Hey Fateful. Metal Slug is the most iconic side-scrolling shooter in my opinion. It defiantly was a precursor to Madness Interactive which was a big inspiration for this game. My design goal was to put a side-scrolling top-down shooter on a table-top. I also downloaded RV tournament. I'm playing my first round now.
I've decided to break the update into two or three parts so I can get your fixes to you quicker. The next update will have blue-tooth support and the improved instructions. I will probably have the new surfaces support also, but that might come in the second update. I took some short-cuts to get the game out faster and because I want to continue developing it I need to go back and re-write some of the poorly architected parts.
If you're available to answer some questions about your experience, that would really help me understand how players interact with the game. Just answer whatever you want, skip anything that's not interesting.
What kind of gamer are you? When did you start? How often do you play? Which platforms? What are your favorite genres and titles? Previous AR experience?
How did you find the game? When did you make the decision to download? What made you decide to download?
How approachable was the game for you? How was the AR set-up process? Did you get stuck or feel confused at any point? How did you learn the controls? Were the controls approachable or were they difficult to understand?
How do you play the game? Where do you play it? How does it fit into your life? Do you play it during short work breaks? When you have free time? Is the game still novel or interesting to you? How long before you got tired of the game? (No need to exaggerate. I don't play the game myself because it's not very compelling to me. Probably because I did so much testing during development. Most people probably just give it a single play. I'm just interested in how you interact with the game.)
Have you beaten the challenge mode? (I tried to designed it so that an average player could win with only a little practice. I wanted people to be able to easily experience all the content.)
I think you said you're on a 6S. Have you had any performance problems? (Like stuttering frame rate, Performance changes with low battery conditions, or excessive heating, poor battery life. The game freezes for me on about 1 out of 6 games and requires a restart. Does that ever happen do you? This is a very difficult bug to diagnose. The game kills the battery on my device. Sometimes just 10 minutes will take me from 50% to 10%. I tried to make it so a player could play though the whole challenge mode on an older device without noticeable performance problems - I couldn't really avoid battery problems though)
I included a short-cut where you can do a 2 finger tap on the left side to open/close the editor. Sometimes I activate this by mistake. Do you ever activate this by mistake? I'm probably going to remove that feature in the update.
Do you play in landscape or portrait orientation?
Have you used the time-slider to alter the speed of time? If so when? Have you ever paused the game and looked at the scene?
Was anything about the game unclear, confusing, or frustrating to you at any point?
How do you interact with the various scale options? Did you understand the scaling options from the beginning? What did you size it to? What surface do you usually play it on, table or floor?
What stands out to you? What's the first thing that comes to your memory when you think about the game?
Feel free to answer any of the questions that seem interesting to you. To give you context, I'm a very amateur developer. I've only published 2 amateur games. My goal is to keep practicing until I can make really compelling games with viral appeal. I want to make games that are totally novel and break away from prior convention. There's also amazing technology coming out that's accessible to people like me. Tech like this AR stuff as well as tech that can allow for thousands of animated characters on screen and 1,000 - 10,000 players in a shared universe.