Copying this from your YouTube video for increased visibility. ' v '
Thank you for removing the infinite mines LOL dominant strategy of spending an hour laying mines to unlock everything was not fun :'D
I really like this update since it solves a lot of frustrations we had in the past, like frisbees being a nuisance, finger guns being mostly useless, and the sort. In the interest of this game's success, I do still have one sharp criticism that doubles as a from-experience suggestion which I personally feel could make the "feeling" of this game perfect.
A lot of enemies are still un-reactable if you're moving vertically and they're coming right for you because the camera is still too zoomed in. The only safe directions of travel are diagonally and somewhat horizontally, and that still causes a lot of cheap deaths as well as prevents you from manipulating aggro correctly. I'd recommend you zoom it out for sure so that people can stay focused on the simplicity and fun of the game more easily. Comparing Korone box to other games in this exact genre, the cameras are all vastly more zoomed out in competing games for this very reason.
This also contributes to "mobbing" which, in any 2d game like this (other 2d arena/arcade shooters, ragnarok online, etc), refers to moving in a way that draws the aggro of enemies to gather at one location so that you can circle around them and manipulate their movements. Non-aggro enemies are obstacles, and aggro enemies are meant to be zig-zagged and circled around in order to condense them and enable the player to manage otherwise overwhelming odds. This greatly raises only the skill ceiling and is something most people pick up on sub-consciously, but when a player becomes keenly aware that this pattern of aggro and movement exists, it exponentially improves their gameplay, and that kind of player-driven progress is extremely fun in other games of the same genre. This could easily be combined further with the way the machine gun and Okayu affect movement. Currently, boosting yourself with them is genuinely unfun because while you WANT to, you make more directions of movement unreactable if you encounter an enemy moving in your direction. That removes an option from players which could be really engaging: "boost and sacrifice the protection of shooting ahead of you in order to get boxes and/or evade quicker, should enemies be scattered." Korone box genuinely has the ability to be a super deceptively deep and compelling game because these qualities are intrinsic to the genre that this game is, and it is all achievable by simply zooming the camera out enough so you can see a few more enemies and so that no direction of movement is remotely unreactable even with the fastest enemy in the game (roaches) and the player being boosted by Okayu vertically. Those two enemies coming right for each other vertically should NOT be unreactable, so as to put the emphasis on movement and not deny the player natural options presented in the game. A 170% increase in visible space or more feels correct to me in order to prevent the game from punishing you for moving as well as achieve enough eyesight to implement these types of very common strategies into the game.
On the note of reaction time: Average human reaction time is 200ms and it'd be safe to account for poor latency in devices to future-proof releasing the game on other hardware, should you want to do that. If someone is connected with a controller, that adds latency too and analog movement would compliment the system a lot. The actual reaction window needs to extend past the latency time to allow for split-second decision making based on your surroundings, so we'll assume that latency is 260ms or so. This means that the camera should be zoomed out enough that from the first moment a cockroach is visible on screen coming from directly above or below the player (because aspect ratio = a shorter radius vertically, of course), it should take longer than 260ms + your buffer window (we'll say about another 300ms) for it to reach and kill the player, moving directly towards the cockroach at Okayu-boosted speed. In this example, that means that the cockroach goes from visible north or south of the player to touching and killing the player with them both headed directly at each other with Okayu-boost in approximately 560ms, or just over half a second. This, within actual testing, is an approximation of how to correctly find the right amount to zoom the camera out for the purpose of removing unreactable and cheap deaths from the game based on direction of movement and camera issues, and that lets the player focus on making actual decision in game instead of limiting their options. You may also want to add a few more milliseconds to account for the longer time recognizing an enemy takes when the screen is shaking from weapon use (of course you can turn it off, but it would be healthier for the game's success in my opinion if the reasons a player turns it off involve as few gameplay-related reasons as possible).
Still! This is a fantastic update and I know how hard game development is from a time-consumption standpoint as well as a player feedback standpoint, especially with so many eyes and voices.
' v ' You're doing a wonderful job and I want you to know that we appreciate you a lot! 💖 Thank you very much for your time and consideration!