Hi, first of all thanks for trying out our game! I’d love to shed some light onto the unified control decision. First of all we did not have enough time for playtesting in our development as we fell behind our original schedule by a day or two. I think if we had done playtesting earlier into the jam we would’ve caught this sooner and done the twinstick movement in the original upload as well. Now as to why we even chose the unified controls in the first place: We think that unifying the movement direction and the shooting direction has a couple of upsides:
- it plays into the theme as it increases the likelihood of one of your bullets ricocheting towards you. In just the “Twinstick” version, not the “Rebalanced” version where the map is significantly shrunk down, this is less likely to happen, as the obstacles are quite far apart and you can always just aim away from your target and the bullets will despawn before they ever come near you again.
- It simplifies the control scheme so it works on mobile devices without any additional dev time, which is sometimes nice to have to show people quickly.
That said I think the downsides far outweigh the positives. Due to the unified control scheme the skill floor for just picking up the game is increased a lot, since you not only have to move away from enemies and shoot at them, but you have to time those two actions based on the firerate to not get caught while also dealing damage. While this can be fun in a more rythm-focused game, we just did not put any work into fleshing this out so to the player this is not a fun mechanic to learn and engage with but just an annoyance to overcome to get to interact with the actual game. Ultimately I think that our genre choice of a survivorlike where the enjoyment comes from getting stronger over time clashes with our interpretation of the theme, being that the game gets a lot harder as time goes on.
so yeah tl;dr: We sadly didn’t have time for playtesting early enough or we probably would have arrived at something similar to the “Rebalanced” version before the deadline and I think we tried to force the theme a bit too much, sacrificing fun and good design to strengthen our interpretation of the theme.
Hope this shed some light onto our thought process :)