Hey, thank you so much for taking the time to give feedback - I'm so sorry I only just stumbled onto it! Evidently I need to take a look at my notification settings...
I'm really glad you enjoyed the game, despite the rough edges. Every bit of your feedback is totally valid, I completely agree with all of your comments.
To be honest the last couple of weeks I spent making the game ended up waaaaay more rushed than planned, because midway through the project I was offered a new full time job. So instead of being able to take my time to give things that final polish, send out to some playtesters, etc, I ended up instead just rushing to draw some kind of line under it all and releasing it to get some closure ahead of starting the new job. I basically sank 6 weeks full-time into developing this, and although it was an insane amount of fun, it was never going to pay the rent!
At the time I published the game, literally nobody else (except my gf who was sick of the sight of it) had played or even seen it, which I now see is a massive rookie mistake. When you're totally immersed in the code you kinda forget that everybody else is coming at it with fresh eyes, and stuff that's totally obvious to you may well be completely opaque to everyone else. That's an early step on the game dev learning curve I guess!!
Anyway, excuses aside - the big issues you've identified are all on the cards for tackling in a major update, whenever I can find time to make that happen:
- Add a mini-map, and / or some sort of helping hand (pointer arrows?) to guide towards the next 'objective'
- Have all interactable objects / scenery make themselves a bit more obvious (eg by pulsing or flashing)
- Blood splats / flashes to indicate successful hits on enemies
- More differentiation to weapons / helmets, and for it to be more obvious what the differences are (nb there's currently a pretty weak 'elemental' style mechanic going on here, in which some weapons give significantly better chances of critical hits against some kind of enemies - and ditto for the helmets, which prevent critical hits on you from certain types of enemies - there are also a couple of other hidden mechanics with some types)
- A pretty serious overhaul of items & pickups, particularly mushrooms (nb the 'invincible' mushroom effect gives a 50% chance of negating any damage you take while it's in efect - there's a metallic 'ching' sound effect when this is triggered, like a sword bouncing off armour - so now you know!)
- ...etc (loads more ideas than time to code them)
Thanks also for flagging the glitch - not something I've seen myself yet but I'll try to replicate and squish it.
Anway I'll stop rambling - thanks again for playing & giving really constructive feedback, cheers!
Robin