I enjoyed the game, but had a frustrating time learning it. I didn’t read any of the above stuff for some reason (and still haven’t read most of it) and I just tried the game “raw” after it came on my phone. I found the user interface to be clunky and annoying and it really got in the way of enjoying the game. The game itself was appealing in that weird way that many mobile games tend to be. There’s something attracting in the re-iteration of mistakes… that didn’t work, I’ll try this way now. Okay, this way.
What did I like the game? I don’t know. I liked shooting bowling balls out of cannons and trying to hit pins? The basic game has good, decent, straightforward gameplay. It’s not a deep game, but that’s part of the appeal, too.
This post is mostly about the stuff I didn’t like. The stuff that kind of got in the way of my having fun for a few minutes on my phone.
Which leads me to the timer. I hated that timer. The timer mechanic was annoying because it literally got in the way of my gameplay. I understand it’s purpose, to keep me engaged… and it did. I had a constant sense of rush. But immediately and spontaneously, while I am focussed on the minute details of the game and lost in its own little world… bam! shut down. You lose. That’s a bit disorienting and feels… I don’t know, bad. It also just generally feels kind of weird… I’m playing the game, and now the game suddenly ended and I guess I should stop playing now? It doesn’t lend itself to my wanting to jump back in. And the desire to go see a wacky bowling ball flying through the air again is a little tempered by the fact that the timer is also going to be waiting for me.
I’m not saying to get rid of the timer, because it did do some constructive things for your game, too. Part of the problem is that the game ending felt like something that was done TO ME rather than something I did. When you die in a video game, usually it’s because you made a mistake. It’s obvious. If you don’t want that to happen, simply don’t do that same thing. With timers, it’s a lot more abstract and you’re not really left with the sense that your decisions resulted in the game’s end.
Maybe this was just bad play on my part, but sometimes I forgot about the timer because I was having fun. I knew the timer was there so I was still in a rush, but I wasn’t looking at it so I had no conscious knowledge that the game close to ending until it ended. The end result felt like when you’re working with a program and it suddenly crashes back to desktop.
This can probably be fixed with more warnings to the user about when the timer was running low. Maybe large numbers could flash on the screen occasionally. Maybe the color of your cannon can change. Maybe the sky can get darker. I don’t know. It’s something to think about though. I mean in console games you have tools like music tempo and auditory cues to help you convey this sort of information without distracting the player.
It took me forever to figure out how to shoot the cannon ball. I mean pressing the fire button just drops it to the ground, but I had no idea how to adjust my cannon or add power to the shot. Using the “fine tuning” controls were obvious, but the controls were so fine that this turned out to be a terrible way of moving the cannon to fire at an angle. In fact, many times it felt like the cannon didn’t even move when I pressed the button. If I hadn’t been so determined, I might have just quit the game and made the assumption that the game was broken… the directions don’t move the cannon (much) and the fire button doesn’t shoot the ball (very well). This is the sort of thing that sends people straight to the app store to leave bad reviews.
To move the cannon, I used the camera button. I still don’t know if that was the way I was “supposed” to do it or not, but that’s the only way I could get it to work. Shooting the ball was fine once I learned how to do it, but as I said, that took a long time. There wasn’t really any indication that I was supposed to hold it down, and no other buttons work that way. (Or do they? Maybe I should try that.) But just pressing the button which if the first thing you try had a very disappointing result. I suggest maybe putting in something that prevents the shot from firing and educates the user if there’s not enough force.
Despite being able to finally fire at angles, I found the optimum tactic seem to be to just fire along the ground at low power. Again, I don’t know if I was “supposed” to do this (I don’t think so), but that seem to be the most effective way to ensure I hit the pins.
Which leaves me to my final and most important bit of feedback. The “mini display” that shows the status of the pins… was reversed. After I knocked the pins on the right down, the mirror-image mini-display showed the pins on the left knocked down. So when I tried to “fine tune” my shot, I accidentally fired at the pins already knocked down. That was funny, but definitely needs to be fixed. As you add levels, you’re probably going to run into this situation a lot more if you don’t find a way to match the rotation of the perspective of the main camera.
Finally, there’s something a little bit odd-feeling about the openness of the world. Obviously it’s very flat and featureless, and maybe that’s a large part of it, but honestly I think it might also be the colors. The colors don’t seem to blend well. I don’t know exactly what means as I’m not a color artist by any means, but it just feels off. The ground feels too bright for one thing. Maybe it’s just the way my phone displays it.
But it’s not just the visuals that feel weird. It’s the oddness of having a gigantic open world and get the playspace we are concerned with is so tiny. This is probably just a result of the world being so flat and open; I’m not sure. It just feels a little odd that I’m always trying to focus on this one little point on the screen and ignore the big wide world around my cannon. I haven’t really felt that way since Delta Force had me sniping at moving pixels hundreds of yards away. I’m not sure what the fix to that is. I kind of felt the same way with my own Bowlmaster game and didn’t really feel the situation was solved until I filled the empty space with lots of ambiance graphics and added the look and sound of a bowling alley. Your ideas of adding terrain and walls and stuff might make this a thing that solves itself as you flesh out the game, but I wanted to give full feedback on the game as I currently played it.
That’s all my feedback for now. I hope none of this gave you the impression I didn’t like the game. I think there’s potential for a really neat game here. As it is now, I feel like there’s elements about the game either present or missing that are getting in the way of the core fun.
(and I think that I can see now that people would write “I press the shoot button and nothing happens” or “It takes ages to turn the cannon”)
)
]
That’s a pretty good feeling when you do something in the game, and it recognizes it and congratulates you. It’s what other games’ achievement systems are supposed to do but fail at.
