Really enjoyed this! The ball movement was really nice. I would have loved more of an opportunity to move around just with the normal movement. Felt like the meta was jump spamming, which is unfortunate given how nice the grounded movement is.
I also would have personally like the jumps to like set your upward velocity to some constant. It felt more like a force being applied. In other words, jump while falling = smaller jump. Given the cost of the jumps in the shop I would have liked more jump power so that jumps have more utility when you've been falling for a bit.
All in all though, quite a fun game! I was pretty surprised when I looked in the shop and realized what I could buy. I was a bit worried the extra jumps were going to be too cheap and abusable, but overall I think it was well balanced.
One last thought: I would have like to see more of a balance between the lava (or whatever) damage and the damage from enemies. Lava feels like a non-issue with 0 threat, whereas basic enemy shots feel super impactful and scary. That's probably what you were going for, and I guess the lava shouldn't be too strong with the player falling in it so often. I'm honestly not sure! But the lava just felt more annoying than it actually felt like a core mechanic of the game, in a way.
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Thanks for the detailed review!
I was aware of most of the problems you mentioned, a lot of them exist because I ran out of time to make them better. I wanted to make lava more of a threat but I couldn't think of a good way to achieve that. I could punish the player somehow when they touched it, for example taking away the ability to jump for a few seconds but I thought that would be too annoying. Maybe with an easy tutorial level the player could learn the movement and get comfortable with the controls.
Your point about the jump implementation is absolutely right, it should set the upward velocity, not just add a force.
Balancing is also a thing I struggled with. I didn't have enough time to make it right so much of it was just guessing. I'm glad you think it was all right in the end.
So to sum it up, if I could change anything it would be to make the basic enemies damage less in the beginning and implement some mechanic that makes the lava more dangerous.
Out of curiosity, how many seconds did you survive? I was worried I made the beginning too slow so some players just give up before seeing all the enemy types. Also, how many powerups did you get? Their spawn rate could be a little higher I think.