Aiming is a bit fiddly, both for keyboard and controller. Lining up shots took more time that I'd like.
I got increasingly annoyed by the RNG of whether or not I did damage to an enemy or they damaged me, particularly after spending a good chunk of time lining up the shots. There surely must be a better way of handling that.
This game was really enjoyable. I kind of wish the controls were a bit refactored; I don't think using the ability needs a dedicated button, you can just reuse the spacebar to trigger it since space doesn't do anything while they're moving about. I also think you should spend time making a mouse-only version of the control scheme as this would be a fun single-hand game.
I'd take another stab at the metrics/sizing of the game elements, I felt all the levels were too cramped and because of the solid walls there were only ever two or three places you could aim the cannon towards to do anything meaningful. Also stuff like spikes just take up too much space too, spikes are basically solid walls as well.
This brings me to my last point, spikes never did any damage on my characters, I wasn't really sure how the damage calculations worked either. I'd get rid of dodges entirely as well, it should feel more like pinball where you hit something and you do the thing, put the focus more on doing tight moves. I think moving elements in the level could add a layer of timing to the canon shooting, as it feels really static now. I do appreciate that the red line predictor is always 100% accurate though.
There's no real sense of danger, I didn't even feel like I had a limit on shots or that I was going to die so I could just spam shooting and win every time. The healer also never healed my dudes when she bumped into them, it also feels bad to push one of your dudes into spikes, even if the spikes don't do any damage. And the mushroom clouds didn't seem to do anything but they took up a lot of game space and the smoke obscured too many tiles behind them I think.
It's also unclear why, when I run out of balls, they all return to the queue. The level should be failed I think, starting over would let you try other strategies and make you focus more. It would also help you in designing levels to be more focused on what idea you want to convey to the player in each level.
It's a really fun and neat concept, DnD party of heros fighting with marbles, I think if you make the stats more readable and udnerstandable, and stackable/multiplicative, it'd be cool. I think the game essence is strategizing and getting all your marbles in the right spots then causing/seeing unexpected chain reactions. The lack of controlling the order of your characters is a detriment to this, as it makes every level feel the same, maybe try randomizing them. Character customization and upgrading between levels could be a lot of fun too, add build variety to each run. It could also be worth putting in a power meter for the canon so you can control more precisely where they land, like a golfing mini-game (again, adds more sense of timing and urgency). It might neat to have treasure in a cage at the top of the level, so you see what you win, maybe even sometimes character are caged and you get a new party member you get to upgrade. Think of your party as a bag of marbles, or a deck, and you only get to bring like 4 into each level. You could even "peak" at the level to decide who to bring and strategize.
EDIT: I got another idea reading your stamina idea. What if you get rid of the canon entirely and you flick each hero until their stamina runs out? So it's like a game of marbles with turns. Once all the stamina is out on all the heros, the enemies go. Kind of like Baldur's Gate/X-Com turn-based, but physics and more fun. So each character would be their own canon from their current position.
Hi. As someone who also did their own spin on the brick breaker type of game, I think you have a good concept here. There are a few issues in its current state though. I think the different characters and enemy types should be introduced gradually. I know that all the information is on the screen but it's a lot for the player to be expected to memorize on just the first level. Because of this I did not pay much attention to the abilities and stuff like that at all. I was still able to progress through the game fairly efficiently regardless. The graphics and art style are good, and the game overall is very polished for an early proof of concept.
-I like that you activate the skill but also kind of hard/weird to time it when they have stopped moving.
-i like that i can bounce out my hero to get it into the party again, nice little hack
-AoE of certain attacks is unclear such as the fists and sword swings
-If i bounce towards spikes more than once, i only take damage once?
-Between round powerups would be a fun solution and would also ease in the player instead of overwhelming with all characters. perhaps the heroes can level up and you select an upgrade.
-Maybe heroes should stay dead between rounds?
-Final comment: It's lacking some sort of mechanic that makes it possible to lose or create urgency. Either a timer, set of rounds or heroes staying dead between rounds. But thats if you want to go down the "roguelite" route or if you want to keep the "puzzle" route with set amount of levels but then i think you need more level gimmicks such as traps but probably a set amount of turns so you got think about what you do and really use the skills because right now you can just spam your party into one enemy until they die. I would unironically look at games like candy crush in that case for inspo and design solutions.
-It looks great, animations are very cute, plays great, and mechnics are solid. but you know all of this already :)
this would be a great mobile game too (this is a positive thing).
it's on my list. I avoided adding it because I was afraid of breaking stuff. another idea was to make the balls in the party turn to look at the ball bouncing in the board
that's fair. I can definitely see it being a lot to take in. some semplification would help.
also true, I've had this issue too.
yeah I agree, it felt E M E R G E N T when I realized you could do that
true, I need clearer visuals kind of like with the shockwave to display the radius
oh yeah lol I should fix that. I made it to prevent balls taking dmage contantly if they bounce very fast against it but there needs to be a cooldown of some kind after which the ball takes damage again
by 'round' do you mean between different levels? if so, I agree. I'd like to have a shop where you buy upgrades and such
that could work, maybe as a hard mode though. cuz at least in my experience I beat most levels with 1-2 heroes alive
I agree. I was thinking of adding a turn limit or at least a grading system that rewards you based on how many turns you took to beat the level. also, another idea I had was a sort of 'stamina' meter for the heroes, where they consume a bit of stamina evey time you shoot them out, so you can't just shoot a hero-hit enemy-hero coms back-repeat because once they run out of stamina you can't shoot them anymore until the next turn. but we'll see
Very cute graphics and very polished UI. Overall very nice presentation for an early prototype. Even as a final game this would be great.
I find this game a bit overwhelming. Everything has abilities and different stats that makes things difficult to keep track of and the gameplay is very chaotic to the point I feel most of my moves have random results. I don't feel I'm in control. Pointing the shot in the direction I want is challenging, I want to do fine adjustments and for that I have to do quick taps of the direction keys that not always result in the path I want, so I have to keep going back and forth in an uncomfortable way. The windows to use the abilities feel too tight, making it much easier to miss.
It is a good starting point, needs polishing and in my opinion simplifying some ideas and giving the player more control.
I definitely understand your point about stats and abilities being overwhelming. Even more I understand your concern about moves feling random and chaotic. It's one of my bigger concers with this whole idea, as I want to strike a balance bewtween the dynamic fun of balls bouncing everywhere and the 'strategy' of planning your moves and strategizing. It's quite a difficult problem I think.
You can sow down the cannon by holding down Shift to aim more carefully.
the lack of an ability to make a precise move makes the game less interesting, i think it would feel a lot better with mouse aim and scroll wheel for precise adjustments
the characters don't seem to go as far as the indicator predicts, so my turns feel like the hero can get to the end of the board and that's it
this also makes bombs feel unavoidable since i don't bounce off of them
dead characters turning into obstacles AND needing to be saved is annoying
a combination of all the above complaints has lead me to feel softlocked on the board when i have only one left and cant aim a shot to kill the last enemy or save a hero
for some reason it took me a while to intuit that all living characters are brought back on being out of ammo, it had felt like only one random one/all ones that moved that turn were returned to you
enemies in the "rebound zone" are easily defeatable without doing anything interesting, since i heal for whatever they did when i get the character back. this isn't bad, but the levels seem to be designed as if there were a purpose to the nearby enemies
the game seems to based around stats, but i didn't feel the difference in the heroes or enemies other than the active and passive hero abilities, or that the healer dies instantly
i don't understand what the hit ball/hero skills are doing, or even what their purpose in theory is. except for the heal on hit
i didn't manage to set up anything interesting like in your capsule. my 'bullet' slows down quickly and then sits on the board until reloading, but when i do hit a hero they'd just bounce around without purpose
since the heroes are safest when 'held', i don't feel inclined to shoot them to leave them on the board when i can just make return shots
i think the game would be more interesting if you simplified each character to an 'on hit' and 'on stop (while on the board)' effect and lent more into a Peggle-style board & "clear the board before X" goal, instead of trying to make players do tricky shots
you are completely right. I added a way to make the cannon rotate slower by pressing shift. mouse aim and scroll wheel controls would definitely help a lot too
that's also true, it's a relict of the old system I had in place. I reduced the number of bounce predictions to alleviate that (but I should probably have a system in place that predicts the trajectory based on the ball's speed more accurately)
I guess the 'turn' mechanic is not very clear. I should have explained it somewhere in-game or on the itchio page
I admit I didn't spend a lot of time (or effort) in level design. the general idea is that, like in brickbreaker, every block you destroy changes the paths that are available to the other balls. so even the easy target enemies still serve a purpose.. at least in theory!
I also didn't spend a lot of time balancing stats so I can definitely agree with you, that the balls and enemies don't feel very different fro each other. ideally each ball would have diffrent stat distribution that make you play differrently based on your party formation. ideally...
the ball hit skills are definitely an underbaked mechanic atm. in this build most of them just provide temporary stat changes. but without visual cuse it's hard to tell what happened
I think creating fun combos and chain reactions is one of the most fun parts of the game but I agree that it's not easy to set them up intentionally. The one I recorded happened kind of by luck too!
I do like the idea of each ball having an 'on stop' ability. And yeah, having a turn limit is definitely in the cards. I didn't add it for this build because I didn't have much time to test/balance the levels.
the UI and creature design are great, it's apparent you're an artist.
-every time I tried to dash in with a hero at the start it always ended in deaths. I beat the two first levels with 2 deaths actually. I don't like the concept of trying to hit single enemies and bounce back to spawn, it's a bit cowardly. It's fun to combo a lot of procs at once in those types of games , right? but if my first 2 characters die it's a problem. if the healer could revive on touch however.. -I'd like to finetune the cannon aim, arrow keys aren't precise enough.
-Trying to time abilities when you're at max speed is hard -Wizard dies every single time he stops moving?
-I understood what's the active ability but some of them are obscure. what's giving a dex bonus to a ball? what's the difference between a ball and a hero?
(built-in image uploading is so bad) https://imgur.com/a/CSnbpta IMG1 - I thought I was softlocked there because I couldn't launch a hero directly at it. I didn't understand the concept of pushing and bouncing yet. something for a future tutorial? IMG2 - I could launch another hero at a steeper angle to fit in the gap but the allowed angle changed or the hero's colission is bigger and the other hero couldn't fit in
I feel like this could be either a puzzle game or an arcade game, the style lends itself better to an arcade game but the abilities and deaths feel more like a puzzle game and the game is in-between.
Comments
Really nice game. No audio?
I finished multiple runs. I imagine in future the idea is going to be to finish each level in one turn, which I was close to on my second attempt.
The healer is cute, CUTE!
I had few moments where the preview did not match where heroes bounced, but I do not have eny screenshots of those moments, sorry.
Needs more levels, please. The premise is fantastic, and I cannot stress this enough - it "clicks" really fast, and when it does - it feels very good.
Models are very cute, suitable for this sort of game, and very readable. My only issue was a very tiny, non-resizable window.
I liked it a lot. Mobile version?
This game was really enjoyable. I kind of wish the controls were a bit refactored; I don't think using the ability needs a dedicated button, you can just reuse the spacebar to trigger it since space doesn't do anything while they're moving about. I also think you should spend time making a mouse-only version of the control scheme as this would be a fun single-hand game.
I'd take another stab at the metrics/sizing of the game elements, I felt all the levels were too cramped and because of the solid walls there were only ever two or three places you could aim the cannon towards to do anything meaningful. Also stuff like spikes just take up too much space too, spikes are basically solid walls as well.
This brings me to my last point, spikes never did any damage on my characters, I wasn't really sure how the damage calculations worked either. I'd get rid of dodges entirely as well, it should feel more like pinball where you hit something and you do the thing, put the focus more on doing tight moves. I think moving elements in the level could add a layer of timing to the canon shooting, as it feels really static now. I do appreciate that the red line predictor is always 100% accurate though.
There's no real sense of danger, I didn't even feel like I had a limit on shots or that I was going to die so I could just spam shooting and win every time. The healer also never healed my dudes when she bumped into them, it also feels bad to push one of your dudes into spikes, even if the spikes don't do any damage. And the mushroom clouds didn't seem to do anything but they took up a lot of game space and the smoke obscured too many tiles behind them I think.
It's also unclear why, when I run out of balls, they all return to the queue. The level should be failed I think, starting over would let you try other strategies and make you focus more. It would also help you in designing levels to be more focused on what idea you want to convey to the player in each level.
It's a really fun and neat concept, DnD party of heros fighting with marbles, I think if you make the stats more readable and udnerstandable, and stackable/multiplicative, it'd be cool. I think the game essence is strategizing and getting all your marbles in the right spots then causing/seeing unexpected chain reactions. The lack of controlling the order of your characters is a detriment to this, as it makes every level feel the same, maybe try randomizing them. Character customization and upgrading between levels could be a lot of fun too, add build variety to each run. It could also be worth putting in a power meter for the canon so you can control more precisely where they land, like a golfing mini-game (again, adds more sense of timing and urgency). It might neat to have treasure in a cage at the top of the level, so you see what you win, maybe even sometimes character are caged and you get a new party member you get to upgrade. Think of your party as a bag of marbles, or a deck, and you only get to bring like 4 into each level. You could even "peak" at the level to decide who to bring and strategize.
EDIT: I got another idea reading your stamina idea. What if you get rid of the canon entirely and you flick each hero until their stamina runs out? So it's like a game of marbles with turns. Once all the stamina is out on all the heros, the enemies go. Kind of like Baldur's Gate/X-Com turn-based, but physics and more fun. So each character would be their own canon from their current position.
Hi. As someone who also did their own spin on the brick breaker type of game, I think you have a good concept here. There are a few issues in its current state though. I think the different characters and enemy types should be introduced gradually. I know that all the information is on the screen but it's a lot for the player to be expected to memorize on just the first level. Because of this I did not pay much attention to the abilities and stuff like that at all. I was still able to progress through the game fairly efficiently regardless. The graphics and art style are good, and the game overall is very polished for an early proof of concept.
this would be a great mobile game too (this is a positive thing).
GG! Keep deving.
I beat the game. Video:
Very cute graphics and very polished UI. Overall very nice presentation for an early prototype. Even as a final game this would be great.I find this game a bit overwhelming. Everything has abilities and different stats that makes things difficult to keep track of and the gameplay is very chaotic to the point I feel most of my moves have random results. I don't feel I'm in control. Pointing the shot in the direction I want is challenging, I want to do fine adjustments and for that I have to do quick taps of the direction keys that not always result in the path I want, so I have to keep going back and forth in an uncomfortable way. The windows to use the abilities feel too tight, making it much easier to miss.
It is a good starting point, needs polishing and in my opinion simplifying some ideas and giving the player more control.
Thanks for the feedback!
I definitely understand your point about stats and abilities being overwhelming. Even more I understand your concern about moves feling random and chaotic. It's one of my bigger concers with this whole idea, as I want to strike a balance bewtween the dynamic fun of balls bouncing everywhere and the 'strategy' of planning your moves and strategizing. It's quite a difficult problem I think.
You can sow down the cannon by holding down Shift to aim more carefully.
cool
Cute, good looking game, nice UI
It would be cool if i could hold ctrl to slow down the cannon rotation a bit when i want to be accurate
Thanks for playing! You can actually slow down the rotation of the cannon by holding Shift.
tldr; nice, idea is solid, polishing is needed
i think the game would be more interesting if you simplified each character to an 'on hit' and 'on stop (while on the board)' effect and lent more into a Peggle-style board & "clear the board before X" goal, instead of trying to make players do tricky shots
Thanks for playing! Let me address your points:
I do like the idea of each ball having an 'on stop' ability. And yeah, having a turn limit is definitely in the cards. I didn't add it for this build because I didn't have much time to test/balance the levels.
Thanks again for playing and for the feedback!!
this needs a more fleshed out tutorial to better explain the skills and characteristics of every character.
don't forget to set the shoot key to spacebar, PLEASE.
i really like the bouncyness of it all
the UI and creature design are great, it's apparent you're an artist.
-every time I tried to dash in with a hero at the start it always ended in deaths. I beat the two first levels with 2 deaths actually. I don't like the concept of trying to hit single enemies and bounce back to spawn, it's a bit cowardly. It's fun to combo a lot of procs at once in those types of games , right? but if my first 2 characters die it's a problem. if the healer could revive on touch however..
-I'd like to finetune the cannon aim, arrow keys aren't precise enough.
-Trying to time abilities when you're at max speed is hard
-Wizard dies every single time he stops moving?
-I understood what's the active ability but some of them are obscure. what's giving a dex bonus to a ball? what's the difference between a ball and a hero?
(built-in image uploading is so bad)
https://imgur.com/a/CSnbpta
IMG1 - I thought I was softlocked there because I couldn't launch a hero directly at it. I didn't understand the concept of pushing and bouncing yet. something for a future tutorial?
IMG2 - I could launch another hero at a steeper angle to fit in the gap but the allowed angle changed or the hero's colission is bigger and the other hero couldn't fit in
I feel like this could be either a puzzle game or an arcade game, the style lends itself better to an arcade game but the abilities and deaths feel more like a puzzle game and the game is in-between.