itch.io

It's not mainly the size, but the fact that the font is not the most legible one combined with a relatively low contrast and the scanline effect. That being said, I gave it another go today and it seems a little better when my eyes aren't already tired.

So, what about the game? it's sort of fun. I do think it's brought down a little by one crucial rule of game design, though: "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."

Example 1: While it's much more fun to just left-click every square and there are more than enough health drops to be able to do that, it's clearly more "optimal" to first right-click every tile, then left-click it, so players will tend to do the latter.

Exampe 2 (though that might have just been my own silliness): The first time I clicked one of those end-game tiles, all green blocks exploded, revealing a lot of enemies that I had to take out quickly. This was actually the most fun part of the game. HOWEVER: What I "learned" from this encounter was that, since there are four colours of blocks, probably each of those end-game tiles would reveal one of them and I just got very lucky that the one with the least amount of tiles was revealed first. Clearly, the most optimal thing then would be to clear the playing field one-by-one and only then click the other end-game tiles in order to minimize the number of enemy spawns and not die so late in the game. So I spent the next 5 to 10 minutes clicking on tiles until I got so bored I decided I needed to just try to click the center tiles again, and look, it didn't even do the thing I was afraid of! That's a lot of time I wasted in the name of unnecessary optimization.

Anynway, apart from that, the game was sort of fun. I felt like the stakes were not super high, though, so maybe it needs a little rebalancing.

• I would probably take away the possibility do disarm tiles. There's more than enough health available, and right clicking every tile doesn't show any skill, it's just tedious.
• I would rebalance enemy "damage" a little, maybe doing a continuous small amount of damage. That way, the more quickly you react, the less damage you take. Right now, I hardly ever got hit by any enemy outside of the big green reveal.
• Also, clicking an enemy with a "losing" program should probably do a little damage, too, to increase the stakes.
• How about having explosions reveal the surrounding tiles? That way, you could have these little mini challenges where maybe multiple enemies are revealed and you have to react quickly. Would also be a nice practice for the green reveal at the end, without spoilering too much.

And a few more UX features I'd like to see:

• If disarming stays in the game, it would help to give the player some sort of feedback when there's nothing to disarm. Right now, I just wasn't sure if my clicks even registered in the beginning.
• Maybe add a "new"-tag to messages that change. It's easy to miss the changing subject lines, especially if so much stuff changes at the same time.

After all that rebalancing, would the game even be SBIG anymore? Maybe not. But if you're not careful, it could turn into a SGIG game, which I guess is also an okay thing to achieve.