Nice game
Hey.
Nice shooter, although I'm not a fan of storylines, especially in shooters (or many other action based genres for that matter). I just skip all the text and go straight to the action. (:
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Gameplay
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- A bit too much reading for me, this being a shooter and all. I wanna just get into the game, shoot things, blow them up, and dodge their attacks. I don't have time for sophisticated ship configurations, pages of walls of text, and what not. I think having more engaging enemies (and not just making a bullet hell or an enemy that shoots a lot in a bunch of different directions), better AI, simple systems without so much learning curve would be better. The game has excellent graphics, but that doesn't hide these aspects.
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UI / Accessibility / Polish / Other
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- On the UI pages with back and next buttons, you should probably hide the Back button on the first page, and the Next button on the last page. Either that, or make them look greyed out or otherwise disabled. Under the mentioned circumstances, they give the impression that they can be clicked to navigate further, when actually, they do not.
- At first, I was going to say, give the player the option of adjusting music and sound effects. Then the option is presented after you complete the first stage, as other non-gameplay related options. In my opinion, options such as these should be presented at the start of the game. Nonetheless, my initial though still stands somewhat - there should be an option to adjust music and sounds effects separately, instead of all or nothing, and make this option available during play.
- One thing I do like about the help is that you limit the amount shown in the beginning. No one likes to see walls of text at the beginning of a game (at least I know I don't).
- Consider adding the Escape key in addition to P to pause and unpause.
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Graphics and Audio
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- Graphics olok great, and the music and most sound effects are alright.
- Regarding the explosion sound: It sounds more like a tapping sound rather than an explosion. Furthermore, consider using several explosion sounds instead of the same one. When fighting many enemies, the same sound repeatedly gets monotonous. The sound they make when destroyed? That's more like it. Also damaging an enemy ship, it uses a similar tapping sound, which seems tacky. :P
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Controls
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- Since the game is keyboard-based, consider allowing the player to proceed through dialog by using some key (as they can sue the spacebar to skip altogether). The same when viewing the Results at the end of a stage.
- When I press down and left arrows on my keyboard and try to fire, I can only get two of these three keys working. The other three diagonal movements with firing all work fine.
Other than all that, an alright game. Focus more on core gameplay and less on writing. (:
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- Ziro out.