When the game said that it was going to crash in the end, I thought it meant that the game was just going to close. But no, it really crashed in the end with an actual crash log as well
PEAK
Anyway, solid game right here. I love how the aim was to effectively master the inherit impreciseness of being a pinball, and try to precisely shoot other enemies. At first I was kinda stumbling through the game getting hit and barely landing shots on the other enemies. As a result I was going into every level with very few hearts.
I thought I'd replay the game and this time around I'd change my strategy. Rather than trying to kill each enemy at a time, I mostly kept myself moving all over the place landing shots whenever I could on whichever enemy was close enough to me. Ended up with a lot more hearts this time around in each subsequent level. I appreciate that the game holds you accountable and asks you to really try to learn how to play it.
That said, I thought the spritework for the duck made aiming a little hard. It's not that the spritework is bad or anything. On the contrary it's very good and adorable ( applies to the other enemies as well ). It's just that the game kinda requires you to be fairly precise at times while shooting, and so I felt the directional sprites weren't as helpful as they could have been at indicating which direction you were going to shoot in. This is because there were only a few directions that the duck's sprites would actually look in. Maybe there could have been some sort of aiming reticle or something next to the duck which rotates towards the direction that you're actually going to shoot in ? Something like the prototype in this video maybe ?
It's probably just a skill issue and the change I suggested may result in a different type of game, but I felt it was worth noting. Also there was a bug where I got yeeted through and into the wall and couldn't move from there.
Another issue I had was that with how fast you move at times, it's a little hard to tell if the enemies actually died or not. Again, not that the animations are bad or anything, just that it's hard to tell sometimes when you're moving at the speed of an F-22 lol. Maybe for the sake of readability, enemies when dead change their colour or something ? Or maybe a more visible effect could be spawned at their position, or a more distinct audio cue. Just a suggestion of course.
The final boss was a pretty cool test of everything so far. Smart usage of enemies along the sides of the environment as well to ensure that you couldn't just mindlessly bounce around in that fight. Honestly, this was a pretty solid game overall and a cool execution of this idea. Kudos to the whole team on this one
( side note : When I first heard " Quack overdose ", I thought that they died because they blew out their voicebox by quacking too hard or something. The don helped me realise what " quack " actually meant in this case lol )