I just had a play its really good and has a great range of play and enemies. Just feel it needs to ramp up a bit speed and challenge or maybe score requirement to keep playing.
The rings look and work well but I thought you were meant to jump through them? seem to score just from hitting them. This kind of makes the jump redundant so as part of the random spawn of the level should have some rows of rocks you must jump over.
When I died I bounced on several hazards this was a very nice touch.
Thank you for your feedback! It means a lot to us.
During development, Surfball's progression system was meant to be tied to the rival battles since it was an in-universe competition and you are competing against them. The idea was that as you defeat rivals, your tournament rank would increase, which would boost the game's difficulty, and you would then be able to earn more points. The "true" goal of Surfball would have been to win the tournament and score the most points. However, due to time constraints for the jam, we were only able to add 1 rival to the game and there is no proper ending or objective. So in its current state, Surfball is an endless arcade game.
As for the rings, originally there would have been rings placed higher than normal and you would need to jump in order to reach them. Also, at one point I changed the rings to gates, but after a trial test, this led to a lot of visual clutter so I went back to rings. It is true that the jump can be largely ignored for most of the game if you are good at strafing between obstacles and enemies, but had there been more time to add more object patterns, I would have made jumping more of a necessity (like with the out-of-reach rings mentioned earlier and more 5-lane rock formations). Right now, jumping is only really required for Rival #1's second attack, which hits all 5 lanes at once. Because of how the game scene is set up, ensuring that the perspective is readable was our top priority.
The tutorial is definitely one of the weaker aspects of the game in my opinion. I wanted to make it more interactive and hands-on, but again, time constraints. I feel the game can convey information better with a more intuitive tutorial instead of just reading text.
There currently aren't any plans to update Surfball as of now, but we will definitely take your feedback into consideration when we do.
