Post by hijong park in Polychoron comments

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Okay. if you don't add secondary weapon, an upgrade or shop system after the levels would be good for deeper gameplay.

Here's some feedback after playing further:

1. you have to introduce new enemies faster. level 1~3 contains only 1 kinds of enemy which is quite boring. If I were you, I'd add new enemies after every waves and start to increase the difficulty once all enemies are introduced.

2. Exploding enemies are quite boring to fight. I have to shoot it once and wait until it explodes. Instead of sitting duck a creeper-type enemy that chases me and then self-destruct would be more interesting. of course killing it shouldn't cause damaging exlosions.

3. I can barely find the heath in the levels, it's very frustrating in later levels. you should give a small amount of guaranted health bonus in all levels.

4. Enemies should be smarter as the game progress, like anticipating the player's location based on its movement speed and distance when firing bullets, and actively avoiding the player's bullets. 6DOF games need smart enemies to fully utilize 6DOF controls.

5. wouldn't it make more sence if turrets are mounted on walls instead of floating and not moving at all ?

FRACTiLE Games3 years ago

Thank you for playing and for the feedback!

1. I might adjust this when/if I add more enemy types. Currently new enemies are introduced on levels 4, 8 and 12. If I introduce them much earlier, the later levels would get boring as there would be nothing new to expect.

2. If you mean the round "mines", you're absolutely right. They have already been redesigned for the next version. They now trigger when they see the player for long enough time and explode sending fragments towards the player. They are still stationary but now they actually pose a threat.

3. There is a shield power-up that lowers the damage taken on hit but there is no way to recover your health. This is a design choice. The game is designed to be an endless high score shooter where the player eventually dies and avoiding damage is the most important thing.

4. That's a good point. I could make the enemies aim a little smarter at higher levels. Currently they only get tougher and shoot more/faster.

5. They are drones in zero gravity, guarding their designated positions. I don't see why floating makes any less sense :)

The reason why most enemies don't move and none of them actively follows the player is that I want the player to always be able to retreat to safety and relax for a while. I also wanted to enable more careful play style where you can sneak behind corners and trust that enemies don't sneak behind your back. This is also why there are no time limits or time score bonuses.

hijong park3 years ago

I agree with your answers but 3. there is a reason why almost every endless high score chasing games have extra life feature since pinball machines, it makes the game more fun as it encourages the player to make the game last longer. the descent creator's new 6DOF shooter Overload also has endless survival mode and it continously gives health points for killing enemies, but it's never easy to survive more than 10 minutes.

FRACTiLE Games3 years ago (1 edit)

My excuse for not doing the same is that it would make balancing the difficulty more complicated. I will have to do some more testing on this.

It might be a good idea to add a possibility to regain some amount of health along the way, I would just have to adjust the difficulty to compensate for this. Randomly appearing rare health power-ups are not an option because that would introduce too much randomness to player's success and final score. Perhaps the enemies could drop items that would give a minimal amount of health to player. But this should only happen in certain conditions..

hijong park3 years ago

how about giving some health after beating the level, like 10% and more if the player managed to beat the level within certain amount of time? It would reward the player for playing the game more aggressively.

FRACTiLE Games3 years ago

The end of the level would be a good place to reward player but I'm not too keen on using time as the condition. I have so far intentionally avoided all time limits and time rewards. Also, determining the actual time limit for the reward would be tricky because the levels are procedurally generated and unique.

Someone suggested simply restoring the health to some minimum value on level completion/start, so that the a level would never start with near-zero health. I kind of like this idea but perhaps I should limit the total number of times the health would be restored.

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