awesome. one of my favorite games in the jam so far! great work, both of you.
seems like the 'bullets' and hit effects are a bit out of theme, but I'm sure you're aware already. getting devil daggers vibes. chess pieces are cool. palette is nice. balance feels good. need to play with the camera a bit more to develop an opinion on how it feels.
I got a around 2K on my second bootup here which I'm sure isn't amazing but I had fun! some more thoughts on the controller.
why not just go the full 360? I mean, I'm sure you tried it in dev but the more I play, the more I want it.
I often miss the chess pieces due to the distortion. this is basically fine and kinda sorta not really a feature--as a player I can (and did) certainly correct for it. might be useful to modulate the distance requirement for pickup based on the vector between the player and the item (to 'account' for distortion).
there's a weird sort of gap between seeing a cloud of heads at 3 o clock or whatever and not being able to shoot at it, because you're managing some other cloud at 10 o clock. again, the game is already fun and it's certainly conventional to aim and shoot in one direction, so it's OK. but I almost wish I could crowd control in such a way that I could manage multiple groups at once. perhaps this is due to the transience of the bullets--as artifacts they have a very short lifetime. if they did some kind of persistent damage, or took longer to reach their target, or something, it might work. but that would mess with the classic mob management shooter feel you have. the solution might be as simple as adding tons of pushback and/or sleep/freeze to enemy hits, to emphasize groups and how you control them in space. yeah.
I love the style, but I can't help but think this would work really well diegetically as a sort of hulking vehicle-on-a-soundstage huge map thing with the full english done on HUD ui and target tracking, and a compass spanning the full footer of the screen.
Thanks for your elaborate feedback! It's a real treasure trove!
It would be possible to go 360 but it probably would require another projection style to be useful (panoramic or equirectangular instead of fisheye), although that might take out a lot of the perceived speed. We initially had the player character hold an actual orb (as a 'weapon' view model) that showed what's behind the player. Kind of like a back mirror. But during playtesting we found that you'd never actually look into the orb since you'd be mostly focused on aiming and what's in front of you. So maybe having a 360 fov might defragment that information.
You're absolutely right about having more means of crowd control. That's a missed opportunity. We had pain responses and knockback in mind but as always, time was the ultimate constraint. We focused on creating different enemy behaviours instead and sadly at some point totally forgot about crowd control mechanism. There was also an idea for a secondary fire mode, like a charge attack of some sort with additional pushback or slowdown within an area.
I'm sure there's a lot potential for elaboration and we certainly didn't exhaust all interesting possibilities. Orbhead 2 maybe ;)
Thanks for playing and for the nice words!
