Hey everyone! Here's a little game I've been working on, still haven't thought of a name yet! What inspired me to make this was a combination of Mr. Game n Watch type games plus a mixture of that Chancy mini-game from Pokemon Stadium 2.

//giphy.com/embed/sQ89k4HlzrJo4

I do have a question for the GBJam community! What would be some good ways of balancing a game like this? Should I up the speed? The spawn rate? Or try a little of both? If you could see yourself playing this game, at what point would you say it should get more difficult? At a score of 10? or maybe a score of 50? This is kind of the hump I've started to climb over in these last few days!

Looks to me like one thing that is making balancing hard is how tall the catcher thingy is. Because of this, player movement looks clumsy, like you're trying to maneuver a truck through a bunch of snowflakes and beachballs... or something.

Another thing: the graphics are a bit too abstract, I can't tell what you're supposed to collect and what you're supposed to dodge. Ideally, bad things should look bad/evil/menacing. If you need a screen to explain to the player what is good/bad, that probably means your graphics are not intuitive. If you manage to get rid of the tutorial because the graphics are self-explanatory, you'll be able to add more obstacle types easily. Stuff that moves more quickly, in a zig-zag, or suddenly changes column once, will be harder to dodge... and if it looks evil, the player will naturally try to dodge it.

A good example is one of the Mario games: whenever a new enemy shows up, the player generally doesn't think "is that something I should pick up, or run away from?"