wasedaigo's messages

Hey Daigo, your fellow colleague here ;) I love the look and feel of your latest game Sweet Hazard, it’s nostalgic and more importantly, it feels very polished. I just have a few suggestions:

— 1. The knife now is a dominated choice and shotgun slightly more dominant much later, as you can see from the comments. As a result, I find the decision-making in the game leaned towards ammo management more than anything else (e.g. “I don’t use shotgun coz it has no more bullets”).

— 2. The zombies suddenly disappearing after every level feels like an anti-climax. Maybe educating the player of how many zombies s/he has left (or maybe a bar, to make it look a bit more ambiguous hence exciting) to finish the level would be nice, and it feels rewarding too.

— 3. From the way I play the game (and others too, looking at the comments), I like to line them up, kill them at once. Or herd them together and plow them down. Apart from weapon/health drops, are there more visible rewards for players who do such things? A combo system (kill another one within a 2-second window), or even just a graphic pop-up would do. This would encourage players to come up with new strategies, etc. It’s interesting what people do just for graphical triggers and score! If you wanna go further, the combo system rewards different things at different tiers, and the user is well-educated on that via the interface.

— 4. The level design is really nice and simple (the symmetry makes it easy for casual players to grasp the layout) , but maybe there’s a way to use the environment to your advantage? Apart from the herding earlier, maybe randomly introduce some barrels/cars to blow them to smithereens? That would also affect the decision-making in the game too (just use the pistol to shoot the barrel now? or save the barrel for later and use the shotgun?), adds more variety too.

My biggest nitpick in this game are the factors that affect weapon choice. It just needs slightly more variety, like for example the sniper gun can shoot through simple obstacles, the machine gun having much more ammo to enable recklessness on part of the user (weaker than the pistol maybe), the knife for awesome one-to-one action (or maybe “kill 50 zombies with just the knife” achievement?), etc. But apart from that, the game is awesome. The mechanics are already there on top of some immersive gameplay and look-and-feel. Great job!