I've received this specific piece of criticism/feedback many times. I experimented with this idea a little more shortly after this DD ended, but it felt really clunky to me. Having to take your hand off WASD to mix stuff renders you completely defenseless, not to mention you have to stretch your hand all the way to the 6 key. To me, this could only work if the time slow-down also happened when you're mixing with the number keys, but then it might still break the flow of gameplay. What do you think?I assume you want to keep movement as WSAD, and not make it so you can move with mouse instead.
I guess your reasons are that players have more control over movement with WSAD compared to just clicking to move. My suggestiong would be to make it so you move with WSAD, but when holding a mixing key, you can mix with WSAD. At first I thought you could maybe keep the last movement direction before pressing the mixing key, so it would allow you to move while mixing, but I think if you do it the way I described you are not going to need slowing down or anything, since every mix would be Hold Mixing + Rapid Keyboard clicks, so I don't think a moment to stop would be bad.
If you can make mixing faster without breaking the flow of combat, then players will be able to mix a lot more in combat. When Magicka went online PvP in Wizard Wars, they made it so each cast/mix was limited to 3 inputs, unlike the original game with 5 - What I mean by that is you would make all the spells by choosing 3 keys to press out of 8 (not counting extra combo elements like steam, or ice). That way it allowed for fast paced combos in form of multiple spells chained one after the other, rather than spending more time on clicking combinations inbetween each shot. Example of combos I am talking about
It is much more fun when you can make enemies wet with first spell, and then quickly zap them and freeze them with second, and then finish them off with a giant rock in 3rd cast and everything lasting split second.
You also want more enemy variety, so quick mixing when changing from one target to the other mid fight is going to be even more important in future.I can make the timer last longer, but the timer stays.
I think I already explained above how else you can do it without both timer, and slowing down time.
I expect the second level to have different enemies with different colors.
Yes, that'll be the case soon. There's a miniscule amount of content in the game right now, so it just repeats the same stuff.
I hope in future you plan to have more enemy variety in each room, and not just changing them on different floors.
You didn't find any of the cool combos you can pull off
I could definitely do more, but right now the game doesn't "require" me to do it after you find just one combo that works, and the way mixing is done right now does not make it fun (breaking the flow, taking too long). Let me know what you think of my control suggestions. I am curious what you are going to say. I will be happy to brainstorm more if you give me good reasons why you wouldn't want to do things in certain ways.