High school game designer finds a unity programmer and a very good artist.
Game design is extremely poor. Too much unnecessary resource management that doesn't really add much, mechanics are not that coherent, and I swear the entire game's AI uses the following one line of code:
vec3 findNextMovementPos(vec3 player) {
return rotate2D(normalize(this->pos - player) * randrange(10, 20)),High school game designer finds a unity programmer and a very good artist.
Game design is extremely poor. Too much unnecessary resource management that doesn't really add much, mechanics are not that coherent, and I swear the entire game's AI uses the following one line of code:
vec3 findNextMovementPos(vec3 player) {
return rotate2D(normalize(this->pos - player) * randrange(10, 20)), randrange(-0.3, 0.3));
}
I serious cannot find a non-stationary enemy that doesn't use that movement. Stanford AI course. Behaviour trees. Learn it.
AI blandness aside, the biggest problem here is very incoherent game mechanics, which is very bad game design. Examples:
1. Why does blaster have a cooldown? What purpose does it possibly serve other than just slow down gameplay?
2. Why does player have to actually go pick up energy crystals? Why does energy crystals disappear so fast? If the player has to go pick up energy crystals, then why design literally EVERY enemy in the game to not facilitate that in a interesting way? The only way to reliably go pick up crystals fast is energy shield and probably dash out. That is a one trick move, one and only option players can take, which is bland and boring.
3. If dash and mobility is a core mechanic, then why do they not work on environment hazards or bullets? If you're going to make dashing not work on bullets, then there needs to be a good way to play around that limitation. Examples of adding mechanics so players can play around that limitation is telegraphing of shots (nope, not in the game), clear visual distinction of shots (nope, not in the game) and/or directly affecting the shots (only possible with energy shield). I would telegraph shooting enemies + make bullets more visible + make laser weapon also kill bullets.
4. If left / right horizontal shooting is a main mechanic, then why does LITERALLY every single enemy in the game move in a zigzag line towards you? This creates no interesting interactions whatsoever. I would add enemies that do vertical things (shoot lazers but only up/ down), enemies that only do left/right stuff...etc to make interesting use of the left/right horizontal only shooting mechanic.
5. If the game mechanics revolve around not getting hit even once, then why are missiles so freaking unreliable??? I fire missiles in general direction of stuff and hope 1 (one) (ONE) of the enemies doesn't seep through or I have to mash the energy shield button ASAP and hope things work out. Not very coherent mechanic.
And many many more examples of completely incoherent mechanics.
Art and music are amazing. Give whoever worked on that a thumbs up. Could go into detail about how I think art and music are amazing, but going to eave the negative details here instead in the hopes of being constructive. Please imagine I wrote 2000 more words about the good points of this game, ie. presentation art and music. Too bad as a player I'm playing the gameplay, im not playing the sound or visual assets.… Expand
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