Thanks for the detailed reply I think I was just a bit taken aback by the idea I was employing some cynical ploy, when the truth is more like I might just have been a bit too ambitious with my first project.

It’s true there are Cannon Fodder references, but also a bit deeper are references like ‘FastSphere’ (speedball) and ‘The Order Engine’.. I wanted to reference things dear to my own childhood gaming experiences which led me to make the game. I hear your point about evoking expectations so perhaps I can chalk that up to a ‘noob mistake’.

I don’t feel like I’ve completely failed- along with receptions like this and the mentioned RPS review there have been kind tweets and emails from people who didn’t look for anything deeper, and actually enjoyed the simple approach.

I do plan to gather all the feedback and focus on what changes will give the biggest boost to the experience, and it makes such a helpful difference when criticism is followed with ‘and here’s what changes would improve things’. Thanks again for taking the time to explain the problem areas in more detail.

-Rich

However, I do stand by the general thrust of the review (indeed I believe John Walker over on RPS has said much the same sort of thing) which is that Pineapple Smash Crew is a fairly decent gameplay mechanic looking for a decent game. It’s not enough to put in some shooting and explosions and randomly generated levels and then call it a day; what the game badly needs is a sense of *structure* beyond the vestigal — not to mention badly repetitive — mothership coordinate terminals. I’m not a game designer so my opinion may or may not be valid here, but I really think you hamstrung yourself with the randomly generated levels. PSC is a classic example of why that can be a bad idea; far from making every level different it makes every level feel the same, since they’re all being constructed to the same set of general principles. You don’t need to throw those out the window but I do think the game needs a core set of purpose-built levels to inject some guaranteed variety and challenge into the game — levels that go beyond one of the three generic missions that are currently present, where you’re completing the same task three times and then teleporting out. Perhaps it would be a good idea to base the gathering of the mothership coordinates mainly around these levels, and reserve the random ones as an optional, supplementary experience. And then the mothership itself needs to be more of an event rather than just another level with a particularly tough boss — something worthy of rounding off the game instead of the arbitrary stop it is at present.

That’s the major thing that needs fixing. My issues with the actual gameplay are, I admit, deeply personal and not so much of an inherent problem, but here’s a brief list of other things:

More feedback when a soldier dies. Cannon Fodder had Boot Hill and the scrolling list of dead when you finished a mission. PSC has.. what, exactly? This is actually two problems with the game rolled into one: first, prior to the final boss battle I lost two soldiers in the entirety of my campaign and that was on the first mission when I had no idea what I was doing (i.e. I don’t think the game, as it stands, is challenging enough), and second that there’s no *connection* to my soldiers. I don’t think they even get named on the victory screen; it’s just a series of anonymous dashmarks representing the dead and very much forgotten. It’s a little unwise to directly evoke what Cannon Fodder did in this regard with the use of the names Jools and Jops when PSC’s treatment of it is so superficial.

Enemy variety and AI. I think most differences in enemy types consist of what happens when you shoot them; all but two enemy types walk towards you slowly while firing their weapon (if they’ve got one), and the only reason the turrets don’t do this is because they physically cannot move. It’s rather telling that the one enemy that made me sit up and pay some attention was the one enemy that did not do this: the purple spider thing that stops for a second and then charges you. More enemies like that would have gone a long way towards keeping me on my toes.

In spite of what I said in the review the weapons are largely okay and don’t need fixing to pander to my particular preferences. However, I feel the way in which they are gradually unlocked is a little absurd and unnecessary. What is the rationale behind arbitrarily spoon-feeding them to the player? I don’t think this adds anything to the game, and in fact while I was chatting to a friend who also bought the game it turned out that I’d apparently missed out on one of the better weapons entirely (the teleport beacon).

If you are planning to continue development on the game and add in more features then I wish you the very best of luck. For what it’s worth I think PSC isn’t beyond saving and that it does contain the seed of a very good game. It’s just going to take an awful lot of work to get there, is all.

PS: I hear what you say about the Cannon Fodder thing and it was unfair to attribute that directly to you, but that was the impression I got from many news sites that led me to purchase the game.

If you’d like to make some specific suggestions for improvement which might bring the game in line with your expectations, I’d love to hear
thanks,
-Rich