In the bemused orbit post mortem

This game was made for LÖVE Jam 2020 themed "frequency". What came to my mind when thinking about the theme was sine wave, and that quickly ended as an idea for movement pattern. This also required some borders that would mark the area player would be moving within. This later changed to be the orbits, because the game would take place in space. I didn't want to force the movement along the sine wave, but at the same time I wanted the player to move that way. The way to solve this was to give points for this kind of movement. So, at any given time one of the orbits was marked as highlighted. Touching it would give one point and switch highlighted orbit to the other one. This required player to constantly move left and right to get points. Later I added the middle orbit which could also be highlighted to add some variety.
Simply moving left and right is pretty boring so enemies were added to make it more difficult to get points. The easiest thing for an enemy that came to my mind was a comet that would also orbit the star. Enemies don't move in sine wave themselves. This is for three reasons. First, that makes collision detection much simpler, because I don't need to check for every combination of player and enemy dot. The enemy is basically a straight line, so all I need to do is to check whether any of player's dot is between enemy head and tail. Second reason - it makes much easier for the player to plan movement. If enemies were not moving along a straight line, it would be much harder to navigate between them. Third - why would a comet move in a sine wave pattern?

Instead of making the game plain 2d, I added a kind of pseudo 3d perspective. This adds some nice feeling that you actually orbit a star in space (hopefully). It also makes the game a bit harder, because enemies travel along a curved line which makes it somewhat harder to see where exactly they're going. This is only a pseudo 3d - it's basically some simple math transformations with a bit of scaling applied to things that are further away, so that they actually seem to be away. I think it works fine though.

There's no lives, which makes the game one-hit-kill. The game ends after single hit of the enemy or going outside of the bounds. While the one-hit-kill mechanics works ok, I think that there should be more feedback when the player goes outside of the bounds. Due to the way scoring works, player will be constantly bouncing between two edges. And this makes it quite easy to make an error, especially while also avoiding contact with the comets. I also received some comments that the error margin is quite low. There already is some margin for making an error. Maybe it's just not enough considering the game is quite fast paced, or maybe it's just lack of visual feedback of some sort.
Another issue was that some player was confused as to how to get points. I think there were some people that didn't even know there were points in the game. The scoring mechanics was explained in the game description page (a bit vaguely, but still), but I guess not many players read the descriptions before playing. It's not that surprising - I rarely do so too. The game should teach the important mechanics in its very first few moments. Scoring is definitely such a thing, but that game failed to address that. That's because the player started at the centre and to score they needed to touch the edge. But if the player didn't know how to score there was no reason for them to be near bounds, because that risks going out of bounds and ending the game. That was addressed in a later update, where the player was shifted slightly to the side and moving slowly towards centre, which is the place where initial point is granted. That way it should be at least known that there's something more than just avoiding comets.

There was one more issue with the game. A few hours before deadline I did a small change related to detecting player collisions with comets. I wanted the end of the tail to not collide at all, but instead made the head behave like that. Lesson: never do changes to mechanics that late.