itch.io

I think arrow keys should have been fine, yes. Generally, the more reliable solution is to bind to physical keys instead of logical keys, especially when you use keys for their position (WASD) instead of their symbol (e.g. M for map, or I for inventory). This should also apply to players with less exotic layouts than mine, like AZERTY which is used in France and Belgium.

Thank you for your honest feedback!

This game certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I think you are pointing a few hard UI design and balance issues that need fixing. So that is very helpful :)

About music & sound: absolutely, this was just not a level of fidelity I had in scope for the prototype. Although thinking about it, adding a 3rd-party music asset and a few more beeps here and there probably would have not been that much work.

Thank you for your feedback!

The difficulty is one of the most dissonant design aspects I have identified so far. So thanks for confirming that once more. I am looking for alternative kinds of challenge to mix it up a bit. Stressing players out is part of what I’m going for, but not throughout the entire story.

Excuse the terribly laggy video; my laptop was unable to handle the game and recording at the same time.

What was the most frustrating moment in what you experienced?

In the beginning, when I did not understand how to place bumpers and it seemed like there is nothing for me to do.

What was your favorite moment?

Figuring out combos, especially those involving bumpers placed while the marble was rolling. Also longer combo sequences.

Was there anything you wanted to do, but the game didn’t let you?

Collecting marbles in the corner or edges without it being the end of the run.

If you had a magic wand where you could change any part of the game, regardless of cost or complexity, what would you add/change/remove?

More level variety: obstacles, effects, extra gameplay. The current level gets repetitive very quickly.

What would you say you were doing in the game?

Building a marble parcour to collect colorful buttons with numbers on them.

How would you describe the game to friends and family?

A prototype of a puzzle game where I do the above thing. You need to hit two marbles with the same color or number in sequence to score enough points.

I ended up adding the video after all. Hope you gain something from it still.

Excuse the terribly laggy video; my laptop was not able to handle the game and recording at the same time.

A few key points of feedback:

I like the art style, it’s quite appealing. Pixel art and hexagons are always neat to see.

The worldbuilding made me curious about the story. I wanted to know what kind of world I was in.

I had a tough time figuring out my goal. Finding an exit is okay, but I did not understand what was meant by the path at all.

After finding the first portal, I felt like I had no choice but too slowly wait out for the place to collapse because I was not allowed to leave any longer. That was rather frustrating.

The core game loop of making camp, restoring/losing happiness felt very grindy and did not provide a lot of meaningful choice to me.

I liked this a lot! This is about the right level of fidelity for such a prototype to have an efficient design process ;)

What round did you get to before quitting?

Round 3 in the first playthrough.

What was your strategy, if any?

Computing expected values optimizing my chances of success. I did sacrifice a bit of that for dice pool diversity on occasion. It seemed like I might need that in the next rounds.

What did you most like?

Playing with numbers, calculating the optimal strategy was very fun.

What was frustrating?

Failing despite having estimated an acceptable chance of success. Random chance can be cruel.

What did you wish you could do?

I would have liked having more options to manipulate my chances of success. What I was doing felt like there was mostly a correct answer. Of course, figuring it out is comparatively hard as it involves some computation, which I find fun and rewarding in its own right. But after doing that I felt that there was no choice left.

Unfortunately, my recording is very laggy as my laptop apparently could not keep up performance-wise. Sorry about that. The live audio may still be useful even though you don’t quite see the game in real-time.

I am still summarizing my review in writing though:

Initially, the keyboard controls did not work on my keyboard that uses Neo-layout. The gamepad controls work fine though.

The learning curve is really well designed. Especially the first levels had very good pacing to introduce me to the mechanics bit by bit. Every single new level felt like I was learning more about the puzzle mechanics with just the right amount of challenge.

I have to say, that the game already feels quite polished for an early prototype.

It is very useful that the subsequent worms are arranged by colors along the rainbow. Otherwise I would forget the order.

Altogether, I had a lot of fun playing this :)

Unfortunately, my recording is very laggy as my laptop apparently could not keep up performance-wise. Sorry about that. The live audio may still be useful even though you don’t quite see the game in real-time.

I am still summarizing my review in writing though:

Initially, the keyboard controls did not work on my keyboard that uses Neo-layout. The gamepad controls work fine though.

The learning curve is really well designed. Especially the first levels had very good pacing to introduce me to the mechanics bit by bit. Every single new level felt like I was learning more about the puzzle mechanics with just the right amount of challenge.

I have to say, that the game already feels quite polished for an early prototype.

It is very useful that the subsequent worms are arranged by colors along the rainbow. Otherwise I would forget the order.

Altogether, I had a lot of fun playing this :)

I was recording my session, but unfortunately my laptop GPU was not up to the task. So the gameplay is very laggy (frozen screen most of the time). I still uploaded it, but given your game’s pace I am unsure if you get much out of watching it. I tried to summarize my comments here.

Which Flippers feel/work better? Top or Bottom?

I found it quite hard to get to the top part in the first place. I only got use the top flippers twice. So it’s hard to tell.

Are there any elements you don’t understand?

It took me a while to realize I was fighting enemies and it wasn’t obvious that I had to shoot them. In a pinball game, I am usually busy to avoid dying. There were a lot of distractions from that core gameplay going on and they were introduced much more quickly than I was able to figure them out.

Do you want to know more about certain elements?

I did not quite understand how the active items worked. I tried to use them a few times after understanding how I was supposed to control them. However, given the feedback it wasn’t immediately obvious to me if they had triggered or if I was out of ammo or even what their general effect was.

The pinball game is already pretty fast-paced and I need to pay attention to the flippers. Trying to track the state of these items was very difficult as I felt like I could only afford half a second to check now and then. The distance between the weapons inventory is quite far away from the area where the action.

What is your opinion on the weapon choice?

It reminded me of MOBAs a bit. I intuitively went for passive abilities, as that would avoid the aforementioned issue and cost me less mental bandwidth. With active items I often end up not using them, even if they’d be useful. Getting good enough at this requires some form of training which I usually don’t like to invest into games.

What is the thing/aspect you like most?

It was really satisfying, when I realized that my passive abilities were doing a lot of damage after a shot, with a ball ricocheting around the enemies taking out a few. That felt very pleasing to watch, even though I was not quite sure what had happened mechanically.

What don’t you like?

The information density was too high for me. There was a lot going on with visual effects, gameplay, sound effects, etc. and it was very hard for me to understand what I was supposed to pay attention to.

How do you perceive the difficulty?

Very hard. I played three games in about 10 mins and a few times I just failed immediately. I am not very skilled at this type of reaction-based game though.

Is the game fair?

Hard to say, I am definitely not very skilled at that kind of game. At least it felt fairly punishing to me.

Do you normally enjoy other Pinball or Survivorlike Games?

No. I have hardly played survivor-likes as they don’t appeal to me very much. My pinball experience is limited to Microsoft 3D Pinball: Space Cadet which came with Windows 95 back in the day. I used to play that last one a lot. But that happened decades ago ;)

Thank you for the feedback!

And yes, by “timeout” I meant the aspect of the letter input where some choices disappear after the timer runs out.

Oooh… 🙈 There is no keyboard input. It’s only mouse or gamepad. I learned something about UI discoverability today.

That is unfortunate, probably tricky to debug without looking at your setup though. Would you mind telling me what gamepad and browser you are using for future reference?

Thank you for trying nonetheless!

This was fun to play!

I love the art style, very minimalist yet evocative. It reminds me of Crayon Physics Deluxe.

Some feedback on what tripped me up: Shooting lasers takes too long. I found it frustrating to wait for the lasers to come out of the ship. It is hard to shoot precisely when I need to account for that kind of delay.

Initially, it was unclear to me that I could not shoot the little stones.

Your sound effects and music are very arcade-like, which imo does not fit the visual art style. I would have leaned into the theme of someone sketching out the scenario on paper more strongly here, for example:

• human-made fake “pew pew” or explosion sounds
• a pen scratching on paper to respawn the ship

Very evocative audiovisual design. You feel the postapolyptic vibe throughout the game. I failed due to “performative paralysis” – this feels like a political comment on my existence somehow.

I’m glad you figured out how to advance :)

There are a lot of avenues to explore from here on. I will be experimenting with a few over the next week and see where it goes.

Thanks for trying it out and providing feedback 💜

A gentler introduction to the game is certainly missing, I will need to think about how best to do this.

I am curious about your further progress, too. When you make it farther, let me know how it went.

Thank you for the feedback! 💜 It is quite helpful to learn which parts of the interface players have trouble understanding.