Really delightful game! A few things I particularly liked:
- The sprites are crisp, clear, and appealing. Great animations -- I particularly like the enemy walk animation and the explosions. - Sound FX were simple but did the trick - Nice touch to list the controls on the first screen, and the directions when in the game levels were also very clear. From the first moments opening up the game, I never felt lost. - Good job with the level design — the first level functioned well as a tutorial, and the remaining levels had a fair difficulty ramp until the end
The gameplay was generally very fun. The trick I discovered for effectively killing enemies was to walk near them, drop a bomb, then walk or jetback off into space away to avoid the splash damage. This reduced the possibility of messing up my aim and dying in silly ways.
However, I ended up clearing all of the later levels with more enemies with more or less the same pattern:
1. Kill all the enemies, ignoring the chocolate 2. Then go back and collect the chocolate, without pressure
So the stress contour of a level for me was always high stress at the very beginning of a level, decaying rapidly as I killed the first few enemies, then reaching a sustained low as I transitioned into the chocolate-collecting phase. Of course, it’s completely up to you what kind of contour and narrative you want to provide for players with each level, but the game will provide greater interest if there’s more variety here (especially if you eventually have more levels).
Another way of thinking out it: your game features two objectives, but the player can always just ignore one and never needs to focus on both at the same time. As an extension to the gameplay that you might explore later, I think might be neat to consider ways of forcing players to be considering both objectives at once, as a way to reward more complex decision making and prioritization.
Perhaps:
- An portal that continually spawns enemies, once every few seconds? - If this leads to enemies that always get trapped on the contiguous piece of land surrounding a portal, then… spawn an enemy somewhere arbitrary every few seconds? - Unkillable enemies? Force the player to use the bombs as a zoning/world-manipulation tool rather than just as a weapon for killing. Or, simply reward clever movement around walls that gets enemies stuck on the other side. - At higher difficultly levels… enemies that can fly across gaps? Enemies that can hop over walls?
Just some possibly fun ideas to turn over if you work on the game some more :)
A few more thoughts about areas that might want fine tuning:
- I played with keyboard and mouse. I felt like the direction bombs travel when aiming with the mouse is often unexpected — possibly this is due to the y-axis being squished due to the isometric perspective not being corrected in the mouse vector? Aiming was not impossible, it just was slightly more annoying and difficult that probably you intended. - I had a lot of trouble with bombs bouncing off walls when trying to land them on ledges, I think mostly for the above reason. Once I corrected my aim, it was usually not to difficult to hone in on the button hold time to produce the correct velocity. - The music didn’t seem to fit the rest of the bright aesthetic of the game’s visuals. - The jetpack animation is subtle and hard to notice, which makes it sometimes difficult to tell whether you’re flying or not. (Granted, this is very minor)
But overall, very well done! The gameplay is fun and the art is super delightful.