WALL OF TEXT INCOMIIIIINNG
Okay, first I just want to say that I think it's a nice game, and I had fun playing it. I like the the art style (and I
love the background. The size of the background tanks reminds me of some levels in Super Mario Galaxy). The music is freaking awesome
I especially liked the core mechanic, but I want to give you some well-meaning feedback. Take it to heart, or throw it out with the trash, it's your choice!
I liked the core mechanic. The core mechanic is great! The only problem is... The game seems to be confused as to what the core mechanic is!
Let's set this straight. The core mechanic, which is a great, original, well-functioning mechanic, is bouncing around the ball with the octagonal breakout pad. This is fun to do, and it's interesting to experiment with different techniques, especially since you have to balance risky bounces with the slow-moving pad. But the game just piles on so much unnecessary stuff on top of this. I know you've spent a long time implementing all of these things, but they just seem superfluous.
Note that I played on normal, so some things might seem better on hard, but I think the game should be balanced on all levels. I always play games on normal, since that seems to me to be the difficulty that the designer polishes the most.
Most importantly, the phasing and catching the ball. It sadly makes bouncing off your bat completely unnecessary. I played through all 12 levels, and I only died ONCE, in level four, because I was confused about an enemy (which is okay though!). The game just seemed way too easy, and my much beloved core mechanic never got its time to shine! I then replayed the game, without phasing AT ALL, and it was glorious! It was fun and challenging (although I still only died once, this time in lvl 10, but that was probably only because I had already played through all the levels once) and I had to think about how to use the levels to my advantage a lot more. My suggestion: remove phasing completely. I know it may sound drastic, but unless you restrict it A LOT, it only subtracts from the core mechanic.
Turrets. I used them in the level they were introduced, and never again. They just seemed too much of a hassle to worry about, and I think this was mostly because it was rarely necessary to destroy enemies, since the ball didn't take damage from them, and I didn't have too much diffculty navigating them. So unless you plan to make it more necessary to keep enemies in check, I will have to make another drastic suggestion: remove turrets completely.
SO MUCH STUFF! You just keep throwing new enemies and block types and power-ups at the player. This is something that Angry Birds did really well: they knew just when to introduce a new type of bird. I think you have to let the player play around with new enemies and block types more, before introducing new ones, instead of introducing new stuff every single level. It's too overwhelming. My suggestion: design
at least two levels per new thing introduced (power-ups not included). This also gives you room to show off your awesome level design skills (which I know you have, there were some pretty cool levels in there).
While on this note, I don't think you should describe what the enemies do before the level! This is something that is fun to explore and figure out on your own as a player. The explanations of blocks and power-ups seem less redundant, but they could still easily be removed, depending on how much you want the player to explore, and how much you want him to just know it (which is definitely necessary some times)
And if you really want to tell the player what the enemies do, at least give them names instead of numbers. Numbers are boring!
Score. This is cool to have and all, for the extra hardcore players, but I don't think most people will care about it, they will only care about beating the levels, especially when there is no star system or anything to tell you if you got a good score. The main good thing I could see the score doing would be to support experimentation with combos. So design the levels around completion first, score second.
Some comments on the visual design: I think the art style is great, but the sprites need to be a bit more distinct (the enemies are fine, since they move). The main thing is that the blocks that you have to destroy needs to be visually different from
everything else, in order to minimize frustration. Right now it's fine that they're yellow, but the enemy generators are yellow as well, giving you the impression that they are destructable. Also the distorter things that damage your ball are great (I'm all for more things damaging the ball itself), but they are yellow-ish as well.
I think the mouse cursor should be sped up a teeny bit, to lower the amount of frustration. It's fine that it's not instant, but right now it feels just a bit too slow.
And a small final note: saying that "The time and era is unknown" seems redundant. If there is no time and era, why mention that? Stuck in space is good enough.
But again, I really like the core idea of the game, and the only reason that I'm annoyed by the points above, is that I would really like this to be a good game!
Good luck!
-ZC
Developer
