Post by skallywags in LightLine jam comments

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I found this game somewhat therapeautic to play, with the calm upbeat music, and the satisfying shooting. I do wish that you could shoot with a higher rate of fire, or charge up your shots for bigger, faster bullets. It might also be cool if shooting the bullet caused the spaceship to move backwards a little bit. My team actually made a similar spaceship game for our previous game jam with some of these mechanics I'm talking about, I think your game has more interesting level design, but might be cool to try each others games: https://skallywags.itch.io/gravity-blast

I somewhat agree with what others have said about balancing. It was a really cool idea to make the player prioritize being inside the circles of light, however it seemed a little overbalanced. It made the game more challenging for sure, but its not that fun to be reset to the previous spot simply for staying out of the light too long. Its more fun to be reset because you messed up during a fight with an enemy. So my suggestion would be to give more energy by default, or make the upgrades to energy be worth more energy, and then make the enemy AI a bit faster and smarter, so the difficulty comes more from the fighting and postioning yourself in the light is still important but it won't be the primary driver of difficulty and challenge.

I hope you do keep improving the game because I think its a really cool concept.

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skallywags2 years ago(+1)

Here are a couple more minor pieces of feedback. I think adding hit stop, camera shake, more pronounced particle effects and sound effects could go a long way to make combat feel more visceral. I'm assuming you are making this in Unity? (Sorry if this is too much info or you already know all this stuff, just trying to help)

In unity for hit stop effect, make a coroutine like so:

And you can call this with StartCoroutine(hitStop(x, y));

I would call this whenever a player bullet hits any object or enemy, I would make x = 0f, and y = 0.05f. Similarly, I would call this whenever the player gets hit by anything, with x = 0.2f and y = 0.2f.

Whenever an enemy dies, I would call it for longer: x = 0f, y = 0.3f to really emphasize it.

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skallywags2 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

In unity for a camera shake, I would make a coroutine like the so: https://imgur.com/a/rWEMD0U

and again you can call it using StartCoroutine(cameraShake(...));

You can make your own functions for decideDuration() and decideStartingMagnitude() and magnitudeOverTime() and inside those functions return whatever numbers you would like for each type of camera shake. You most likely want to do a small camera shake each time that the player fires a bullet - if its a bullet the player charged up, then do a bigger camera shake. You also may want a camera shake each time a bullet hits an enemy or object, and whenever the player gets hurt. And lastly a big camera shake anytime anything explodes.

Again, sorry if this is too much info, and please don't take this as me not liking the game - I liked the game a lot and would like to see it get even better. I'd be happy to playtest if you make a new build.

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GalloPintoGames2 years ago(+1)

THANK YOU! thanks so much for all the feed back. so much to talk about, I played your game and I was impresed of the level of polish I liked the details of the particles and the camera shake.

I definetly agree that the game needs some balance, I didn't have enough time and I'm planning to update that. Believe it or not the enemies used to respawn more quickly and you loose even more energy outside the light on earlier version jahaha.

About the effects a particles, yes! there are a LOT of things that I wanted to add (animations and particles effect, hit effects and more) but I didnt actually thought about the camera shake, thats a great addition to make it feel so much more satisfying, thanks a lot for including a way to make it because I haven't done that before :)

I really appreciate you taking the time to write all that, I'm going to make a version with some new stuff and without bugs, also I'll love to add more weapons and upgrades like movement and even shield, I have a lot of ideas for this.

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skallywags2 years ago (2 edits)

Great, let me follow you, and if you would like, I'll check out a new build if you put it up. My username is 'rsaamar' in the lost relic game jam discord, feel free to message me there.

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GalloPintoGames2 years ago(+1)

Awesome! I'll follow you too and let you know when I get an update version for this! thanks a lot, I'll send you an invite on discord as well.

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