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This is designed as a hardcore game. You should dash and hover alot to avoid enemies. They will surely prevent you to collect yellow energy balls, this is by design.

Ok, so let me be more precise with my words. I apologize this come off as harsh, I want to make sure the gravity of my concern is understood.

I am constantly dashing, usually on cooldown, to try and keep enemies off me. If I don't hit it on cooldown every time, enemies catch up within a second or two. Having to hit shift every 2-3 seconds with your pinky finger while you're constantly trying to navigate with your other three fingers can cause the hand to tense up so intensely that it causes physical pain. This is not okay. You need longer dashes (with a bigger cooldown) or to slow enemies down. The game can still be hardcore without this.

Meanwhile, the combination of enemies that take longer to kill than the time it takes for a new to spawn, ammo despawning despite seemingly being a necessity to winning, enemies able to easily swarm you and obscure your vision entirely AND enemies being able to shove you around is just bad game design. The enemies swarming you is disorienting enough, let alone when 4 of them decide "we're going to push you now" and they send you way off course and you have no idea where you are anymore. And this is before the health reduction effect, which is something I like and feel should stay. I was not the only person who felt it was disorienting, as people in my audience said it was disorienting to watch. A game that relies on disorienting the player constantly to make it "hardcore" is just bad design. You don't need to disorient players for a hardcore experience. There are all sorts of examples out there for this, but From Software games come to mind as a prime example. The latest Doom games also do and are a lot more relevant due to being first person shooters.

I recommend you to read "How to play this thing" on main project page.

If someone needs to read your project page to know how to play then you've screwed something up. You need to tell this information in game. If I'm required to read something offsite to figure out the basics for playing the game, then there's something wrong.

(5 edits) (+1)

Thank you for your feedback. I agree that there are omissions, perhaps even serious balance errors. I didn't record any videos for this project because I was hoping to watch how other people play this game first, to get a sense of the difference in perception. Yeah.. I need to balance game towards a wide audience and your detailed answer a step on that, in fact I really lack feedback because I balanced the game for myself. Among my friends, I noticed that people who played Quake series much could easily cope with it (like myself). And I'm in a difficult situation from a design point of view: on the one hand, I won't be able to make a game that I wouldn't play myself or take it too easy, on the other hand, it turns out to be a very specific gameplay, which is very far from casual experience. I carefully accept your point of view and will try to find a compromise. There still may be design errors which I missed, which cannot be attributed as part of challenge. Good design always has a difficulty curve that isn't presented here (I just didn't have time to get everything done by the jam deadline), and the game is probably too raw right now to  evaluate as release state. You also right about lack of ingame tutorial or gameplay hints. Will work on that. Thank you for your time!