Aight, where to even begin!
Shall we start from the obvious one, the visuals. Post processing makes simple shapes look nice and your color choices weren't horrible. The things that really stood out were obviously the displacement effect on explosions and somehow the triangle shot pattern was quite satisfying looking. But that was pretty much where it ended. No effect at all for getting hit (super annoying and sometimes you just didn't know where you lost health), hitting enemies, stuff dying or even yourself dying. You just slap on a game over screen as soon as something hits the player for the last time. Very imbalanced when comparing these shortages to the explosion effect. Hell, you could have just pretty much reused the same effect (maybe scaled down and recolored or something) for triangle enemies and player death too.
And of course those missing visual bits don't only affect the look of the game, they would serve an important role too, feedback. They give the player instant information for for example that no you can not collide with enemies because they are hurting you. All that without having to look at UI which the player will not do in the heat of action. I would have liked to see scores pop up on the field too while killing stuff which also would have made it easier to try to understand how the scoring worked.
Audio feedback was also missing for the majority of these actions. The constant shooting kinda overpowered over the music which by the way got way too repetitive way too fast. It was nice but adding some length to it with some needed bits of variation would have gone a long way.
And where were all the particle effects and other juicy bits? You really gotta step it up with the stylistic choice like this, it's very hard to go overboard with juice. Camera shake was another thing I was really missing which would have put some all needed oomph to all the actions. And speaking of camera, that could have used some TLC too. The camera damping sure looks nice but it is very ineffective because you're showing more where the player was and not where they want to be. I think more focusing on a position somewhere between the ship and mouse cursor would be the ideal focal point for camera.
And that reminds me of another thing I almost forgot to mention which is mouse cursor. A custom bigger and more easily visible cursor would have been a welcome addition. Lost my mouse so many times and had to kinda follow the bullets to find it again.
The UI stuff on the other hand looked very bland. It could have used some of that same love that other parts got. That health HUD was very prominent on the screen and but was so damn basic. And not like it even mattered much since everything seemed to do quite random amounts of damage. I don't think it even updated on death so you could end up with game over screen and that meter still showing four. The main menu keyboard controls were oddly setup so that you could only get to quit by looping around and then it didn't go up from that at all. So it was kinda like if the quit button was the first item and there was no looping around.
And then there were some not game breaking but not great either bugs. You could totally ignore the turret forming which cut your speed to half by double clicking the shoot button. But the biggest bug was really the edges of the playable area where enemy and health spawning just came to an halt and the edges were really affecting the shot aiming too. The size was really not a factor in the gameplay at all so it should either have been a lot smaller or then scrapped completely and had an endless world.
The scoring system was confusing and boring. I couldn't really wrap my head around how it worked either. There was some kind of multiplier system but very unsure of what it really did and never got it to go past two. Somehow I feel like it was always super quick to get to around 30k and then it became a slog. But when I tried to pay more attention to the scores, it seemed very linear. Obviously a proper multiplier system would be a key to making an interesting scoring system where a good player and a beginner would achieve a vastly different scores in the same amount of time. And then there was that annoying negative score bug which made you need to check your score each start of a new run and hard reset if it went negative. Very unfun!
Another thing that made the game miss out in some of its potential was the actual shooting. The inaccuracy combined with small bullets and enemies made missing your shots quite easy and obviously missing isn't fun. Slapping on a spread shot on that bad boy would make the fun factor of the game much much more. Or having the shots home at the closest enemies even just slightly would have served the same purpose really, not just being that fun. But having homing spread shot, now we're talking... 🤔😎
All right, I think this is my final bit. The game was too unfair! Enemies spawn right next to you without any warning and they even shoot quite was after that so you can't even react. Quite often you might not even notice the whole thing until they've got few shots/bumps into you because the lack of feedback and you're usually paying attention to where you're shooting. Just having a simple spawn animation and increasing the delay before they can shoot would solve these really. And increasing the range where from how far of the player ship they can spawn at would be nice too.
Okay, that was it. I hope I didn't come off too critical, I think just pointing what is wrong and can be improved is the more constructive feedback. And I know you can take it too! 😉
Good job! 👍
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