What did this game do well?

I like the clear screen skill that’s rewarded to the player when gets a certain amount of point. And the game feels added to the breaking objects feel appropriate This game did a pretty good job with the effects. I also like the fact that it’s an infinite scroller. There’s a nice challenge to beating your high score. The player ability (‘E’) is very satisfying with screenshake and explosion particles, the game feel is solid! The game feel elements like the particle effects and camera shake was well done. Pretty fun to play. The controls work pretty well and hitboxes make a lot of sense. I like the aesthetic as well. The particle effects for the explosion are really nice and the shooting sound effect makes it feel really calming. The bomb is also very satisfying to use. I think the group’s effects are pretty well done, they did what they did in the game feel, and the explosion clear screen effects are well done! the ui and gameplay is good, the effect is right I really liked the music and the particle effects for when the enemy appeared and died. I thought it was great since it drew attention to the enemies and danger which can be a bit confusing in some bullet hell games.

What could this game have done better?

I’m not sure how you can fail in this game. And it’s kind of exhausting when you have to keep hitting space bar, maybe change to automatically shooting each second for example. Again no pressure in failing so I feel lack of motivation to play the game. This game felt a little too minimal. Maybe having more texture and a wider variety of effects can help it. Using the same sound for destroying and spawning enemy makes the game lose the ‘juice’ a little bit. If there is a satisfying sound for enemy explosion and a pop sound for enemy spawning the game feel will be up to next level! A punishment mechanism could have been added. For instance, it could be made so that there are lesser obstacles at once on screen so the player can destroy most if not all obstacles coming the player’s way. And if obstacles do escape and pass by the player, some punishment occurs (like the health bar being affected). The ‘E’ power up wasn’t immediately obvious since I didn’t really look at the bottom left of the screen. However it is a useful power up to destroy all enemies at once. Though it’s good, it should be a reward based power up that you can’t always use, since I could spam E and always get all the enemies with no consequence. But since the idea of the assignment was game feel, other enhancements could have been made instead, like the bullet having some trail effect, or something more evident and prominent when the enemy hits the player. The sound effect choices could have definitely used some improvement. The explosion sound effect is really jarring and I think a different one should have been chosen, especially since you have to listen to it over and over. I also don’t really understand the heart system on the top left, since it looks like the score acts as your health? Either way since you can always kill enemies before they reach you by just holding space and not moving there’s not really an active threat so health doesn’t matter. I think it’d be good to lean into the zen aspect more and/or make the enemies more threatening. I think the gameplay is not so good, I felt confused while playing, I didn’t quite understand how to unleash skills at first. the life is not reducing and maybe add difficulty while the time increase, probably increase speed on it I think the sound effect for the enemy spawn could have been a bit quieter and the screen shake for when the player took damage seemed to not be anchored to the camera, causing the screen shake to be a bit more like a screen jump.