some great feedback there, thankyou for posting .
I'll try and address as many of your points as I can.
-I expected to be able to navigate the menus with the directionnal buttons. While the mouse support works rather well, the game itself doesn't need it so it is odd to have to switch between the mouse for the menus and the keyboard for the game.
When playing with the keyboard I use the mouse for firing so I hadn't really noticed much of an issue with this, at one point I had it so that the menu buttons could be navigated using a control pad but it was buggy as all hell so I changed it to mouse only, I may reintroduce controller navigation if I can find a way to make it work without any bugs.
-Speaking of the controls, how many buttons are there in the game? AFAIK, you can move and shoot, but that's about it. The default start-up Unity input window has more buttons than that (Fire1, Fire2, etc.) which can be confusing so consider removing the useless buttons and only keeping those you will use.
Yeah there is only move and fire at the moment but I have been considering adding features such as shields and bombs, so there may end up being more controls eventually, I'll look into narrowing the options down though so that it's less confusing.
-The post-hit invincibility is kinda short. The first time I got hit, I got hit again before realizing what happened and retreating.
At the moment you get 1.5 seconds of invincibility, which I thought was enough time for the player to get to safety, is the invincibility period too short or do I need to make it more obvious to the player that they've been hit ?
-The music you have chosen kinda matches the military theme but not the intensity. While the stage takes place over a rather calm yet devastated ocean, the music sounds like it was rather made for the climax of a war movie. It is too over-the-top for your stage I think.
The music that I'm currrently using is just a placeholder really, at the moment I'm having discussions with someone regarding an original soundtrack, I won't say too much just yet incase I jinx it, but if things go as planned it's going to be something a bit special.
-The yellow power-up's voice clip sounds more like "Sniper" or "Slypher" than "Life-up". It also wasn't immediatly obvious the item increased my life counter because it is shaped exactly like the other weapon capsule. Why not have three different types of visuals for the speed-up capsules, the weapon items, and the extra lives? As they all have different purposes, they shouldn't have similar appearances.
You're not the first person to mention the appearance of the life capsule, I'm obvioulsy going to have to give this some more thought.
-Stage 1 is a bit too long. 2 to 3 minutes is fine, but 4 and a half minutes can be a bit frustrating considering you have to play this stage every time you start a new run. Besides, not only you do have a midboss and a boss, but the waves themselves often have some dead air between them. Some of those waves are also repeated a noticeable amount of times without having any changes to them compared to the previous times they were used. As a result, the pacing can be tightened by reducing the repetition and making sure there aren't too many moments with nothing on the screen. A small pause in the action before bosses is fine though.
Some good points I'll look into stage length some more and up the pace a bit, moving the waves a bit closer together where needed.
-There aren't many different types of ennemies : 3-4 for a single stage doesn't seem like a lot, especially if the waves themselves don't offer a lot of variety. Towards the end of the stage, there is some mixing going on with different types of ennemies at once, that's interesting.
I don't mean to come accross as a pedant but there are infact 5 enemy types, if I can get the level length down a bit it might not seem quite as bad.
-The boss and mid-boss patterns are very similar. Try to differentiate each boss to give them a specific identity.
I must admit that this is something that I've struggled with, I'm thinking of changing the main bosses fire pattern when it's health gets down to halfway.
-There isn't a restart option in the menu. That could come in handy.
godd idea, I'll add one.
-Where is the hitbox located? Does it cover the whole ship without the wings? I thought it would only be the cockpit, but I think I got hit in the ship's nose and still got damaged.
The main hitbox covers pretty much the entire body of the ship, with a smaller secondary one that covers half of the wings, I'll look into tweaking this a bit more possibly making the main one a bit smaller.
-I am not too fond of the small, difficult to see orange bullets. When you know the ennemy patterns, the reduced lisibility is less of a threat but it can still be kinda annoying.
Other people have also mentioned this but honestly I don't have any problem seeing the bullets and I've already enlarged them quite a bit compared to their original size, I wonder if the particles are rendering for you properly, maybe a screenshot would help.
-There seems to be an interval between the moment the boss dies and the moment it stops firing.
Yeah the bosses do continue to fire as they fall to the ground but those bullets shouldn't be able to hit you, I'm still looking into an adequate solution to this issue.
-Is the second level simply a repeat of the first one? If not, consider changing the background to give that stage its own location, identity and feel. The first level ended with the ship reaching a specific beach. Why not have the following stage be the city behind that beach or something similar for example?
Yeah at the moment it's pretty much just one level on repeat, I do intend to have other levels eventually and have plans for most of them in my head, I just want to get the first one as polished as I can before starting work on any more.
-The bosses weren't too long with the colored weapons and a bit of point-blanking, but I can see them getting a bit long with the default gun and given they only have one pattern, they could also become boring fast enough. You should make sure they don't outlast the number of patterns they have.
The bosses shouldn't take much longer to defeat with the default weapon but I may still beef it up a little bit more to bring it inline with the rest, I'll need to do some more testing first .
-The speed indicator uses arbitrary values (30, 35, etc.). If you have 4 speed values, I would simply indicate that number between 1 and 4. Some games (the Star Soldier series, Eschatos and probabl a ton of Megadrive shmups) represent the speed level with arrows. That could convey that piece of information better than a number whose beginning and end don't immediatly make sense.
I like the arrows idea a lot I'll see what I can do about that.
thanks once again for your feedback, it's been very helpful.
-mark
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.