Thank you so much to the almost 70 of you who played and rated my game! I'm humbled by all the positive feedback that you guys gave, and I'm so glad that so many of you enjoyed playing it! I am very pleased that my best category was fun, which was my goal. I was a bit disappointed with my overall score. I think that many of you had fun playing the game, but found other issues that held it back, which is understandable. I also found that the web features were appreciated, but didn't really seem to translate to any judging categories, unless that contributed to the fun score for some of you. Anyway, I'll try my best to address the more critical feedback that you guys gave me. I'm thinking about expanding this game and addressing many of the concerns, so these were my takeaways:
@sinci1, @caeonosphere Yes, it can be very easy to stay alive for a long time if you only bounce one ball. To be honest, I kind of like this since it makes it possible to play for a long time if you want, but it can also make it boring if you're determined to stay alive. Maybe incorporating a lives system that kills you if you drop too many balls overall could help.
@cdunham, @obscenelytrue Adding an indicator for when the powerup is going to run out is definitely a good idea, and something that should've made it into the 48 hour version!
@remco Yes, you can submit your score even if you didn't make the top ten, and while there's no way to see these scores in game, I can see them in my database. For an expanded version, I would definitely want to make scores searchable by name. As for the balls getting stuck in the text, I think that's just a problem visually. The next section expands more on problems with the ticker text.
@darthnumbers, @prism, @emmanuel-gaillot, @zondarg, @jharler I agree that the ticker text can be distracting. The main reason why I put it in was to add to the frantic sensation of playing, not for you to actually read it, haha. I think the main problem is that it's too frequent. I may add an option to reduce it or remove it altogether.
@kuiefs, @selftitled, @emmanuel-gaillot, @zondarg, @jharler So there were a few people who complained that the game wouldn't respond when the cursor was outside the game window, and one or two who said it does. This may be a browser difference. GameMaker offers no way to track the mouse outside the game window in the browser, and I actually put a lot of time into minimizing the issues associated with this, though it's still clearly a problem. The best way that I can think of to fix it is to have the cursor bind itself to the paddle.
@jeremy-ryan You're right about the background, it's way too bright, especially the green planet. I wanted to make the game feel frantic with all the stuff happening graphically, but I may have gone overboard, haha. I actually meant to mute the background a bit, but I had other stuff going on over that weekend, and I totally forgot to do it before I submitted. Oh well.
@kaisean-games I don't entirely agree with your point about the scores scaling too big. In my opinion, the huge numbers make it more satisfying and crazy, and this approach is used in a lot of space shooter games like Ikaruga. There is one change that I hope to make in response to this feedback, though, which is to add leading zeroes to the score, which would make it possible to tell where you're at in terms of score by looking at how many zeroes are left.
@obscenelytrue Unfortunately, adding an indicator for when a new ball will be served would be really hard since I set it up to serve a ball as soon as enough time has passed and there's an opening to serve one where it would be possible to bounce. Ultimately, these windows are very narrow, so adding any sort of warning would lead to missing the window, and no new balls being served, or balls being served outside the window, which would be impossible to bounce.
Okay, that's all the criticism I found, and I'm running out of characters, so thank you to everyone who played! Good luck on future game dev!