Okay, so I’m pretty proud of this entry. Turns out people quite appreciate the concept too, and some of you guys have bothered to play it enough to get some insane high scores. This makes me feel like I have an obligation to make a really finished, polished build afterwards. Like something people might support with a bit of pocket money.

I’m just gonna go ahead and riffraff about some key points that have come up - both as a note to self, and also as hopefully informative behind-the-scenes commentary. The crux of this news update is “hey guys, I’ll develop this game further after the jam”, so if you’re not interested in a big list of details, you can stop reading here.

~gameplay stuff~

The feedback has revealed there are a few quirks keeping players from really getting into high scoring.

• In general, the underlying thought of “go figure out your own strategy” only works to a certain degree. A player’s got to know what makes a good strategy in the game first, and what interactions are available as the building blocks. The cool stuff for experienced players is already there, but sadly most players don’t get that far cause they can’t get started on the right foot.

• Ideally, players would have more investment in each reset. I’ve gotta scale things down a bit to get a smoother difficulty curve and take the game to a bit more planning-oriented direction. So basically increasing the value of a life, leaving people wanting more after it’s over (and knowing how to get there), instead of them getting numbed by rapid dying and restarting and things happening.

• Important tactics, like slope-hugging, need explicit hand-holding as well as audiovisual feedback. Sparks flying off slopes, gained points flying off the player’s head, that kinda stuff.

• It’s not very well explained what the numbers mean, with blocks/powerups just kind of popping into existence. It’s a clear example of a failed aspect when players have to ask about this stuff. It bothers me particularly because a little bit of animation when things spawn (or are close to spawning) would make this implicit and solve many “WTF is going on” situations. I’m imagining like a dotted, block-shaped outline that actually shows at a glance when a block/powerup is gonna spawn, and alerts you if the upcoming spot’s occupied. The score milestones are an important part of your layout strategy, and can never be too transparent.

• While the crush deaths were tuned to be way more forgiving than they once were, there are still some unfair-seeming deaths, especially with the ceiling. I’d go ahead and classify those as bugs, since it is a buzzkill when you’re doing well and suddenly just die from your movement vectors being a little off (in the collision test’s shitty opinion).

• Another thing that adds extra spice is that blocks can only become unaligned from the invisible “grid” when they’re fired towards each other by the player. So you might end up with a bunch of blocks being just slightly off and hindering the movement of everything else. It makes them priority targets to be broken alright, so you could excuse that in favor of a certain kind of gameplay depth. But thinking more about it, it’s more valuable to have the layout planning be straightforward and predictable. It’s kind of an unnecessary artifact to have out-of-grid blocks at all. (There’s an easy fix, too - as a block sees that there’s another coming towards head-on, they’ll both agree to stop at their nearest “tile” in the grid before there’s an actual collision messing them up.)

• Replays have a slight bug with the powerups, doing stuff you didn’t actually do. Creepy. I’ve fixed this one in an offline build, little consolation as it may be.

~presentation stuff~

• One of the things that personally bothers me is the name. “Footh0ld” was just a tongue-in-cheek placeholder that eventually stuck after testing the Gamejolt API during development. Now “M-Quadrant”, there’s one suggestion that’s orders of magnitude more badass, representative, and arcade-y. When I think of M-Quadrant, this game is what I think of. Footh0ld is such a Comic Sans name, while M-Quadrant deserves a big noble arcade title font.

• ROCKETS!! The blocks should totally rocket off with a visible thrust when they move. It’s like, why don’t they already? Additionally, if they left a slight trail, it’d help you see the rate of change in the state of the board. Let’s say you took a screenshot - it’s not obvious what actions have lead to that frame and that exact layout. The current state of the board at any given moment appears static, while it’s actually highly dynamic. So it’s not just the rule of cool speaking about FRIGGIN’ ROCKETS, it’s also pretty important game design stuff about getting feedback from the game.

• The visual style is meant to be industrial-themed, more on the futuristic and “cute” side though. Like one of those endgame Sonic areas (Gene Gadget Zone!). Think of shiny metal, hydraulic pumps, light bulbs, mecha-style platings, pointless zig-zagging tubes, LCD screens… Looking at it now, the background seems like an afterthought in comparison. Which it is.

• The color palette is also kind of a mess, and doesn’t properly take into account the informative value of stuff.

• One easy thing to improve the player ball is adding some lines that spin around according to your movement. I’m not gonna change the shape much, this isn’t the sort of game to need like a mascot character.

• I guess the edges of the map need to stand out more. There’s no proper depth effect.

• Fix that diagonal text to be more readable (may need to write a custom anti-aliasing thingy for this). Not having the high scores cut off would be nice too.

• Show a better indication of your available powerups. People’s eyes are focused on the ball, they don’t wanna oogle around the edges of the screen.

• The music is essentially my first track with a new setup (MIDI keybs+Studio One). It’s tolerable, maybe just too serene and casual for the hectic dodging going on, and not mixed very well. Even if I did make something more intense, I’d still use these elements as the base.

• In any case, it definitely needs more varied sound effects.