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noeticnightjar1 year ago(+2)

so i had enough fun playing/attempting to scorerun this that i was only stopped by my left hand becoming physically incapable of continuing to control the character, and had to return the next day to keep going

but uhh feedback:

  • guns all nice n punchy but also tangibly unique from each other in operation, which works great with the being-forced-to-swap mechanic - there's a slight learning curve to every weapon such that the forced swap also requires changing playstyle quickly
  • shovel shift always ends too early. always
  • misses seemed most frequently due to enemies spawning on top of me without warning; i guess there's also no delay clouds on bullets (i.e. they spawn instantly) which made reacting to them basically impossible sometimes, so staying alive longer/getting better scores often meant getting lucky multiple times on prefiring enemy spawn positions, and/or timely shovel/rocket launcher swaps
  • small touch but i like how the score/money field was labeled "stonks"
  • music and art good; idk exactly what bunny girl's deal is but fighting fiercely while trapped in corporate (bullet) hell indefinitely is a big mood

current highscore is $29,950,475 (average "good" run has been $17m to $19m but i got particularly lucky once), i rate it would-risk-hand-health-again out of 10

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CROW'S NEST1 year ago (3 edits) (+1)

Thanks for the analysis! Your will to chase higher scores regardless is noted. :P

To address certain points:

  • Could you elaborate on the shovel?
  • Agreed, the way enemies suddenly spawn can be quite a surprise, especially if they spawn on top of you and just pointblank you there.
  • Also agreed on the way enemy attacks are untelegraphed, doubly so since their delay between attacks is randomized. There was originally going to be a pseudo-sealing system that increased how long an enemy takes before it attacked depending on how close you were to it, but that never made it in.
  • The luck-based prefiring situation is unfortunate, wonder if this can be addressed by controlling the randomness of how the door spawn points are picked. However, there is at least a pattern to whether or not enemies will spawn from either the doors or only the dark hallway.
  • Relatedly, this type of randomness control can be seen with how weapons are randomly dealt, where you are guaranteed to get all 5 weapons within 5 swaps, with zero chance of a repeat weapon happening (ie: Tetris bag-style except repeats when crossing bag “seams” are disallowed).
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noeticnightjar1 year ago(+1)

ah the shovel's just, really good - the AoE damage makes it easy to wipe swarms of enemies quickly, swings deleting bullets makes later/higher-density enemy attacks far more survivable, and there's enough of a cooldown between swings that it's easy to trigger the coin autocollect while maintaining damage output

somehow i didn't register that the enemy spawn points were tied to points in the environment (despite recognizing that enemies always spawned in big groups at the top/bottom and in smaller groups around the edges) until i saw this/went back and looked at gameplay video i recorded, maybe adding animations for the doors opening would make that more obvious

overall the randomness is good in a lot of ways as-is i think (likely due to the grab-bag algorithm, i did feel that the time i spent with each weapon was fairly equal, and even with spawn points i started getting a semi-accurate sense for whether a big top/bottom wave or a room-perimeter wave was coming next, after a while); so likely all that's needed really is the additional visual telegraphing, to give the player a quarter-second heads-up on where they should be stepping away from

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