I AM A TRIANGLE. XDHey again,
Wow, you gave this a lot of work! Amazing progress I must say!
1. Randomly generated maps?
Noice! (always applauding that)
2. I really like the characters, including the outside-the-game artwork. It really gives the game a soul! x)
3. The movement is much better than it was before and the (double)jumps are really cool. Suddenly even just moving around is kinda fun (as it should be, basically in all 2D arcades). Well done!
4. Fighting AI was cool, good job there too. :) I just wish I had more bullets (or ways to refill) - I actually spent most of the time just meleeing everything because out-of-ammo.
5. I really like the building mechanics, and the gameplay mechanics in general (how combat looks and plays overall + the arcade thingies, both the classics, like the spikes, or more original ideas, like the poison trap (very cool btw)). I can see a lot of thought went into the gameplay, and both Dive-in and Arcade play really nicely! (pretty sure multiplayer would work nicely too) If it was a fully polished game in other aspects as well (i mean beside gameplay), I could see myself paying for it, thats how good I think the gameplay is. ;) (consider that there are AAA games I can't say this about... ;D)
With these compliments out of the way (one more: like the music, non-distracting yet carrying tension :)), it is time to address what you should probably focus on right now. Which, for me, would be the visuals in general. (also the weapon sounds could be better, but otherwise the sounds are well done)
The style (especially in-level - menus are another story) is cool (the dust, the avatars, most of the effects...), what you need to work on is just making everything look smoother and... well, simply better. Maximum detail but also _same amount of detail on everything_.
For example, the avatars are both cool and cute. However because of how thin their lines are, and because the lines are a little bit "jagged", they don't really fit into the environment, where everything has rather bold and clean lines. Same goes for the spikes.
Another thing that I would change is the size of the dust clouds (made by jumps etc) - seem way to big, unnecessarily big. I get that right now all your "particle effects" have "huge" particles (like in the menu; it has its style I admit), but I think you overdid it a bit with the dust - it's usually better use "smaller particles in higher quantities". But this is something that's actually still pretty new to me. (the work with particle effects, or effects in general actually)
The menus overall are actually mostly fine, although I would make all buttons (especially in submenus) much smaller. Hard to balance these things. That's true for interface as well, which is probably what
actually needs the most work right now (the star, the ammo count...) - for starters, I'd make it smaller (btw you could make the rifle image much smaller, yet keep the size of the ammo numbers almost the same).
From this moment it's just going to get increasingly harder, from my experience. But as I was once advised by
certain local indie artists, there's basically no other way than 1. look at your art, 2. think about how to make it slightly better, 3. try that 4. repeat, over and over again... can take a while, but that's how you learn how to make your game look really polished. ;)
Good luck and keep up the good work! Can't wait to see what the future brings for Dirtfight: Mole Mayhem AKA Last Mole Standing AKA Only Over My Dead Mole ;)
EDIT: Watching the jbarrios's video ("Dirt, my favourite thing to equip." lol), I just wanted to ad that my run was basically bugless except for one light-blue-screen crash (happened to jbarrios too). The crash occured after falling into a new level (at the start of the new level already), when I tried to put a block under me while still falling (guess it didnt like the high-speed fall?).
Besides that, it all seemed fine - jbarrios clearly had a way more horrifying experience. xD :p
Developer
