Maybe I'm getting too old, but I find reading the text very straining on the eyes. So much in fact that I don't have the patience to read through the entire text of the game and understanding it without the text seems very hard.
I'm sorry, but as interesting as the game sounds, I think I'll have to take a pass on this one for now :/
It's not mainly the size, but the fact that the font is not the most legible one combined with a relatively low contrast and the scanline effect. That being said, I gave it another go today and it seems a little better when my eyes aren't already tired.
So, what about the game? it's sort of fun. I do think it's brought down a little by one crucial rule of game design, though: "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."
Example 1: While it's much more fun to just left-click every square and there are more than enough health drops to be able to do that, it's clearly more "optimal" to first right-click every tile, then left-click it, so players will tend to do the latter.
Exampe 2 (though that might have just been my own silliness): The first time I clicked one of those end-game tiles, all green blocks exploded, revealing a lot of enemies that I had to take out quickly. This was actually the most fun part of the game. HOWEVER: What I "learned" from this encounter was that, since there are four colours of blocks, probably each of those end-game tiles would reveal one of them and I just got very lucky that the one with the least amount of tiles was revealed first. Clearly, the most optimal thing then would be to clear the playing field one-by-one and only then click the other end-game tiles in order to minimize the number of enemy spawns and not die so late in the game. So I spent the next 5 to 10 minutes clicking on tiles until I got so bored I decided I needed to just try to click the center tiles again, and look, it didn't even do the thing I was afraid of! That's a lot of time I wasted in the name of unnecessary optimization.
Anynway, apart from that, the game was sort of fun. I felt like the stakes were not super high, though, so maybe it needs a little rebalancing.
And a few more UX features I'd like to see:
After all that rebalancing, would the game even be SBIG anymore? Maybe not. But if you're not careful, it could turn into a SGIG game, which I guess is also an okay thing to achieve.
Hey! Thanks for the detailed feed back! Some of the features that you're talking about here are already in the post jam version of the game. Mines don't immediately explode, they show a bomb icon that flashes for a bit until it explodes. These explosions are bigger, and will set off bomb timers around them! This can make things more frantic, and put the abundance of health power ups to better use. I can always look at other fonts, that's an easy thing to fix.
Initially there was a penalty for clicking the wrong program, but that made the game too hard for those who play tested. It was too unforgiving for most, and I've found that difficulty for jam games can be hard to peg down. So I will often lean towards what keeps people playing over difficulty. It was hard enough to explain to some people how to play, as most people don't experiment anymore and expect directions on how to play, hence the tutorial. At a minimum, I could add some sort of audio feedback for the wrong program being used to start.
Overall, I just need to add some more feed back to the player on actions they take. There is some, but could use more on good and bad actions. I really appreciate the detailed feed back and recommendations! Thank you for taking the time to play and rate the game!
