Wake of Poseidon! - I Analyze Your Indie Games (#013)

today I want to talk with you about the indie gaming wake of Poseidon dear developer of this game I want to give you some feedback the art style of the game looks absolutely fantastic the combat however isn't nearly as juicy as it could be in my opinion welcome to Jonah's place your game the series where I give you feedback on your games and prototypes let's go figure this out chapter one perspective and with perspective I obviously mean the camera angle I definitely wouldn't change it it has a very unique look at the same time I think it's important to talk about because this is where a lot of the issues are coming from what you can do with this perspective is showing a three-dimensional surface which is cool because your game doesn't need to take place on a 2d plane and the developer made good use of this there's a lot of three dimensionality in the level design what you cannot do with a perspective like this is judging where things are in 3d space so if things are not touching the ground if they are not ground-born you cannot tell where they are in 3d space there's no way because there's an

orthographic perspective meaning everything has the same size no matter how far or close it is to the camera and the game plays a lot into that exact weakness both enemy bullets as well as your own bullets are very often flying through 3d space because obviously when the combat is not taking place on a 2d plane some enemies need to shoot up some enemies need to shoot down sometimes you need to shoot up sometimes you need to shoot down and in cases like that it's just not possible to tell where bullets really are you can clearly see that the developers aware of this issue and try to fix it by adding shadows to all of the bullets and the shadows get bigger when the bullet gets closer to the ground that certainly helps especially when fighting in a two-dimensional terrain it is still a lot more confusing than and should be though understanding where the bullets are is not as straightforward as in other games and it is quite taxing on your brain which means as soon as there's a certain amount of bullets you just can't process it anymore you don't even understand which shadow belongs to which bullet anymore long story short I think this

art style in combination with this perspective and this amount of three dimensionality is not compatible with a bullet hell game the very least it doesn't really play into your strengths luckily there are a couple of simple things you can do about this chapter to combat first of all I would pretty much only use round bullets for the enemies because I feel it's way easier to tell where they are compared to the lines the reason being that a ball with a shadow has pretty much the same format as to play a character the player has a vertical alignment a ball with a shadow has a vertical alignment if the ball shaped bullets are flying at the same height as your head you basically just need to dodge them with your head which is pretty intuitive the size of the hitbox is easier to judge and they look pretty much the same from every direction which makes them easy to recognize and one more important point ball and shadow together look more like a unit that belongs together whereas a laser beam with a shadow almost look like two different projectiles because there's

such a big gap between them which brings me to point number two make the shadows of the projectiles a little weaker if they are that strong it really just confuses me because I'm always thinking do I need to dodge the shadow do I need to dodge the laser just make the actual bright shiny laser thingy the thing you need to dodge with your head and use the shadow as something that is barely visible and helps to anchor the projectile in 3d space point number three I would highly recommend you to reduce the amount of bullets that are on the screen at any given time as I've said earlier I don't think this perspective is super suitable for a bullet hell again and there are a lot of good alternatives you can use to make your game harder first way of keeping the difficulty at the same level while reducing the amount of bullets just make enemy bullets a lot faster and slightly bigger secondly don't let the player start with 27 lives what about five lives thirdly why not create a couple of melee enemies so enemies that get right in your face and try to mess you up and fourth point there are other ways to do ranged combat then bullets for example

enemies could have little grenade launchers and then you give the player some feedback where the grenade is going to hit you make a little red circle on the ground and then all the player needs to do is to get out of that circle in time telegraphing attacks like that would be way more suitable for this perspective because you can leave the surface you're standing on and you can react to that way better so I think that is how you could bring more clarity and readability into the combat kappa three combat again okay so let's talk about combat some more because that's pretty much the main meat of the game you are competing with games like transistor or Bastion so your combat needs to be pretty much perfect I mean this games definitely already on its way to get there they're just a couple of things that need to be stepped up in my opinion one of them being the readability during big fights of course but we already covered that more than enough first of all I'd like to see better visual feedback whenever I get hit by an enemy because it is very hard to learn and improve when you don't realize you made a mistake which happen

to me all the time yes you can tell when you die but you can't really tell when you get hit with all of that action going on on the screen another feedback thingy that would give you a lot of bang for your buck is knock-back so whenever you hit on enemy the enemy should get knocked back even if it's just a little bit it can have to make your guns feel a lot more powerful and I love how this enemy is pushed away this makes such a big difference the knock back makes the weapon so freakin powerful it's absolutely beautiful so maybe a little more of that and I'd also like to see a directional death animation that means a death animation that reacts to the direction the enemy was last shot at from so you basically and knock back for the death animation if you will here you can see what I mean in gunk 899 even the explosions are knocked back so here an example from my own game because the spike was coming from the bottom all of the particles are basically flying to the top so long story short for the enemies I want that animations that react to how the enemies were killed because it's pretty much guaranteed that that will increase the satisfaction level of the combat why is that the case

I think it's just a matter of you're basically showing the player that your decisions matter and that the world reacts to your decisions accordingly honestly you might want to rethink your death animations anyway they don't really fit into the style all that well in my opinion I'd consider going for something more neon heavy like the bullets and the rest of the level design that might work a little better before sound I start feeling a little bit like a grumpy grandpa that complains about everything don't worry I'll have some encouraging verse at the end okay what really irritates me about the sound is the mix between very old-school 8-bit retro sounds and modern sci-fi laser sounds now to give you an example this is what I would consider a modern sci-fi laser sound [Music] but most of the stuff you can hear here is crunchy 8 with retro sounds

this combination doesn't really work for me I would decide either for one or for the other but not for both sure you can also try to go for modern take on old retro sounds but at the moment that's not the case either it's really just old retro sounds mixed with new modern zones I personally can't handle it maybe you can I don't know also considering the style you're going for I would lean more towards modern sounds this is a very modern take on old retro graphics and the more modern sounds you have in the game so far fit a lot better than the old retro sounds in my opinion plus they are less annoying chapter 5 USP this is another thing I've been wondering about what is the unique selling point of this game at the moment it's a pretty polished win six shooter with a unique look problem being there are a lot of polished twin-stick shooters with a unique look out there I mean sure you don't need to reinvent the wheel every

time you make a game it can be completely enough to make a super polish twin-stick shooter I just mean considering all the competition that's out there it wouldn't hurt to make the gameplay a little more unique either doesn't need to be something big I would definitely choose something that ties into existing mechanics either into jumping or into shooting for example I've realized that during combat you jump a lot to dodge bullets what have we made that interaction a little more interesting let's just say you do damage to all enemies around you when you land back on the ground after performing a jump and to stop you from spamming the jump button and make that decision a little more interesting let's also say you can't attack while performing a chump that's just an idea you can but you don't need to use it I just thought the jump is probably the closest thing you have to a unique selling point because there are not a lot of twin-stick shooters that involve jumping so why not put a little more emphasis on that the advantage of having a unique selling point is that it's way easier to pitch your game to others and to your potential players do you want to play my game it's a twin stick shooter does not sound as interesting as do you

want to play my game it's a twin stick shooter where you can also do damage by jumping you see it sounds a lot more intriguing it doesn't need to be exactly that but something like that wouldn't hurt Chapter six idk no the reason why I've been so harsh to this game is because I see a lot of potential I don't want that potential to be wasted and in fact I know this will turn out to be a very good game because when I saw this game a couple of weeks ago you could only shoot to the left and to the right you couldn't shoot in all directions some parts of the level design have changed so in short the developer is willing to make improvements and to make quite drastic improvements and reworks there are a lot of stubborn game developers out there that just want to stick to their vision you dear game developer don't seem to be one of them so I'm very confident this game will become absolutely awesome I'm not implying you should listen to all of my advice at all I'm just a random guy from the internet implement what you agree with don't implement what you don't agree with keep

putting your game out there keep listening to feedback and you have the chance to make an absolutely brilliant game if you want me to play your game as well and give you feedback check out the video description I'll put a link there this is Jonas on the journey to becoming a game developer with you if you enjoyed watching its a subscribe button and I'll see you in the next one