Gave this a try and I can say you’ve definitely got potential there! Although there’s something about this that makes it super laggy on my laptop (which is not much of a surprise to be honest), but it does make the game a lot harder to play, added to the fact the game window cuts off too early and leaves me unable to see the bottom 3-4 rows at all times, which makes it very difficult to complete stages in time if whatever enemies are down there don’t cooperate and I don’t want to go in blind and risk getting eaten if there’s a Fygar in there.
Of course, it’s not really worth it to support potato laptops such as mine when everyone else here seems to have had no issue, and on a practice game no less, but I felt like mentioning it anyway.
Aside from that, there’s a couple discrepancies I noticed from playing way too much Dig Dug a couple months ago (was doing a simple sprite mod rom hack and had to justify the time wasted by wasting even more time since I didn’t have anyone to share it with), although they don’t necessarily work against the game most of the time.
Detailed thoughts:
- The addition of a time limit is certainly interesting, to say the least.
In the original (or at least the NES game, not sure if the arcade version is much different) the difficult curve is materialized through making enemies faster and more aggressive as the game progresses. It works well with the inclusion of boulders as you’re encouraged to hold off on popping enemies so you can create a long winding path and hit multiple enemies at once for a lot of score.
There’s no time limit as far as I know, but obviously staying for too long is an active risk, and you have no real incentive to wait other than for lining up the perfect boulder drop, which of course becomes less rewarding if you’ve already taken out a couple of enemies, so there’s a great deal of self-imposed difficulty you can add if you want a higher score.
Meanwhile, in this game the time limit prevents you from doing that, but since there’s no boulders it ends up not mattering all that much. I feel like this was a bit of an unnecessary mechanic change when the enemy speed ramping worked just fine, but it still serves to add urgency required of an arcade game, so it’s still a plus. Besides, taking advantage of the smooching mechanic still requires a bit of planning and enemy avoidance, and it’s cute too.
- The slimes are an incredibly fitting replacement for the Pookas, and I think this is one aspect that’s undoubtedly an improvement over the original, even ignoring the fact this is a weight gain game. They aren’t nearly as dangerous and you can easily just eat two or three if you really need to, but you miss out on a lot of score by doing that, so they’re always this looming quasi-threat you have to watch out for if you want to go for all the smooches and not lose out on score, which I think is a much more interesting gameplay niche than “fygar but no (near-inconsequential) flame breath attack”.
The slimes and smooching mechanic (and just slimes in general) synergize beautifully and serve very well as a self-imposed difficulty opportunity, so I don’t think you need to add boulders to this game. Of course, in the end it’s up to you, but I feel it would require changes to the time limit to truly be worth it.
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The hitboxes are a little too big for comfort, at least to me. Maybe it’s the lag preventing me from reacting fast enough, but they’re definitely much bigger than they were in the NES version, which makes it a lot tougher to make use of the grid-based movement of the game (especially when turning corners or catching phasing enemies), and I’ve definitely eaten slimes/got eaten through walls, which probably isn’t intended. I’d size them down for sure if you were to keep working on this.
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The lack of distinct graphics for phasing enemies makes it difficult to tell how to react or plan ahead when there’s more than one phasing at the same time. Granted, for me it was a bit worse than it should have because I had no way of knowing what was coming when an enemy started phasing from offscreen near the bottom, but I still think it would be an appreciable change, although certainly not necessary.
And finally, two Dig Dug quirks this game is lacking that could be fun to include:
- You can normally fire the gun through thin walls if you stand very close and face them. This lets you take enemies pretty safely at the start if the level layout allows for it, but it’s easy to lose a life if they start phasing right next to you. The fire breath attack Fygars have also phases through them, and it’s the only occasion where that attack cost me a life, so there’s that to watch out for as well.
You can sort of do that in this game too, but only for slimes, and only if they’re touching the wall. It also leads into some funny glitches such as being able to feed/inflate the air until a slime passes by, but whether you’d prefer to turn this into a full mechanic or remove it entirely is for you to decide. - Spamming the fire button while moving lets you instantly reset the gun fire animation, which enables you to inflate enemies much quicker than intended and lets you take on 2-3 enemies at once in some occasions. It makes the game easier than it should be, sure, but it’s pretty fun to do. I don’t mind its absence, though.
I don’t know how much time went into the game design aspect of the project, but you might’ve struck gold without even trying that hard. Like other people said, it’s a pretty good start, and I’d definitely play a lot more of this if my laptop wasn’t so bad.
