Post by swoopie in FOENK comments

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Nice game, needs some work to let it feel more 'consistent':

The timing of reloading / firing seems out of sync with the UI, in combination with the shoot twice powerups, it feels really unpredictable when you fire, making it harder to plan your moves
Penetration powerups only seem to work sporadically, I only saw my bullets penetrating enemies a few times, really inconsistently, even though I had multiple pickups
Would be nice to add some health powerups to the mix
Not sure if I have seen criticals happening
Later in the game I felt I couldn't keep up anymore with killing the enemies. Might be due to me not aiming carefully enough, but it felt like the balance between damage and hit points was getting too big

Hi, thank you for your feedback, it's very much appreciated!

I believe another fire interval is taken into account right after reloading, so I understand that this makes the UI look out of sync with the reload mechanic. Not really intentional though, so I might fix this :)

It could be a good idea to have a pre-fire animation on the gun of some kind to let you know you are about to fire a bullet!

Both bullet penetration and critical hit chances are calculated in the same way and the math behind it is pretty simple. That being said, I don't rely on a 'random bag' implementation so in theory it is possible to hit a non-critical hit 3 times in a row, even though your critical hit chance is 90%.

Bullet penetration is calculated for each enemy, so if penetration is 50% and the bullet hits the first enemy, it has a 50% chance to penetrate that enemy. If it penetrates it goes to the next enemy and re-rolls the penetration chance.

I spent quite a bit of time on game scaling and balance, the idea was to make the game gradually more difficult without making it feel unfair when you reach the point where you can't keep up with the amount of enemies that are spawned or their health. If you feel like you can't keep up that's by design after a while, but if it feels unfair I should maybe make some changes.

Again, thank you for your comment! :)

sevenhearted2 years ago(+1)

I agree with all that was said by swoopie, and I think that it should not be by design that you eventually just can't keep up. For example one of the things that makes an endless survival game like CoD Zombies great is that you can go as far as you can, purely by development of skill. BUT if you mean what you say then you don't want it to technically be endless, so you could make there be a final wave with a boss or something. Or maybe even like after X number of minutes, there's a boss and defeating it within 1 minute makes you win.

However, my main feedback that came to mind after playing was that there should be one or two additional enemy types that occasionally show up with a different kind of attack. Or even stationary threats with significant health which buff other aliens nearby.

But I like it, overall. The music really made me vibe out to the nice speed of gameplay, and I found auto-shooting weird at first but after a minute I liked it.

piewie2 years ago(+1)

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

The idea was to make it 'endless', but I realize that the enemies are not quite dangerous enough in their current form to make that work. If I improve their attack mechanic to make the game more skill-based the difficulty scaling will be a bit easier to balance.

I like the idea of having a boss with a 1-minute timer :)

Stationary enemies with a buff aura sound interesting too!

I had 3 enemy designs planned, each with their own attack and movement mechanics. They became out of scope as time went by though, sadly.

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