comments for Nova Pilgrim

1st run, picked orb and got rekt shortly after... 2nd run picked laser...and then lock on... and game turned into something else... 200k score in the end

fun game, feels similar to space invaders. end score 54940.

Sadly, this doesn't load for me. I'm on firefox, if it helps.

54130 was my score. I agree with some comments that this feels like a mobile game, there are some mobile games out there with a similar gameplay loop, the very slim vertical screen also adds to this effect, but I'm not saying it as a negative. Mobile games exist, they can be fun or they can be crap. This is OK. It's not something I'm likely to return to very often. Given this website is primarily incremental games, the first thing I'm thinking of is how you could inject incremental elements into it, permanent upgrades, a prestige system, progression, things like that. But as it is, it's a fine game to play a little bit when you want something that's not too demanding, a little bit challenging, but also you're not looking to dedicate a half-hour to it. That said, that does sound like something that might have a better life on mobile than on browser.

Having reached lvl 3-2 with 750k score... Oh boy... How do i start this?
First of all, it's not idle, it's not incremental, so it's the wrong place to post this game. But ignoring this, this has a lot of problems :

-Weapon balancing. Why is there some godly weapons, and then some absolutely horrible one? Lock on is strong. Really strong, but vulcan? Absolutely useless, no point in upgrading that. Fire is incredibly strong too, and orb is way too situational to be useful, so wasting too many upgrade will make you too weak for later. Every weapon need some balancing so that they are all equaly useful.

-Bullet pattern are non existants. The only thing everything does is : shoot at you, shoot straight in front of them with some variance, or just explode in bullet around themself. That's it.

-Difficulty curve/RNG : This is the biggest problem. The game is so unbalanced that, if you're unlucky with upgrade, you will get swarmed, and it is LITERALY impossible to dodge the bullets because it simply fill the whole screen, and because of the sheer number of ennemies flying in a straight line down and you don't have the damage to kill everything, you will have nowhere do dodge. And colliding with ANY ship is instant death, so you'll most likely try to get out of the way rather than try to slowly crawl through it. I don't know if you wanted to make this a bullet hell or a regular Shoot'em'up, but for either : either the number of bullets is way too big, or the ship hitbox need to literaly be cut down to 20-30%.

-"Die if you didn't know" stuff. In stage 2-2, the game introduced mine that will insta kill you if you hit them, which.. is fine i guess. Until the mine appear from the side of the screen without warning, and you die. A warning label 2 second before they spawn should be put, otherwise it's just blatantly unfair.
The boss in 2-4 ( or 2-5? ), the big bee ship boss that goes on the bottom part of the screen. If you don't have anything that attack below, the boss become near impossible. You could do very small amount of damage at a time by playing it slowly, but then it become terribly boring to do, and still complex since other ships spawn at the top of the screen constantly, making this an extremely long process.

Talking about boss design, literaly all of them put a swarm of bullet in front of them without break, while going left and right. So, again, you'll want bullet that don't shoot in the middle, or you'll need to slowly kite by being in the right or left of the bullet swarm, making a boss that could be killed in 20 second, in 2 minutes.

I do know it says v0.01, but clearly it has not been playtested enough. A lot of work need to be done.

Why I feel this game like mobile game
lmao.

I really like the concept! The gameplay is fun, I like the variety of the weapons, it feels like several have their own unique utility. If I could offer a handful of criticisms, I think having to clear an entire stage for an upgrade to the starting bonus is a little slow, and it makes an otherwise fun gameplay loop into a looooong gameplay loop. I also think that the lock-on weapon feels A Lot stronger than the rest of the weapons. Also, not sure if I just couldn't find the pause button, but I couldn't pause the game, which makes things difficult when runs are so long. Really hoping you continue to update this though, it's very promising.

For a bullet hell this ship feels way too big.

Uh... that was a really fast response.
You should probably wait for some other people to share their opinion, this could totally just be a skill issue on my end.
Just because one person has a certain opinion doesn't mean they're right.

clearing stage 4 might be impossible unless you need to memorize where enemies was about to spawn or just need more dps, end score is 5,808,500

Same, just a white vertical bar with the word Nova in red. Nothing to click.