Hi chris_b and Nebjezus, Thanks for taking some time to play and send me some feedback on Monsters. Let's see if I can comment on or address some of the criticism...
Huge File Sizes - I was quite shocked that the latest build was so large myself. Chris nailed it on the head... I recently added several audio files that were uncompressed .wav files. I'm looking into how to get these to be more reasonably sized files. I was under the impression that Unity did some kind of magic and would compress these files. herp derp.
XBox Controller - I do my development on a *cough* Mac *cough* and I'll have to admit that I haven't fully tested on Windows/Linux (yet). The driver support for XBox Controllers on mac doesn't map the controls in the same fashion as on Windows for some reason. I had THOUGHT that the analog sticks were working as described on all OSs but I guess I was wrong.
I'll look into getting this fixed. I'm a bit annoyed by having to throw an input manager on top of the unity input manager to sort this issue out but this is the way the cookie crumbles I suppose.
Quickly Bored - The difficulty ramp up is something I'm still trying to master. On the one hand I've got players who are, like yourself, not satisfied with how easy the first 5 levels are, while at the same time there are players who are complaining that the first level is way too hard. o.O I'm going to be experimenting with this almost daily. If you have any suggestions I'm all ears. :D
User Interface - This is something else I've been trying desperately to develop. Originally there were bars at the top of the screen that indicated how much life/energy the player had. We then took that out and put a "shield" around the player that would dim as the player lost life/energy. That didn't work either. For now, I've put a number indicator (0-100) to help play testers but I'm still not sure how I want to present this information. Again, suggestions are more then welcome. :D
Backgrounds - I do agree that they need a little special something but as Nebjezus mentioned, we don't want to distract the player as there is already a ton of stuff going on on the screen, especially in the later levels. I'm considering a border of some sort.
Release - My overly optimistic release schedule had it planed for release at the end of January. Then I bumped it to end of February. Ultimately I want to have it at least into a mostly finished state before a friend and I go on a road trip to GDC in March. I would like to release it on our own website but we are also working on getting it set up on Desura. You can currently find it on IndieDB as well (
http://www.indiedb.com/games/monsters).
Again, that you very much for the feedback. :D