Post by SevB in Arkatron Adventure comments

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The retro style of this game is really cool, it is convincing and invokes a sense of nostalgia, I do have some feedback that you could use to improve the game if you like.

First of all I did come across this glitch where if the ball collides directly into the corner of a brick at a seemingly 45 degree angle it just gets stuck there. It took me a while to figure out that right clicking resets the ball it would be cool if that was clarified somewhere, as well as hitting escape giving you an instant game over, I tried to pause the game but it just ended my run lol.

Some other quality of life changes (a.k.a. nitpicks) I would suggest are:

- When you left click during the screen just before you enter a level the game starts without before you can see it.

- When you left click during the level screen it should skip it instead, it is a tad too long

- A mouse sensitivity slider would be appreciated

- The balls speed is a bit confusing, sometimes it's unbearably slow but sometimes the speed is perfect and it seems to fluctuate randomly.

- The ball hitting sound is a bit jarring, especially when it's the same sound every time.

- Not that I would want to turn off the music but the sliders lowest value still plays the music relatively loud instead of off completely
Edit: I noticed it only didn't work if you put it all the way to the left, if you move it a bit up it works as intended though this also made me realize that the volume sliders don't have any effect in the levels just in the menu xd.

That is all I can think of right now, overall a really cool game. Good Job!

SevB159 days ago

pain

emil_io159 days ago(+1)

Thank you for the feedback! I really appreciate it. A couple of these things I admit that I must have just gotten used to during development, but I can see how helpful it would be to add these improvements.

For the ball speed however, it's a feature not a bug 😄 the ball speeds up as you get closer to finishing the level, and sometimes a power-up will increase the speed; just to make things interesting (and inspired by space invaders). I was thinking of having a speed multiplier in the settings, which could be analogous to difficulty.

As for the slider, yeah I believe it's another classic Unity flaw, lol. I'll look into it though.

Thanks again, I'm glad you liked it!

emil_io159 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Update: I've now patched *both versions to address your feedback!

- Switched ball collision system to be more standard (using Circle Collider) which has fixed issues of getting stuck (as far as I can tell)

- Fire Input is now disabled until the swipe finishes, and will skip the transition instead.

- Ball's minimum speed increased 33%

- Music settings should now affect all in-game music

- Ball impact sound is now less obtuse, it has been switched with the brick impact sound.

- Bonus! Fire ball now has a custom impact sound.

Please give it another go and let me know if you're happy or spot any further issues! I guess swapping the ball impact sound isn't a perfect fix but I will make a new one if the brick impact is irritating. (with that said, bad audio helps the authenticity of the 80s style!)

Enjoy!

SevB158 days ago(+1)

It's amazing how just a few simple changes increases the game's quality so drastically. The balls physics is definitely fixed now, no getting stuck or wrapping around corners. The sound effects are much more satisfying and of course accurate to the style, just that slight differentiation helped a lot. For further issues I do have some, mostly to do with level select:

- Upon first opening the game all of the world 1 levels were already unlocked but I did still have to do level 4 to go to the next world

- When closing and reopening the game the scores and completed levels are all saved correctly but the arrow to move to world 2 doesn't appear until I beat level 4 again

- A very major issue is once I eventually beat level 8 after a few attempts, level 9 never unlocked so I was unfortunately not able to progress past that point. Which was especially annoying since I failed so many times with 1 or 2 bricks left on level 8 lol

- Speaking of failing on level 8, when you fail on the last level of a world and you return to level select, you will be set to the world after even though you had not unlocked the next level

- This one is to do with the gameplay but I believe it could just be kept as a feature if it is not already, when you get the beach ball power-up the current moving ball can collide with it before you release it from your paddle. This can cause a bit of a glitchy effect when it collides with the ball on the paddle it can jitter around as they both overlap for just a second but that being said not really a problem.

I believe these are the only issues I had asides from the ones I had in my original comment that haven't changed. Again, really good work!

emil_io158 days ago(+1)

Thank you again, I'm glad you appreciated the update! I will get to fixing the level select issues.

For the level 8, that's a design oversight on my part, sorry. I wasn't sure whether to make an instant unlock on the level completion, or to require a score threshold, at first. Currently, The next level is only unlocked when you beat the score threshold of 1000 x Level number (i.e. 8000+ on level 8 to unlock level 9) - but I haven't made that clear anywhere yet (whoops). if you unlock the next level for the first time though, it should say "new level unlocked" next to your score.

I'm thinking maybe to remove the score threshold, because it's unclear and acts mostly as an artificial difficulty, when it matters, and impossible not to beat in other cases. On the other hand, it's an 80s arcade game, and unforgiving difficulty is part of the authenticity! 😄

Well done on getting to level 8 though, I think you have done the best from everyone I've seen play so far :)

itch.io

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