Comments (2)
"Everyone Died!" lol!!
OK, here is some concrit! Sorry if some of this you know already or have thought about. I realize this is mostly just a little test project, so you may have thought about this but just chose not to implement it or whatever:
The game never really picked up for me. I don't know if this was a bug or whatever, but I played to about 450 clicks and it was barely faster than when the game started. When I did restart, I realized that it was quite a bit faster, but it was more like a difference between EXTREMELY SUPER ULTIMATE SLOW and VERY VERY SLOW. You know what I mean? With this kind of game, making a play session last less than 1 or 2 minutes is usually ideal. The difficulty should pick up very quickly. A player won't want to spend 10 minutes before the game actually becomes challenging (though I feel like at this rate even after 10 minutes it would still be quite slow and easy). Again, this could be a bug in the browser version (the clicking works for me, though!) but in the case it's not, I feel like this could be an easy fix. But hey, this is what testing is for, and I'm testing it now :) Perhaps you could even add difficulty settings (just let people click 'easy' or 'hard' at the beginning, and the rate of appearance/speed could hvae a multiplier that is set based on which they clicked).
Risk/reward. The mechanics work fine, but the gameplay design seems non-existent. Simply accumulating points by clicking is not particularly fun (or so I say stares at cookie clicker and other idle games). Challenging the player to get points can be fun. Some ideas I thought of while playing: Make the asteroids worth more points the closer they are to the bottom. Make the asteroids worth more points if you click one within a certain (and very short) time limit from the last click (like a chain bonus/multiplier). This way, as a player, I may choose to risk letting many asteroids emerge and letting them get very close to the bottom for clicking, for the sake of achieving a higher payout. This kind of thing should be thought about during the game's design/planning and thus implemented in a prototype, unless this prototype is simply to show off an object-dropping mechanism and not meant to reflect a concept for a game.
Display the score when you lose. I want to know what score I achieved. Usually the player will be looking at the action on screen when they lose and not the score, so they won't know unless it is displayed.
Feel free to continue to build on this game! I know people say to build lots of little games to learn stuff, but expanding on a game is like building a new game on top of an existing one, too. You'll learn more skills if you challenge yourself, and the best way to learn is to work on exactly what you want to learn. If you want to learn to make explosions, learn how to do that and then you can add them to this game. Of course, it really depends on what you want to focus on. With building lots of small games from scratch, you learn about a wide variety of topics from a very general perspective. But by improving an existing game, you learn about specific topics on a more detailed level. I think both of these are important. But it's up to you to decide which is most important to you right now of course :)
Of course, some of this stuff just might not be something you can do at the moment with your current HTML kowledge ability, so you may have thought of it just couldn't implement it yet :) Which is perfectly fine. In that case, just keep on chuggin' and you'll get there soon :)
(Also, what is #90daydev?)
Note: This is my game prototype, game jam, and experimental account. For full-featured games, visit my company account for Alkterios Games: http://gamejolt.com/profile/alkterios-games/362925/
Save the Earth is a simple Missile Command-type prototype made in Construct 2. Destroy the asteroids by clicking with your left mouse or tapping on your tablet (note: for some reason the tapping mechanic doesn't work in all browser on tablets when playing in GameJolt).
There are a few things that I would like to add to this prototype, but I lack the experience. These include making the asteroids rotate, creating an explosion effect with each asteroid, and other things. Also, for some reason, the first asteroid always moves at the speed of the previous play session. I might revisit this prototype in the future. In the mean time, I will make smaller prototypes to pick up the skills that I want to learn.
Any constructive feedback would be appreciated.
