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Hello gents/ladies,

I'm looking to release a prototype of my game soon entitled "Ninja Gold Rush" on the Android Play Market. The basic concept of the game is 3d action/shooter which takes place in your "dojo" where evil Ninjas have broken in to rob you of your gold. You stop the ninjas by throwing shurikens. Because the game is targeting for mobile I really wanted to keep the mechanics simple.

I've been vying for feedback and have been getting mixed comments on my main mechanic which is the shuriken throw. Some people seem to indicate that the shurikens should be faster and that the Ninjas are too hard to hit. Conversely some people seem to think the shuriken throw is fine and that increasing the speed to hit the Ninjas would pretty much reduce the game to whack-a-mole. Currently, you need to use more timing since the shuriken has to travel and the Ninjas are running.

The other comment I have received is that the Ninjas are too difficult to hit because you need to obscure the location of the Ninjas when you touch the screen. This seems to be a common issue with touch-based controls (i.e. your fingers get in the way of the action) and I don't really know exactly how to address. I actually thought that by creating the paths for the Ninjas this would greatly be avoided.

The feedback for both items hasn't been consistent and I haven't been able to gather enough responses to really get a clear feeling if I should change something.

I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on the two comments above, any other feedback is also welcome.

The latest Android build is available here.

Thanks.

I'm perfectly fine with the daggers taking time to move.

I would tone down the ninja movement speed a little, but more importantly, I would reduce the "trail" of the daggers.

Currently, the trail is the confusing element and makes it hard for me to determine the depth of my dagger (thus, it's true velocity). With less trail, I'd have a better understanding of where my dagger really is and could adjust my throw more efficiently.

Simple game but has some potential for mobile play.

Best of luck!

Thanks Orymus this is a great suggestion.

I lowered the trail and it feels much better. I uploaded this version (and several other fixes) here. If you get a chance, check it out and let me know what you think. Thanks again!

I would make the dagger hitbox slightly larger and scale the visual along. This to insure that when spamming a specific point the ninja doesnt strangely pass between two immediately successive daggers.

Otherwise it feels better!

Thanks for checking it out again, your feedback is greatly appreciated. Could you elaborate on "scale the visual along"? I'm not sure what you mean here? Did you witness an instance where the collision didn't occur when the ninja passed through successive daggers?

Essentially, I think making the daggers larger in scale would solve this issue (it would both increase the visual size and the hitbox I'm assuming?).

I've found several instances where firing repeatedly at the same spot still allowed a few ninjas through between two hits.

One way to assess that is to allow the user to fire daggers even faster, but it wouldn't make for much of a fun game if this is just a spam-o-thon.

The alternative is insuring that a player that spams an area gets to hit what he's firing at (at the cost of closing on the forced cooldown).

That's the only instance I felt cheated in the latest build, and I think making the dagger larger with corresponding hitbox would help resolve that (essentially leaving no dead zone between two successive dagger throws).

What do you think?