Like PapaCashew said in a previous comment, the visuals do need some work. However, what I am mostly concerned about is feedback on the player's status. From what I can tell, there isn't much feedback to the player to on how much health they have, except for the health bar. With all of the visual elements that are on screen at any one point, I found that my focus turned away from the health bar, which could be detrimental to a player that has low health.
My recommendation would be to find a way to improve the feedback that a player gets when being hit (whether that's a sound effect, screen effect or other method depends on what your vision for the game is).
I would like to collaborate further with you to help test this project. While I don't have much testing experience, I could provide some helpful further feedback. Feel free to message me if you would like to collaborate further.
Hey, could you clarify please what you mean exactly with the health?
There is a health bar that shows the player's health. Also, when the player gets hit, the character briefly flashes red and there's a hit sound effect.
Do you think the health bar should be placed somewhere else? Or changed to be bigger, smaller any tip ?
I recently added an RPG-style health and stamina system, so I’d really appreciate any suggestions on how to improve its visibility or effectiveness.
Here’s the full gameplay of the first easy level. If you have some time, could you describe what you would do differently?
I looked at the video and was not able to determine exactly which sound effect was the hit sound effect. It could be that the one you chose is getting drowned out by others in the scene at the time, but to me listening on earbuds I could not pick it out..
As for the health bar, my immediate reaction would be to add some sort of flash/pulse to the health bar when the player is low on health (refer to Halo’s shield bar when shields are low/broken). Alternatively you could do a pulse effect on the screen itself (I think Skyrim does this).
However, going back to the previous comments, anything you do to the health bar might not matter if there is too much happening on screen. For example, at around the 2:30 mark in the video you provided I noticed that there were a lot of visual effects going on at one time. Someone who is easily distracted might get caught up in the action on screen and not notice the health bar.
Side note: I don’t remember seeing any gameplay where the player dies or has extremely low health. It is possible you have accounted for the things I have mentioned but it just didn’t happen to show in the gameplay.
To summarize:
- see if you can mix the audio to allow the hit effect to be more prominent
- Investigate adding some visual cue to the health bar/screen
- Investigate ways to reduce visual effects on screen where unnecessary
I hope this helps.