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unless games9 days ago(+1)

Solid game, I really like the simple but functional enemy design with their drops signalled.

Being able to restart with Space would be appreciated!

The core concept is great but it is very counter-intuitive how much not missing shots matter in the beginning paired with how wide-angled your shots are. I think the simplest way to improve this would be to add some negative vfx and sound to the shots hitting the screen boundary (ie missing), to make it obvious that this is something that you want to avoid more than anything.

Without knowing this it is easy to just stay in the limbo of shooting constantly and wondering why you aren’t progressing. Maybe you could take it further to explain this better and have the game play out inside the body of something that you want to actually preserve (for example invaders are coming inside the mothership and you have fight them there), so the screen boundary would actually be the walls of the ship you want to avoid friendly firing at, then it would make sense that if you hit the wall enough the whole thing blows up. This would solve the “limbo state” by progressing you towards game over if you aren’t playing the game right, as you couldn’t heal the mothership the same way you can reverse your own fever damage ad infinitum now.

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kpreid9 days ago

The rule for Coherence is that not hitting at least one thing has a penalty, so it’d be difficult to tie it to damaging something because most of the time, not all of your shot hits an enemy. In development, the first version of the rule was that bullets that miss did have a cost, but that was (in my opinion) not fun to actually play well, so I changed it.

I agree that there should be more guidance towards the idea of avoiding firing, but I didn’t have any good ideas for how to make this clear in-game, short of a “quest marker” system that explicitly points you towards the next stage of play (a more explicitly labeled, attention-getting version of the thing where bars appear when they first become nonzero).

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unless games9 days ago

I see, that is a bit harder to intuit as a player because I conceptualize bullets as distinct things once they leave my ship instead of being treated as a group where one hit “validates the rest”. If this needs to stay like this then maybe some unconventional rendering that groups the bullets visually might help with understanding? For example have them be connected together and back to the player and if one hits the connection turns green but if none hits the connections turn read and slap back on the player or something.

Alternatively, firing itself could always give you some fever so it would be more obvious that you have to turn shots into coolers efficiently, otherwise you’ll overheat.

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kpreid9 days ago

I think that “always give some Fever” might be a good place to start. (Right now, it's directly proportional to Coherence, so shooting with zero Coherence gives zero Fever).

I see, that is a bit harder to intuit as a player because I conceptualize bullets as distinct things once they leave my ship instead of being treated as a group where one hit “validates the rest”.

Actually, they aren’t a group at all. Firing starts coherence drain and any bullet hitting any target stops it. (The state of this is visualized as the wavy part of the bar — each of the 3 quantities has a “temporary value/modifier” associated with it which is drawn that way, but each one has different rules.)

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