itch.io

I don't mean reuse of menus. Menus are not gameplay to me, they're accessibility polish which I think is always welcome. I meant the talent trees that every idle game has and gameplay that is virtually identical to similar games like Ball x PIT which your name also seems inspired from. You can make the game you want to make for the jam, and I can rate the game how I'd like. Don't take it so personally.

But I'm sorry if I phrased it in a way that feels unconstructive. It may help to know it's mostly because I feel awkward how to rate and comment the game that is both kinda good but also pretty disappointing to me. Here's a retry:

1. I felt very weak at the start, and it immediately felt grindy to get upgrades. Progress became okay after being able to clear the first wave, but it felt weird not being able to control which wave I wanted to enter.
2. After getting one of the last cooldown upgrades the game suddenly became so easy that I didn't even get to see the enemies or bosses which didn't feel very rewarding. I don't think the effective attack speed should be exponential to such a strong degree.
3. I tried challenging myself to use the health and health regen upgrades to kite the monsters, but it didn't seem like it made any difference and even fully upgraded I got basically one shot by normal knight enemies in the second level (after first boss), so there was seemingly no point to those stats, and thus it felt like filler.
4. It was really laggy when the first waves of bouncing AoE balls hit enemies, it would've been ideal to profile them or do some quick calculations of how many ball bounces can be done per frame to not exceed the 16ms budget. I expect there was some bugs in it, or the engine is doing a lot of unnecessary work to make them happen.
5. I had enemies running outside the arena several times, probably due to knockback. It was a confusing bug, and at first I thought the game had glitched out and wouldn't proceed, but the enemy counter said 1 which helped me think of spraying at the walls.
6. I would've hoped that there had been a lot more focus on balancing the game to a fun state than for CRT shaders or space backgrounds. To me it felt like it was more of a project for the developers, not the player. Generally it was pretty unclear to me what was made for the jam and what was imported.
7. I would've loved to see original ideas from an experienced developer, and I'm sad that I had difficulty spotting any. The way I see it, indies' advantage is that they have the opportunity to innovate, unlike bigger studios which have to do what's tried and true to justify the huge investments.
   
8. I played until the end, and I did enjoy some of it. Good luck going forward!