itch.io

I guess I don't really care about high score leaderboards or anything. But I feel like if the rewards aren't really inherently fun then I'm not incentivized to get them, yknow. The fact that you can sacrifice score to block the ball yourself is a bit at odds with the game's goals I think because the scoreboard is subjective/optional. It's like having a game with a healthbar but instead of dying you just get to brag to your friends about how healthy you are. But to be honest, it wasn't clear to me that you got rewards for extra rolling when I just jumped in and played it. So maybe making that more clear could help. I think if I were making this I would try to add some kind of active component to the blocks as well, something you can control while the ball is moving to make it go longer. And ramp up the difficulty, the player usually gets many ball powerups like multiball and stuff that would make it more chaotic, so you should have to deal with all of that in reverse. But this kind of hits on an issue i feel a lot of jam games had with this years theme which is like, taking the reverse of a good idea almost inherently removes everything that made that idea good to begin with. And it's a struggle to figure out how to add the fun back in while still making sense with the theme. And because of that, a lot of people ended up making games that already exist just with a palette swap essentially. I thought last years theme was hard but from what I've seen this year so far, I think this is worse.

Anyway, your game looks nice, and plays well for what was intended, i.e. polished. So that's always something to be proud of in a jam.