Thank you so much for that feedback! I'm glad you liked the gliding! I agree about the reward system, I spent a lot of time wondering whether or not a positive feedback loop is better than a negative, so I agree 100% about having another way to get more flight time (or rewards/progression in general) like the bird rank. Maybe there could be another reward like flap-force which increases, because getting to the end of a level and just seeing "You've got 1 second!" is definitely underwhelming looking back. Thanks for taking the time to play and giving such a detailed review, its really appreciated! Your feedback is extremely helpful! Thanks again!
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No worries :) ! Yeah the gliding felt real smooth ^^.
Only concern with flap-force, is though that might initially feel good, having your flap-force change each level could end up negatively impacting you as you're used to the original, and that might cause you to crash instead of have that narrow dodge. Especially with no time to practice it until you're in the air trying to reach your objective.
I think the main question to answer is, do you want the player to be challenged more as they progress, or do you want them to engage in the experience in a more comfortable way as the maps become larger/more challenging.
If you wanted to give a reward, you could increase zoom out the camera more, as if the bird reaching its goal quicker elevated its environmental awareness.
It's not a significant reward, as a player that's not reaching the goal in few stop may be intimidated by that larger range of view anyway. But for players getting to the end well, that could give them an increased capacity to plan their way towards the goal, and increase their potential ability in a natural way-that still requires them to be good at the game inherently.
Happy to hear the feedback was appreciated and valuable, no worries at all :D !
Yeah, that’s tricky choosing how to reward the player... maybe the better a player is doing you challenge them with a wider variety of tools and having to learn them (like zooming out and learning a more route planning based strategy) so that way they get more comfortable with the initial mechanics, while also learning more varied approaches of attacking the level. Thanks for sharing your game design knowledge, it’s very much appreciated! Reward systems are a very interesting field of game design, might have to watch some more GDC talks about them :D