Some pretty well... panicked gameplay with this game for sure. The controls were simple and easy to understand, but I can tell there's a decent amount of depth you could get into with them. Plus the concept leaves a lot open, and it's just hilarious enough. A few finer points though:
- Picking up the paddle was a bit hard to do, sometimes it seemed to be glitchy (WebGL version) where it wouldn't pick it up if my mouse was over it, only if my mouse was slightly below it. Which took some getting used it and still didn't always grab it. So tweaking that would be nice.
- It seems as though the koala is really fast. Which, if it is possible, (which I assume it is) makes it incredibly hard to reach the end. My assumption is that the koala is moving at a set speed? Though there seems to be some weirdness when it gets close to the player. I had multiple times where I would be going slow through an area, then get to clear waters and move at max speed only to not gain any distance on the koala. I'm not entirely sure if that's a bug, or just how fast the koala is? My suggestion would be maybe in your procedural generation to add a "koala_speed" value to each block that's used and then slightly tweak the koala based on the density and difficulty of each portion of the map. That way if it's a difficult area for the player, the koalas speed will slow down to give some slight leeway. I feel like that's a better way to handle it than just lowering the speed altogether.
- Adding a score would definitely be nice, since then you could go for a high score on how long you can evade the koala, I see other people have suggested it as well tho, so I assume that's already on your list.
Overall definitely a really interesting and really open concept. Executed pretty well, honestly one of the best simple experiences throughout the jam.