Hello Flertal!
I've just played your game for the first time. Congrats! It definitely got my attention and I had fun. I got to Human on the first go ;-) Second time I also got to Human but close to the next stage that I would like to reach. Here's some of the things I liked and what I thought could be maybe improved:
I liked:
- The intro dialog with Darwin/God got my attention, I thought it was funny and made me want to know more.
- The mechanics. I'm a big fan of the original suika game, so I'm biased but adding the skill for trajectory and strength is a good idea to make it more interesting.
- It was easy to play straight away, even if there are a couple of things I didn't get at first.
- The throwing felt right
- Darwin's comments during the game
What could be improved in my humble opinion:
- A bit of music could be nice, but I understand this asset will come at a later stage.
- I think you could add a "pointy bit" to the segment showing the direction of the throw, like an arrow. And maybe increase the width of the line as the "load" of the throw increases, not just the color.
- I wasn't sure what would the bomb would do. I think the first time I used it it killed everything on the board so I thought that it should never touched anything and when the next one appeared, I threw it slowly to the side and tried to avoid afterwards. Then I got another bomb and destroyed the first one with it. Later I realised that it didn't necessarily kill everything, but might actually be useful to get rid of some items... I think you could easily add some Darwin comments on the first game as a kind of intro/tutorial so that when the bomb appears for the first time, Darwin tells you what you can do with it.
- More Darwin's comments please! I think this could be developed to comment the game live as you go, it does provide a little more interest to it. It's something I added to my game if you try it (see below) and it's qui cool, though it requires quite a lot of writing time to have plenty of messages to avoid repetition.
- Like mentioned before there could be several incentives to want to finish the game. Chill mode would be what you have, but other modes like time attack, or trophies when you reach certain points... but I guess this could come later.
I played twice, on a web browser on Mac, Google chrome, not going into full screen. I'd happily play again to see what's after Human.
I hope these remarks were useful. And if you want to give it a go on my game, it's called "Bouncenoid", it's a kind of revered brick-breaker game with story-telling, inspired by classic 80s arcade games: https://jerkyhips.itch.io/bouncenoid If you play, you'll notice what I called the "Intercom" where the main character, the Spark, is telling the story as you progress and comment on your playing. Let met know what you think ;-)
JerkyHips