Post by perey in I challenge you to beat my high score; challenge me back! 😉

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Not meaning to boast, but this was my first play-through:

Thoughts while playing:

Do I have to be on the right side of the Earth before I can shoot that meteor? No? Okay, good. I’d hate to wipe Buenos Aires off the map with this laser.
What was that message? “Mission” something? Is mission control trying to talk to me? I’m a little busy here!
Oh, it said “missed”. There’s a cooldown when I miss. Wait, why is there a cooldown when I miss but not when I hit?
Never mind. New strategy: don’t miss.
I like that I can hit multiple meteors with one shot.
What’s that number in the top right? Is that lives? Can I let two meteors through before it’s game over? …I’m not going to test that.
Nope, it’s a wave counter. Good thing I didn’t test it.
Wow, the meteors-per-wave count goes up very fast. I don’t remember how many it was before, but now it’s in the hundreds?!
I really like that I can hit multiple meteors with one shot. But sometimes I’m not expecting it, so I click to shoot one that’s no longer there and have to wait for the cooldown!
Wave 7, wave 7, c’mon, I can beat wave 7… yes!
Wave 8, wave 8, c’mon, I— okay no I can’t. Oh well.

So yeah. Great game, heaps of fun. The controls are smooth, and the difficulty felt about right.

I feel like more, shorter waves—ramping up in number more slowly—would give more of a feeling of hitting milestones without affecting the difficulty, but I could be wrong. Also I still don’t understand the missed-shot cooldown. If it’s to prevent spam-clicking, surely a cooldown on every shot would achieve that? (Or maybe there is one?) But, it’s only brief and didn’t seem to matter much.

Since you asked, my game’s also an arcadey shooter, but games take exactly five minutes, putting it outside the limits of your request. It’s also buggy as hell… but here it is if you’re interested: https://perey.itch.io/full-moon

Siôn le Roux4 years ago

Wow, you must have really good aim, very well done and congratulations!

Thanks for the detailed write-up, it was amusing to read through a player’s perspective and it’s really useful feedback for me!

What’s that number in the top right? Is that lives?

Yeah I know these numbers aren’t obvious at all, unless you pay attention to them for a few rounds. I’m thinking of some kind of UI design with an icon that would clarify what they mean.

more, shorter waves—ramping up in number more slowly

Right now they double every round, which is okay for the first few, but you’re right, it turns into a swarm pretty fast. I’ve balanced it out a bit by making them start out spread further apart / further away when there’s more of them, otherwise they all arrive at once and you have no chance. I’ll still tweak the difficulty factors in future iterations, so if you have suggestions for how it should increase that’d be nice. Currently it’s exponential, each wave has 5*2^(n-1) meteors, where n is the wave number you’re at.

Also I still don’t understand the missed-shot cooldown.

It’s kind of against spam clicking. It’s a penalty for missing a shot, so your “New strategy: don’t miss.” was spot on, you must not miss a shot in this game. I can’t put a cooldown on every shot you take because sometimes there’s just a lot of meteors and you have to click fast. But if you miss one because you didn’t take time to aim properly then there’s a 1 second cooldown. I tried to visualise it in the game such that when you miss a shot then the explosion happens on the turret on the moon instead of where the crosshair is, as if the miss caused the laser to backfire. In future iterations I’ll add a visual cooldown like a progress bar or something to make it easier for players than trying to read the text during the action.

Thanks for taking the time to play so far through and thanks for the detailed feedback! 😊

Siôn le Roux4 years ago

I tried your game too by the way, I’m not sure if I’m doing something wrong but no mobs appeared at all in the first wave, sometimes it said 10, sometimes it said 0. 😅