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(+1)
  • 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

(+1)

Thanks for playing! Let me address your points:

  • 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.

Thanks again for playing and for the feedback!!