This is another fine example of what happens when the game I’ve been working on turns out to be fundamentally Not Very Fun, and so I need to make an abrupt course change at the last minute. The other game had some interesting ideas, but it just wasn’t coming together, so I grabbed a mechanic from it (that I hadn’t actually implemented) and built an entirely different game around it instead. This is the result. Blast your pulses through the gaps in the shielding to destroy the things and get points.
Top Games
I played around with it, stopped after 70k points. It’s a novel concept for a game, and it kept me entertained, it just doesn’t quite feel polished.
This may be the fault of my setup (running google chrome and a laptop not intended for gaming) but the game has quite a variable frame rate – in fact, it tends to stay slow while the core is impenetrable, then rapidly speed up as it starts to zoom all over the place, and go at a blinding speed by the time it’s starting to go red and into huge amounts of negative points and oh god just let me hit you already. The way it goes from sluggish to ridiculously fast rotating and bouncing all over the place eliminates that pleasant middle ground, where you have to carefully time and aim to penetrate multiple, half-composed layers at once, which seems to be where the sweet spot of the gameplay ought to be. But again, maybe it’s more stable on other setups.
Also, if a core is in the top left, the gaps can be obscured behind the text sometimes.
Perhaps, also, a line connecting your cursor to the core might be good? Some kind of visual indicator as to how your cursor is going to aim at the core.
I just played it again, and I think I figured out my problem – having a shot fade out on screen lags it, and shooting tends to accelerate a core, which makes it deplete faster, so if you shoot indiscriminantly, once it ends the core suddenly speeds up and bounces all over the place and oh god.
Being more careful with my shots, I can shoot in its path to keep it steady and let it slow down and watch the layers unravel at a reasonable rate – and let me tell you, shooting through to a multilayer core the instant you can feels really slick. Of course, if you miss you tend to go into a frenzy of guessing fires as it gets more and more out of your control which only exasperates the problem – there’s a kind of positive feedback with runaway cores. But if you keep control you can stop the core from rapidly becoming negative, so it’s not as bad as I thought – it’s just a second element to manage.
So, yeah, cool game!
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I like it and I can play it and not feel like an idiot—- thanks, it was my first not idiot thing today!