Thank you for the feedback, I really appreciate it.
I have a different piece of feedback about how it can be frustrating to have to start the puzzle over from scratch if you fail. How did you feel if you ended up in a failure state?
I completely agree with the art. I quite literally just clipped it from Martin's video and will be replacing it this weekend if I can find time.
My main reason for publishing this is to get feedback towards a possible mobile release. I'm trying to figure out if it is fun, and if it would be fun to play for longer than a few minutes. The main conceit would be a single daily puzzle, with everyone around the world playing the same puzzle and able to compete on speed and lowest number of clicks.
(Plus the ability to play previous days, because one a day might be too limiting on it's own for some people)
I really wanted to love this game because I really love the idea presented. A few things hurt though. Please take these criticisms as well-meaning as I genuinely like what you have done here.
Actually picking up weapons is hard. I wish they gravitated to my ship as if by magnets or something, making picking them up as I drift easier.
The drifting is quite hard to pull off. I wish that when thrusting my turn rate went down or something, as a way to pull off looping turns a bit better.
Knowing your speed is really hard because there is little context directly on your movement plane. It seems like everything is either further away from the camera or parallaxing along, which makes judging your speed quite tricky.
Killing enemies drops weapons, but they drop directly under the giant murder ball that is following you. Maybe giving them a kick out in a random direction would help break that up a bit.
The AI only tracks you directly. If they instead had more states it would make them a bit less 'clumpy'. Have them track a random offset from the player when they are outside a certain range, then when they get closer have them target the player directly.
Absolutely I can. I'd just have to ramp up the acceleration a bit more and then tweak the friction/drag to get a similar speed rate of decay to the drift. Lots of tweaks I could do and I'm glad to hear feedback on it.
I probably won't touch it though, other than to upload the .p8 file to github for easier viewing of the code.
The original tutorial has direct controls that add a fixed amount to x/y. My changes introduce acceleration and drag, which does make it slippery. In fact, max speed is only a soft cap because of the proportional drag.
This could be changed to only apply drag when not moving and go back to direct moving. I would do that by just setting velocity with the arrow keys, which would give a snappier start to the movement and quicker direction changes.
However, if the drifting stop also contributes to your feeling of slippery controls, then the whole thing would need to be binned and go back to only direct movement. The ultimate reason for the change was to allow faster movement without requiring twitch gameplay. Watching people play it and it was too hard with the direct movement style, hence the change.
