MechaRay

Greetings Jupitron,

I just got finished playing your game, and thought I would attempt to give you some useful feedback. Lets see if I can organize my thoughts into a useful form.

Firstly, I thought it was a decent, short "time-waster" game. It did not have a lot of depth, which hurts its replayability as well as how long a person will spend with it even the first time, but for a "let me play something for a few minutes" type of game it served the purpose well. I actually thought the flashy, trippy graphics helped it in that regard. They were attention-getting and entertaining. However, the total lack of explanation on what to do, and what does what, and how to even really play it hurts the initial experience a lot. It is often times easy, as designers of our games, to think "Ah, my game doesn't need a tutorial. The gameplay is easy to just figure out. I mean, I could do it!"; when in reality coming cold to a game with no prior knowledge/experience of it usually means we need some form of "introduction" to how it works. Otherwise, we spend those first few crucial moments when we should be enjoying it and getting hooked instead trudging through the process of trying to figure out the controls/goal/etc.

For example, I at first had no clue what the gold squares did. They are easy enough to see, but also pretty easy to completely overlook with so much else happening on screen. Without having them directly pointed out and me being told "Hey... GET THESE! They refill up your laser", I spent my first playthrough completely ignoring them. It also didn't help that at first I didn't realize you kind of need to use both the ZX keys AND the mouse (just to click on the gold squares to collect them). I imagine it is a bit more intuitive on a mobile device as switching between tapping "Left Hand" to tapping a golden square isn't that large of a shift. On a PC, however, it took me a minute to figure out I needed to suddenly use the mouse to get the squares when I hadn't used it for anything else before then.

In addition, it also wasn't clear that the laser even has "ammo". I also, at first, thought the green bar might be the ammo gauge until I realized it was my health and the gold squares above "Left Hand" was ammo. All of these things would have been much clearer with a simple tutorial, and the player would not have to struggle at first when forming their initial impression of the game.

Gameplay-wise, the core of it is actually pretty fun. The multi-tasking is enjoyable as is the rest of it... once you actually figure out what it is you are supposed to be doing to begin with. There are some issues that kill some of the enjoyment, however. The largest annoyance is how sometimes there is no way to kill a bug so it feels cheap and unfair when an unkillable bug hits you. For instance, any bug that flies in from the left and then stops over your laser hand before zooming in to damage you cannot be killed. It simply gets to hurt you with you having nothing to do to stop it. My recommendation is to code it so bugs cannot spawn along the X axis coordinate that aligns with your laser hand. This way, there is no chance of one of them stopping directly over your hand and getting in a cheap hit.

It is also pretty annoying when any bugs come in from the lower left area and stop before even passing beyond your laser hand. The only way to hit them is to rotate the laser 360 degrees (which wastes a LOT of the charge on it). It should not be too difficult to code it so they at least continue a bit farther along to the right before stopping and zooming towards the player. Either that, or allow the player some sort of way to rotate the laser clockwise as well as the default counter-clockwise. Otherwise, they also feel pretty cheap.

If you fixed those issues (and put in a decent tutorial right at the start), then it would be a pretty entertaining "short" game. Like I said, I actually enjoyed the graphic style. For some reason, it reminded me of Monstervision on TNT. I kept expecting Joe Bob Briggs to make a cameo appearance. The screen was definitely "busy" and frantic, but I found it added to the excitement of the game rather than took it away. Things contrasted well enough that I could tell what/where everything was, so no problems there (well, everything except the Laser itself. It could do with just a bit more contrast).

If you felt like putting in the effort, however, I do see room to improve the game's depth and replayability. Right now, there is no progression of any kind. No reason to play any longer than the initial entertainment value. The enemies do not vary or grow in difficulty, the "scenery" does not change, nor does the players "avatar" grow in any fashion. It is the same exact game 30 minutes in as it was 3 minutes in. Adding some variety to the enemies that progressively get harder would easily fix that (possibly some bugs that crawl on the ground that are immune to the laser even, thus giving the Right Hand a genuine purpose), and possibly some form of upgrade system for the player. You could go so far as to change the background every so often (which goes a long way towards refreshing the experience for a player). It all kind of depends on how much work you felt like putting into it.

I hope this feedback was useful and along the lines of what you were looking for.