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Desert Shootout's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Graphics | #3 | 4.750 | 4.750 |
| Gameplay | #6 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Overall rating | #6 | 4.250 | 4.250 |
| Player feedback | #8 | 3.750 | 3.750 |
Ranked from 4 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
I really, really enjoyed this game. The animations of the main character made the game feel fast paced and so did the shooting speed and speeds of the enemy. The game was challenging and fun. My only critique is that it took me some time to notice that some enemies took multiple hits to take down. I think mentioning that in the description or making an enemy flash red to show some sort of visual sign when hit would made it more clear that they need multiple hits. I enjoyed the game a lot though and thought the theme and gameplay was great!
This reminds me a lot of journey of the prairie king from Stardew Valley, in a good way. I appreciate the gameplay and the use of power ups. On thing I might include before the game starts is showing the player the obstacles. A tumbleweed exploded and killed me, which was confusing but also funny. Another issue I had was enemy cowboys spawning very close to me and not having time to get away from them. It would be nice to include player feedback in the form of flashing red when the player or enemies are hurt. Overall I like the chaos that the game brings and could easily see myself playing this repeatedly trying to master it!
This reminds me a lot of journey of the prairie king from Stardew Valley, in a good way. I appreciate the gameplay and the use of power ups. On thing I might include before the game starts is showing the player the obstacles. A tumbleweed exploded and killed me, which was confusing but also funny. Another issue I had was enemy cowboys spawning very close to me and not having time to get away from them. It would be nice to include player feedback in the form of flashing red when the player or enemies are hurt. Overall I like the chaos that the game brings and could easily see myself playing this repeatedly trying to master it!
Overall, very simple but engaging! I am a big fan of browser games that are top-down shooters with this kind of control scheme, I think that is partly because I am a big fan of shooter games in general. Your game has an easy to understand concept, but I have some things that I think would really help without changing too much.
1) Add a crosshair; adding a small sprite that is set to the position of the mouse cursor will make it easier for the player to connect in their mind that the mouse position is where the player's bullets will go to.
2) Add feedback when the player takes damage; when the player takes damage, their should be a sound effect and a visual indicator (like the player color changes to red for half a second or so) to indicate better to the player. Although the text box with lives in the top is accurate, I found it hard to check due to the next thing I'm going to address.
3) Fix the text overlapping and canvas size; I noticed your game is cut off slightly by Itch.io. Although your games canvas may be the same size as the itch.io window size/canvas size, I noticed itch.io adds some padding on the left and top edges of the game which pushes it just slightly out of view. As far as the text goes, I would try shrinking and rearranging where your text elements are on the screen, as they were hard to read, especially when having the dual-wielded pistols equipped.
4) Add more feedback to the bomb; The bomb's feedback when exploding is great, but before it explodes, it is very static and can even be hard to tell what it is. I think adding an animation to the bomb like making it fade back and forth between it's regular color set and a red color would invoke a sense of urgency to the player that is lacking. Adding a hissing noise (or some kind of noise that would give the sense of a fuse being lit) would also greatly add to the feedback to the player that it's very dangerous.
I know I wrote a lot here, but it's largely because I like to be very descriptive. Your game is very good and fun to play! I really didn't see any bugs in your game besides the text overlapping, and the gameplay itself feels good and is very engaging. The art is also very well done in telling the player what each object is. You did a very good job here!
I really enjoyed this! Gameplay loop is fun, and I like the sfx and graphics. The game can be really hectic, and I like the idea of using dual wield as a powerup! The two things I would consider are that the bomb seems to have a suspiciously large hitbox, and also possibly implementing difficulty scaling of some kind.
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Constructive feedback