yesterday, it felt like it just "broke for no reason" sometimes. Once you understand it, it's fine as a mechanic though. You'll almost certainly need some kind of tell for this eventually.


Quality of Life

When you're on the walls and you shoot slightly into them, your bullets never show up. At first it looks like something broke, but they're just destroying instantly. I might lock your aim to the horizontal or vertical (depending on what surface you're on) so you can never shoot into the "floor". (But not for the Bounce Gun.) It's basically always worse to shoot into the floor than along the floor perfectly, so why not help the player.


Difficulty Progression/Pacing

What's going on here is that the progression you're doing is too subtle to the player. This is primarily because the general pacing or excitement level doesn't fluctuate enough.

You have now:


As more enemies spawn and fire bullets, the game gets harder. As the player kills enemies, he reduces the number of incoming bullets and the game gets easier. However these two happen constantly, so it averages out to something like the above.

The gradual slumps are when the player gets the chance to change altitudes and clear out a bunch of fliers or ground enemies.


What most great shmups have:


The typical Shmup tries very hard to create overly-intense moments interspersed throughout a run. The long high at the end is when the player is stretched to their limit before finally being overcome. Clicking through the menus to start a new game and restarting the "boring" start of a run is the downtime your adrenaline needs to recover properly. It's very much like crafting a good (natural) drug high, and is the primary component of an action title's "addictiveness".

You have waves currently, but they're not spikey enough. Also your player usually doesn't get enough ahead to reduce the spikes from a ton of enemies - they always just slowly build up. Lastly, the overall ramping occurs too gradually compared to the existing spikes, so the game "gets boring after a while."

There's a ton of ways you could solve this and I don't want to suggest any to dirty the pool. If you're struggling with it later I'll be glad to help, but I imagine you have a bunch of ideas right now.

Another idea I had, which will hopefully address the camping spots is a mechanic where standing on a certain area for too long will make spikes come up over that area.  So as the game progresses there are more and more spikes around the area.

My gut reaction is that this is a heavy-handed approach that doesn't solve the core issue. There also might be some difficulty in getting the player to understand the mechanic of "there are spikes about to shoot up at you." What's really going on is the most common source of directed bullets come from the fliers up top, mainly because the player gravitates toward shooting the ground enemies first since they're closer and are coming at them.

These fliers never stray into the bottom area. The ground enemies never stray into the top. So there will naturally be places where the player can avoid ~50% of the enemy.

Since all three of your movement options allow the player to reach the highest points of the level, I might work on making the enemies generally more up/down-agnostic, and more based on where the player is at the time. Or at least have random behaviors that account for this more. This would also alleviate things like enemy portals showing up on top of you when you're hanging out on the ceiling with Gravity Boots.

Why should fliers stay in the "sky" if you're already on the ceiling full time?

[LevelUpJordan]

Thanks for all the help everyone!

I've made a few changes including reducing the reload time of the shotgun and many of the secondary weapons, making aiming the secondary weapons much more precise (they will affect the exact area you click on instead of just somewhere in that direction), you can quit by pressing escape and fixed the bug that was making weapon selection buggy (hopefully).


I'll try and attack bigger issues like difficulty curves, the laser , controls and shooting into walls very soon.

I just want to reiterate that I I really appreciate all your input!

[ThisIsAvery]

making aiming the secondary weapons much more precise (they will affect the exact area you click on instead of just somewhere in that direction)

Oh great idea I didn't even think of that but it's obvious! Nice one!

[The Translocator]

Okay, I just played it, and here are a few suggestions:
As of right now there's no real challenge for the first few minutes. If it's possible, I would have the difficulty increase when you're doing well (killing a lot of enemies without taking damage) and decrease slightly when you take a hit.
If you're going to have unlimited shooting with cooldowns, I feel like there should be a bar indicating how long until the next shot is ready.
Unless you strongly feel that there should never be a reason *not* to shoot, I would suggest that you decrease the combo number for every X shots that completely miss- or you could make shooting be 4 directional, which is even more constricted than 8 directional in a way that would add intensity.
If enemies don't die after being hit, there should be some indication of how much health they have left so you can prioritize. If enough enemies are on the screen at once, it might cause information overload, which can actually be a good thing in a game of reflexes.
As of right now it almost seems like getting hit doesn't matter at all, which takes away from the excitement. I'm not sure how you could remedy this with the current system, because losing one on the combo meter doesn't feel like much of a punishment since you can just kill another enemy. Perhaps you could make taking damage disable shooting for X amount of time instead- you still have to worry about getting hit, but you can't do anything to them. During that time you could even have a "Death Combo" system in place- every time you take damage while you still don't have the gun, the number of combo points you lose for taking damage increases, and it only resets after you get a kill.
If you don't think the combo system is working for you, an alternative might be having the game be timed- this would likely solve the pacing issue, since then the player would constantly be worried about killing the enemies as fast as possible so more could spawn in addition to the actual dodging of bullets. If you did this, you could have various actions increase or decrease the amount of time on the clock, and when the game goes into slow motion after you get hit, it could actually be a bad thing and not require any changes- the game is going slow but the timer isn't; next time I need to avoid getting hit.
If you wanted to have more bullets on the screen at once without making it overwhelming too soon, you could make it possible to destroy enemy projectiles (as a last resort).
If you could increase the speed of the projectiles just slightly it might feel more intense.
The physics for the player object felt great, and you should keep them where they're at.
I'm just throwing out a bunch of random ideas for things that might or might not just be me nitpicking, but hopefully I've said something useful.

[ThisIsAvery]

You PMed me asking to post my thoughts about improving the pacing.

I would try something like make a baseline spawn rate - enemies just appear (away from the player) regularly. Then I would use the spawning cloud to throw down some heavy-duty waves (not one enemy at a time) - these are the core for your adrenaline spikes.

I would ramp both of these up way more quickly than the game does currently. Perhaps based on score, but you shouldn't need to react to player performance if everything's tuned well.

I would introduce your enemy types more slowly, so players get a sense of progress by what enemies they're encountering now, perhaps.

I would add some high-priority targets the player must respond to and deal with. Enemies that rush the player down, or things that explode with enemies if you don't deal with them.

Basically I would just copy the fuck out of the pacing mechanics in Geometry Wars:



Notice the use of serious-threat waves. The in-between parts are purposefully "trivial" (though you can still die in one hit). These "boring" parts are okay because you can still feel the progression before you actually get bored.

Look at that beautiful fucking spike at 2:18. You can FEEL the adrenaline and you're not even actually playing.


I would also take a hard look at your combo/health system. Right now the only way for the player to lose is for the number of enemies to exceed his DPS for a sustained period of time. He needs to take 20+ hits consistently before he can kill a greater number of enemies. Think to yourself, what kind of conditions do I want to create that punish the player with failure? What should he do to avoid those situations and avoid death? Then craft something around that.

I would explore changing it so that the first hit reduces him to 10x combo or something. I would also look at decreasing the amount of invulnerability time he gets, or even removing it altogether (you would need to add a placeholder "get hit" effect). Maybe not both of these changes.

I don't know what a proper 40x combo to death scenario looks like, because I literally can't get any. I can either full clear indefinitely (nigh 10 minutes??) in the game currently with the MG and Bounce Gun, or never really get a solid combo going with the Shotgun and Laser.

[ferretter]

As a disclaimer, I'm not a big fan of shmups, so perhaps you should take what I say with a grain of salt.

Since this game is still in a prototyping phase, I'll keep comments about the polish/juice/balance/etc to a minimum.  However, you cite Luftrausers as a source of inspiration, and as such I would suggest you take a look at Vlambeer's

, most of which I feel would be applicable to what you're working on.  As additional homework, you should also check out Legend of Princess which does a similar 'custom loadout' design to what you're doing.

I agree with some of what has been said above about the combo-death mechanic; I don't really like it.  Unless you can somehow communicate to the player that they're X hits from death, the game-over feels sudden.  I know it's not creative, but I would suggest some sort of 3 health system, where specific enemies drop a health pickup on death.  This would also add something to the platforming side of things, where you now need to take a risk navigating to a new location.

For re-working the laser, I would suggest some sort of overheating system.  The laser would be more powerful than it is now, but cannot sustain for more than a couple seconds without triggering a forced cooldown.  I would also suggest the laser doesn't pierce enemies, just damaging the first it comes into contact with (if that's possible).  This would make the laser good for sweeping out faster/weaker enemies, but requiring more precision for dealing with larger numbers or stronger enemies.

The platforming in the game right now is very bland, due to both the level design and the movement perks.  The level design is very simple (understandably, due to the shmup aspects), and the perks relating to movement (including teleport) change the gameplay far too much.  At the same time I feel the shmup aspects are lacking, mostly since attention needs to be devoted to the character movement; this contrasts greatly with most shmups where you have very free movement, and as such can concentrate on the shooting/dodging.  Right now I feel the two aspects of the game have no real synergy, and can even detract from each-other.  The arena-shmup aspect of the game should force the player to be more aggressive, since otherwise they're going to get overrun; at the same time, the platforming/level-design should work as both a boon (eg. using cover) as well as a challenge (platforming while under fire).

My last suggestion would be reworking the enemy design. While playing I saw ~5 different enemies, the largest of which was immobile and shot in 4 directions (pointless other than flavor) and seemed to die in just a few shots (disappointing).  Other than that there were ~4 smaller enemies seemingly identical except for their movement mechanics.  I feel this doesn't properly show the possibilities you could have here.  I would suggest fewer 'trash' enemies with more variation and synergy between them.  What about a stationary enemy which has a displayed firing range and has a platform-piercing laser which takes a half-second or so to charge up after 'locking on'?  While alive, this enemy would make a region of the screen unsafe for the player.  Or, a swarm-spawning enemy which would get out of hand if not dealt with quickly, giving the player a strong incentive to do something?  Or, perhaps changing the flying mobs such that they drop a small-AoE bomb while above the player, forcing the player to use cover mechanics to safely fight?  Or even taking inspiration from the hammer-bros of the Mario games, which have an interesting projectile and movement pattern?



Re-reading what I've written, I'm afraid it may be veering pretty far from what you're working towards.  I suppose this is just my take on things, and how I would go about this, either way, it's your task to determine what is/isn't useful for what you're aiming for.  Anyway, I think this idea is worth working on, but I don't think the design as it is right now is living up to its potential.

[TriStarch]

Movement - All the options are good and interesting.  The jetpack is simple and traditional, but with a lot of tricks to master.  The wall slide is another cool way to move around and it can do things the jetpack can't (like hover in the top corners) but it also isn't as mobile.  The gravity boots are good too as they're similar to the wall slide but you can't move as fast.  Overall, this section is very well balanced.  

Primary - Again, well balanced with the edge going to the bounce gun for being able to cover more of the screen from a single position.  Any minor imbalance in this is easily remedied by tweaking damage values/cooldowns, so there's not too much to say here.

Secondary - Unfortunately, the black hole gun is the best choice right now by far.  If you sit in the corner with a black hole guarding you, you will rarely ever get hit and are free to spam the bounce gun all around the level.  The other choices are fun, but nowhere near as good as the black hole.  There's a lot of stuff you could do to balance the black hole out:

• Longer cooldown.
• Make it only eat enemies or bullets but not both.
• Make it eat you and/or your bullets.
• Have it disappear after it's absorbed a certain amount of items.

The matter gun seems pretty useless as you can't blockade yourself in due to your shots destroying the blocks.  Maybe let your shots pass through them?

Time warp is cool, but completely eclipsed by the black hole right now.

The teleport is also pretty good since you can go anywhere on the map to wipe out a mob that's in a tricky spot (and dodge all the bullets that are coming at you as well).

--

I also agree with the pacing concerns.  It's a really slow ramp up right now and I also agree that there should be high priority enemies that shift the player's focus.  The enemies right now are all pretty boring and predictable.  The amount of hits you can take before dying is also pretty big and contributes to the game feeling a little stale.

The controls are great overall, WASD + mouse is very natural feeling.  I'd definitely recommend making the keys always move you the same direction no matter what gravity you have with the boots though.

Fullscreen mode (or clamping the cursor to the window) is very much needed.  I accidentally clicked outside the window and lost focus a few times.

There were a few moments where the game froze for a couple seconds as well.

Cool prototype, good luck with it!

[LevelUpJordan]

Okay, cheers for this everyone.

I'll probably slow down a bit as I work on addressing some of the bigger issues, I should be kept busy enough with the list of things to play around with!

Bye for now

[ThisIsAvery]

Looks really solid! I think all your "proposed solutions" are very viable and worth exploring!

Regarding the Black Hole - when I used it like a normal weapon, I never found it to be overpowered. It's the "best" Secondary because it actually deals damage (which will always be your main goal), but it didn't feel broken. I think the broken issue is purely because you can fire it at your feet and then become invulnerable if you sit on it.

In that case, I would focus on a solution like "Suck you in?" to break the invulnerability exploit, and then look at buffing the other items to make them deal damage, or make them so good that it's worth not dealing any damage to have them.


With "Regenerating Enemy" under Enemy Variety, I worry you'll have a lot of difficulty showing that to the player - getting him to understand that the enemy is actually regenerating. I would assume you'll need to have more effects in the game for that to convey well. (At least a general "enemy hit/damaged" effect and a really really intuitive "this guy is totally regenerating back up" effect.)


EDIT: Something I thought of, regarding the "Boring Laser". Keep in mind the goal isn't just to add an overheating mechanic. The goal is to make the laser fun to use. The suggestions of adding an Overheating Mechanic are to allow the Laser to have OP amounts of damage (when it's not overheated). The mechanic is just to balance that OP damage, so that there's a different reason to use other weapons if that's your thing.

[Quicksand-S]

A potentially simple way to show regeneration in the prototype could be to make enemies shrink a bit when damaged and slowly grow back to full size when not being attacked. I think it would be pretty clear to players what's going on.

[monsterkillu]

I'll keep this simple and brief, because i don't need to repeat all those as above awesome guys have mentioned. Here's my thoughts.

Its a nice prototype. performance are great, controls are fluid. I enjoyed playing it.

1. Please add a small soundtrack/BGM to it. I know its in initial stages but it can influence it later (as Kyle gabler once said ....). Add small SFX too.
2. Adding some meaningful but small graphics could be more helpful (I don't read much, and i guess players don't read much). Add some gun symbols (pixel art) to the MainMenu.
3. It took me a while to analyze and separate them (an added load to brain i think. Red means flying, blue is jumping etc). My suggestion is to replace them with a 2-3 frame simple enemies like flying Bat, Slimy wall crawler, Jumping frog etc we can immediately realize what kind of enemy it is.
4. I felt only machine gun as useful primary weapon. Shotgun tooks too long to reload & Feels not like a shotgun. Bounce gun. Nope. Laser. Not powerful enough (I thought it can be a secondary weapon with more power i guess).
5. Agrees with others on challenge and pacing.
6. Add some color change or graphics, when using JETPACK (I didn't read it). I thought it was double jumping sort of.
7. Got frustrated when using GRAVITY Shoes.

Hoping to see an updated version soon.

[LevelUpJordan]

Thanks guys...

I've tried to fix as many issues as possible, since the last build I have:

• Added lots of new enemies which I think influence gameplay quite well, some may need removing or tweaking though.  Hopefully your feedback will help me decide
• Make the laser more powerful and add an overheating effect
• Display more information to the player including amount of jetpack remaining, laser overheating level, combo changes)
• Changed how the controls work for gravity boots on walls and ceilings
• Tweaked with how the difficulty curve works, not sure I've really got it right though yet
• Weakened the Black Hole Gun a bit

• Increased how much combo you lose for getting hit, my mind tells me to remove that system but my heart is telling me to keep it, I  thought it was pretty good tweak on the formula]

The Matter gun seems to be a lost cause personally, hopefully not but if so I'll have to think of something to replace it with

[ferretter]

I decided to give the new update a quick try, and found it a lot more enjoyable than the previous.

The laser feels much more powerful than it was, but the overheat can easily leave you defenseless in a tough situation.  Compared to the other weapons it feels nice and unique, and in a pretty good place with regards to balance.

The new enemy variations add a lot to the game.  As you said, many will need tweaking/balancing.  The one enemy which destroyed the platforms was rather interesting, the only issue I would take with it would be the permanence of the changes.  I'm not sure if it would be feasible, but having it 'collapse' the blocks to a non-collidable state for a while may be preferable.  The splitting enemy can quickly become a game-ender, though I'm not sure if I'd suggest any changes to it right now.  I really liked the enemy type which grew to fill the space available and shrunk when shot.  The AoE tower seemed a little too powerful as it is right now; I don't think I like the insta-hit part of it.

I never really liked the gravity boots too much, but I think the changed controls were an improvement.  The only issue I had with the controls here was that I would need to re-press a button after changing gravity directions.  My only other feedback would be that I'm not sure I like how much the gravity boots change the platforming aspects compared to the other movement perks.

The black hole gun was a lot less powerful, which I suppose was intended; however with such a long cooldown there needs to be some sort of indication for when it's ready to fire.  I also played around with the time warp gun a little more.  Since it has such a short cooldown, I found myself needing to right-click rapidly to make full use of it.  If you want to keep the current (wide angle beam shot) design, I would suggest changing it to firing constantly alongside the main weapon.  Perhaps even go all the way and make it a time-slow flashlight option?

One technical problem is that with the latest version is that the game would freeze for a few seconds at a time; I couldn't identify any pattern or reason for this.