Mixed bag of notes from first time playing. Unfortunately I haven’t played long enough to have serious thoughts about balance. I had fun, I like the visuals, the name is (really) good and I would like to play more but I want to get through more demos.
- This genre is dopamine-heavy and players’ receptors are all fried. I feel that this game’s hits could be stronger, I’d start by making juicier, shinier coin pickups with that silly pitch increase effect (or is it a Shepard tone?)
- I can’t get used to critical info being all the way into the corners, game can be fast paced enough that time spent on the ocular round-trip affects your play and gets fatiguing.
- Stereo not fully utilised, an explosion just left of the character sounds “as left” as one at the edge of the screen. If you can even work in some up/down spatialization it would be primo. A storm of bullets tearing through a fullscreen crowd of zombies should(!) sound crazy good and satisfying, use that as a test case to work on audio.
- Have you tried falling casings sounds? Curious if it gets annoying or is too similar to coin pickups. Maybe only play them while not picking coins or change the coin sounds.
- Not an expert on this so I won’t comment further but I would only pick 2-3 text sizes and 2 fonts and completely stick to them.
- Map screen, the rune icons on lower levels keep flashing even though (I think?) there’s no action I could take about them.
- Enemies should have names (not necessarily during gameplay but at least a compendium maybe) to facilitate players’ discussions. I think they’re unique enough to generate strategy discussions and fun anecdotes.
- It’s “can hardly wait”, unless I’m grammar nazi-ing a pun in which case keep it, it’s a crumb that will drive at least 50 online engagements down the line.