Post by CLYDE in Avoider comments

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Excellent concept, and well executed. The first time you get the enemies to collide is very satisfying.

- On the motion, right now you have a fairly long pickup to a really high maximum. I don't think that perfectly fits the game, because the crucial movement is to just move a few inches to avoid the guys. I think you could take the maximum speed way down. You don't need to move that fast, it's just the first ~400ms of movement that matter.

- Wish I had about 100-200 more MS of time between when the enemies turn red, and when they launch. I know it's an extremely fine tuned variable, but the fun part of the game is aligning the enemies just right, not the twitch reaction part.

- If both enemies are moving while they hit into each other, that should be rewarded.

- The rewards (points) can be made a little more clear. It's easy not to notice them.

- I'm not sure the blink is super necessary. The movement itself is more fun, there is a much better moment of tension trying to fly out of the way than just clicking. At that point, it's almost just like a reaction game. A dash might be more interesting than a blink.

- Another enemy type that works like a "homing missile" that you have to steer into the other enemies would be cool. It's a classic movie scene trope, where the pilot is being chased by a missile, and does a cool maneuver to hit it into something else.

- Making the enemies larger (2x or more) would be good IMO. The theme of the game seems to be that you can't really beat the enemies yourself, you have to fight them against each other. Making the enemies a lot larger could help with that theme, and make the resulting explosion more satisfying.

- Fighting more than 2 enemies at a time is a lot more fun that fighting just 2. Not sure how you're triggering 3+ enemies, but I'd bring that number up quicker. In fact, if you do increase the "warning" time so they're easier to react to, having more enemies present makes up for the challenge.

Anyway, good work. Love it.

Also, thats fucking cool that you're using Haxe too. It's awesome. What framework are you using? I'm using heaps.io

kurt_c0caine2 years ago

Thanks for the detailed response!

1)Yeah, I'm trying it out now with higher acceleration and slightly reduced maximum velocity, and it seems to be better. However, if you reduce the speed too much, you won't be able to get out of the way of charging enemies. So I was going to not reduce the speed too much, but would add a "walk" button, which could reduce the maximum speed while held, so that you can position the ship more accurately(especially relevant when you're being aimed at).

2)It's not particularly finely tuned, I just looked up average human reaction time and took it. And twitch reaction is an important part of gameplay, it gives the pleasant "phew, I barely got away!" feeling.

3)That's a good idea, but I don't know how to implement it yet.

4)I was thinking of making "+1" thingies appear when an enemy dies, but I'm afraid it will create too much visual noise with the explosion particles.

5)Blink was meant to be used when you're too close to enemies or when you're about to die. When I fix the movement, I'm gonna increase its cooldown.

6)That's actually a planned feature, lol. And probably two more enemy types.

7)I'm planning to do that as well.

8)There's an internal wave counter, each wave has a max amount of enemies on screen(roughly half of the wave number) and a total amount of enemies(double the wave number). But the number of enemies on screen cannot be lower than 2 for obvious reasons, so if a wave has no enemies left, but there's only one on the screen, the next wave starts.

9)I'm using a simple custom graphics engine and a custom component framework.

itch.io

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