First of all, great job - movement, drop rates, enemies, enemy AI, generated levels, concept - all ace. Good work, seriously. I played for 13 levels, and my observations are as thus: the physical world is -much- more dangerous than pandemonium. It seems more and more enemies spawn with each level, but whereas pandemonium has spiders (dangerous, but skittish, can be taken out en masse with the rocket launcher, or stunlocked with uzi) and big-red-energy-ball dudes (super simple to dodge, can be taken out with rockets or shotgun or just shot enough times), the physical world has hitscan enemies. Oof. And they just come, in massive massive waves, whenever you enter a room. I found out that the best weapon is the uzi, as it's the only one that can stunlock them for long enough to survive. The rocket launcher is too slow, and the shotgun is WAY too slow.
Aside from the hitscan enemies, the physical world is also much more dangerous because it has fewer drops - so if you run out of ammo for the uzi, you might be in a much worse spot than in pandemonium, where not only ever weapon can be used, you also find much more ammo. In fact, I ended up trying to find the ball ASAP in the physical world because pandemonium was so much safer - I saw no difference in the enemy difficulty if I "left some alive" (maybe they had more HP or something, but nothing a rocket can't fix).
So yeah :D I doubt that was the intention! Here's my suggestions:
- Make a red ball in Pandemonium, that does the same thing as the white ball, except that the bonuses on unkilled enemies stack, so go back and forth enough times without killing certain enemies and they will level up in both worlds.
- Make enemies drop almost exclusively ammo in pandemonium, and almost exclusively health/armor in the physical world. Make it matter when/where you're going.
- Ungimp the shotgun - make it fire much faster (or fire twice before reloading), give it a spread, or increase its damage (or all three).
- Add a second enemy to the physical world to thin out the herds of hitscan mooks.
Oh, and the rocket launcher was a bit funny in that it seemed that as long as the explosion was visible on the screen, it would kill anyone running into it, so it sort of acted more like a molotov cocktail than a rocket launcher half the time. It was fun though, could consider making it a feature instead.
Sorry for the massive wall of text - I had a good time xD
Viewing post in Retroverse Rampage jam comments
Thanks for taking the time out of your day for such an in-depth review, much appreciated! if was my first time making a 3D game in Godot, so it was a fun learning process, I wanted to do something like this to avoid those pesky boned based animations in a 3D model.
I was wondering if the enemies in the physical dimension would end up being tougher. I think this might partly depend on the play though and how much of the level you have to clear in order to advance to the next. I didn't get a lot of time to work on balancing, but when I did, it seemed like the orb would spawn further away, meaning more enemies to clear, which turns into more enemies in Pandemonium.
The goal with the hit scan weapons for the normal enemies was to give it a more retro feel, but maybe I should dial back their damage or the timer for their shot. I kinda struggled with scoop creep, my intention was to only have 1 enemy per dimension, but thought trying to dodge both the melee enemies and the projectiles would be more fun then trying to just dodge the 1 slow enemy. The enemies speed and health scale up as well per level you complete, but guessing I had that tuned too low as well. Lesson learned for next time though, in a game like this, leave some time for balancing at the end.