I'm glad you liked it, and thank you for your feedback!
Unfortunately, with the time shift mechanic, I did tend to see that a lot of players found the most success with it only when they learned to use it in incredibly small doses for otherwise impossible angular adjustments or when they played through entire obstacles with it engaged. What this told me was that there were two ginormous hills in the difficulty curve and leveling them out would not be easy, especially since the mechanic was meant to work as a training mechanism / not necessary at higher skill levels. There wasn't a natural progression that taught people to use the time shift at the beginning and then again at the end of their maneuver to make the best use of it.
I made some changes to the game, and I outline those differences as well as how you could get in touch to get a copy of that new version I worked the last extra month on in my response to a different post. I'd like to see your feedback on the newer version, or if you could find a tuning config more engaging than the one shipped, especially because wipeout, 90s EDM-inspired stuff, and early 2000s flash games were exactly where I was picturing this game being made as I designed it.
As for the intro, I understand that the beginning is a bit jarring, but, I had opted to keep it for a few reasons:
- Its strong intro was exactly the sounds that inspired the theme and context for the game (if I had never heard this song there wouldn't have been a game, simple as that), framing the rest of the song (and game alike) in a tone that builds up to what feels to me like a dangerous amount of energy that culminates in actually starting the game, where the ship begins its course.
- Every other aspect of the sound effects (sparing the "don't touch yellow" phrase) coming from the song itself, including the outro which also painted the imagery for itself in my head, that I also attempted to translate into the game. So with a pretty strong "use every part of the cow" mindset it made it even harder to reallocate such a powerful component of the original work.
- I felt as though if the robot voice in the beginning would give a big enough "heads up" of the sound level since that by itself is extremely loud and jarring, which is also why the game pauses when you lose focus, a feature I usually disable for one reason or another. (Even if Unity nullifies this point with a busted input system that can't alt-tab without becoming completely useless.)
- I didn't really want to tamper with it because it was already leveled against the rest of the song, I felt like it was not appropriate to remaster a song like that in this way -- it felt very disrespectful to do, and I didn't want to be the one to have to do it.
I understand it is not a popular choice, and that it is hard to justify to anyone other than myself, but I figured I could at least explain shed some light as to why I made that decision. I am very proud that despite people feeling as though the game was screaming at them, they were still able to see the artistic merit in it, and that the game still got 2nd best audio.