Oh, it had quite the pacing! I read it was the first game for your team members, and it’s working quite well!
What I liked:
- how boss elements combine and are indicated by the mix of colors in the boss warpers
- combining dodge and attacks into dash
- you can tune your own difficulty by choosing to use the healing circle or not, between bosses and during the bosses (for instance you could start Easy by using it every time, Medium by using it only between bosses, Hard by recovering only 2 HP between bosses and Very Hard by not using it at all)
- game page explains only to deal damage to boss, there is also a little demonstration at the beginning
What I had issues with:
- even with the explanations and the spinning light demo at the beginning, I didn’t connect information together: dashing through the spinning light felt very different in the actual context of a boss vs doing it peacefully in the hub. In fact I didn’t even notice the laser attack at first, only when doing it with an actual boss. Unfortunately you’d require a proper “boss tutorial” to demonstrate that and that requires some time to put in place (we didn’t have one either, but entry Vertiga has a good one)
- I also didn’t get what the green circle was doing at first since you start at full heath in the hub. Fortunately it becomes clearer later (before I got hurt, I thought I had to stay in the green circle to spawn the spinning lights and trigger the attack)
- I have no control on how spinning lights spawn and I spend a lot of time circling around the boss looking for one. They don’t seem to spawn at regular periods like Spin On, or maybe they do at the opposite location in the arena and disappear before I have time to reach them
- so having an arena much bigger than the screen is an issue to spot these spinning lights, and also to see the boss actually spawning projectiles. We also had a circular arena in our game and we had camera scrolling initially but we changed the zoom so player could always see the boss, it was important to also predict the boss spinning attack incoming. In Vertiga you don’t see the whole arena but because most attack patterns are symmetrical by angle, you don’t lose much info, and most importantly you see the boss (you only miss the part of the arena on the sides and behind the boss)
- in the last boss, red projectiles are not contrasted enough with the dark red background (we also need to make our projectiles brighter in our game)
Suggestions:
- reward player with a nearby spinning light to deal damage after either a fixed period of time (like Spin On) or when dashing through a certain amount of projectiles (to encourage risk-reward) or when dashing through special, colored projectiles (requires attention and precision)
Art remarks:
- I see pixel art sprites but considering how big they are and how they are rotated, it could probably have been “HD” / digitally painted everywhere