If you could rotate the world and change gravity, things like golf, juggling, balancing a spoon on your nose and standing upright after you've been laying down for three hours would be easy. Attracting Twist teases us with that concept by giving you control over the direction gravity flows, allowing you to move the game world and change where things "drop". Using this ability, your goal is to shoot your way to massive chain reactions as enemies slowly spawn near your ship.
You control a turret sitting near the bottom of the screen. Aim and fire using the mouse, charging each shot for a brief second before releasing it. Rotate the game world with the [A] and [D] keys, moving not only the ship but the direction gravity pulls particles as well. Each time you destroy an enemy it bursts into pieces. These pieces can destroy other enemies which will, in turn, burst into particles of their own. By spinning the environment, you can affect where these shards go, taking out as many foes as possible and creating huge chain reactions.
Enemies come in a variety of colors, and each one has its own personality. Orange squares like to appear and disappear all the time, while blue squares zoom around the screen, red squares go ka-boom, etc. Power-ups and game-altering events also occur, such as temporarily increasing your rate of fire, freezing enemies, messing with the visual presentation, and lots more. These are executed with superb style and make the gaming experience a lot more epic.
Attracting Twist comes with several modes of play to suit whatever mood you happen to be in. Challenge mode is all about conquering level after level of increasingly difficult enemies, while Relax and Extreme modes are exactly the way they sound. Each mode comes with several levels of difficulty, so no matter how casual you are, you'll find something that fits you just right. After racking up points and completing each level, you get to visit a store to upgrade bullet size, spread, rotation speed and health. The upgrades feel a bit tacked-on, but I'm not one to argue with a game allowing me to super-charge my character.
It's a bit stark for an arena shooter, but Attracting Twist plays more on the concept of shifting gravity and forming combos than pure arcade reflexes. Even still, moving the screen and changing gravity doesn't have as dramatic affect as you would like, lending a somewhat muted feeling to the entire game. You can shoot. You can nudge exploded enemies with gravity. And... that's all. It's fun, of course, and the number of game modes and stylish visual presentation really help out, but in the end, you're left with the feeling it could have been so much more.
Completely unnecessary use of the nauseating "World Spinning" technique. One to skip.
Not a terrible game, but all I did was continually spin in one direction, occasionally pausing or switching directions while firing every once in a while.
Hi there,
just got noticed that my game has been reviewed on JIG, which is great. I agree with the final point of the article and yes there will be more.
I would love, to hear some constructive critizism, because I am in my learning phase and this is not the peak of my career. I learned a lot by making this game (not only the programming aspect) and listening to some feedback, but you all could also contribute to this and well... be partly responsible for the positive aspects of future games.
I will always try to develop new concepts and mechanics, which may be risky, hard to design and financially not as rewarding as a TD game etc, but this is where my heart is :)
Thanks in advance for the feedbacks. Have a nice day and I hope you can enjoy the game.
Hi SiJaf,
Here are some comments from a fellow game developer. First of all, I found the game enjoyable. It has more character and originality than the rest of the arena shooter type games I've seen lately, and I played a few challenge modes through.
However, the spinning mechanism doesn't work very well. Or rather, it works in the sense that it allows the player to produce longer chains, but it seems more effective to just spin around all the time than to plan anything. This is because it's too hard to keep track of where the gravity is pointing, and the high and low gravity periods don't help to build any intuition for the gravity. I'd actually suggest keeping the world and the turret in place and just spinning all the enemies around the center. Then it would be intuitive for the player to assess the paths of the falling chunks as they would be always falling down.
Then again, maybe you have already tried this and found it unacceptable? It's always possible that spinning the enemies will simply make their movement paths too difficult to track instead. Otherwise, it's worth a test.
Some other things to consider:
- Projectiles and chunks hitting enemies need to have a more punchy effect. Like the enemy flashing white or giving off a little explosion. As it is, it's hard to get a feel for the chains since there's no firm visual feedback.
- When you lose, you shouldn't lose all your points. It's okay to lose that level's points of course, but as it is now, the more points you have saved for a nice big upgrade, the more you are punished.
- The world is bleak. It's like a globe covered in asphalt with a runway through it. You could make it interesting and colourful. If you change the mechanism so that it stays in place and the enemies spin instead, it wouldn't induce nausea even if it was more colourful and detailed.
- The enemies could use more variation. The only ones that stood out of the bunch were the ones that fade away periodically, otherwise I felt I was shooting the same stuff all the way. Make them look and behave distinctly different. One could be a cube but the others could be something else altogether.
- The gun MUST be able to shoot with a click. As it is, even for a slow shot you need to charge it a little. I find this totally unnecessary. If you need to limit the fire rate, just limit it but don't require holding the button for a quick shot.
- Artificially creating challenge by degrading the user interface is a bad idea. The reverse control effect and the strange black blocks covering quadrants of the screen do not serve to make this a better game, quite to the contrary.
- The "Yes you can" text is corny.
- I didn't find a way to get back to the main menu from the between levels screen.
You've got a good thing going and it can be much better still.
Hi mURK,
thank you for your detailed feedback. I really appreciate it, that you took the time to do it! I will remember those points for my upcoming projects.
As you already thought: Yeah, I tried out some things and this mechanic is really difficult to design for the players. Although the controls are not that difficult, the rotation can be problematic for many players, who might not have the best coordination, if they don't give it some time. And time is always ticking in the flash game environment :)
Thanks again for all those points,
Sina
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