Okay, before I talk about anything BUG REPORT The movement sensitivity settings are completely buggered. Changing them INVERTS your controls and the velocity, so setting it to 2.0 on both inverted my movement and made me move slow. Because there is no "revert to default" the only way to fix this is closing and re-opening the app, whereupon it revert to the default setting. I was going to say something about the boss random gen after getting the cat and red devil guy five times in a row but I just got the slime boss so I guess it actually is random. Are the chances skewed somewhat? Okay so first impressions, much improved UI. I notice the levels are shorter now which is probably for the best since this is a mobile game aimed at short play sessions. I love the new song for the menu. Kinda makes me think that the in-game theme is kinda getting old, though adding new music options is a very low priority thing. I noticed the new costume and I think it's awesome how it has different stats, shot type, ability and animations. The presentation overall looks much nicer. I see you took the balancing advice on board and made 2 hit points the default health, that should help newer players a lot. You unlock the lantern buddy early and that one's awesome with its ability. Now onto some concerns. These are just concerns right now as I can't fully gauge it in its current form. I noticed you changed the continue option from coins to these life tokens. What concerns me about that is that I can't buy them from the shop, which given its placement there means you can only buy them with premium currency and get them from the infrequent chest drops. I hope you consider adding the ability to buy these tokens with coins instead (a large sum of coins if need be). I thought it was better when you could always just use coins to continue and thus had to balance sacrificing coins used to buy new stuff for a chance at getting further. I suppose it's meant to balance 2 hits being the default health now. I'll have to play for longer to see how this I feel about it more. Similarly, I see buddy unlocking is now tied to getting random drops from enemies. I'm a little concerned here that infrequent drops and infrequently appearing enemies means that getting certain buddies might take disproportionately large amounts of time. Like, 999 rivet wristbands for my fave buddy Thanatos? C'mon man why ya gotta do this to me. It worries me because the enemy that drops them doesn't spawn often, I went five or so games each reaching the second stage before finding a single one. Naturally I assume you can use premium currency to instantly unlock them. Fair enough I suppose, that's the norm for mobile games. There's always that temptation to mess with appearance/drop rates if you do that though... Finally, yay the coin dash is back! But... I don't like how it's been implemented. You get it after collecting all the letters and then can only access it at the end of the run (not at the beginning during equipment selection? Why?), and then it ends as soon as it's over. What I liked about it in the first version of the beta was that you got it after beating the boss, it was an awesome-feeling victory lap and when it ends it puts you right back into the action. Sectioning it off as its own minigame that is completely disconnected from the main game feels like a very weird and backwards choice. While I would like it to be after every boss or every x boss or if you do well on a boss or randomly after a boss, in the current system I think it would work better if you unlock it with the letters and then choose it when starting a new run. You start a new run with the coin boost and then as soon as it's over you go into the action, not breaking the flow of gameplay after an adrenaline-pumping thing like that. Alternatively you enter rush mode immediately when you collect all letters in a game. So far, it's shaping up to be a nice game. I love that each update adds more variety on the way you play with different shot types and power ups and all that. Aside from the major bug, the way premium currency and unlocks are handled needs to be done carefully. While there is a give and take and you obviously can't give too easily, don't make a system that feels unfair or not rewarding (regardless of whether you're actually giving a lot or a little). Like if it were too difficult to get continues, would that be discouraging to players? If one of the four items needed for a buddy is disproportionately hard to get compared to others, would players feel cheated? I can't say if the game is or isn't doing that since that currency isn't implemented yet and I'm still early into the new build, I'm just mentioning it so you think about it just in case.
Thanks a million! Before we talk about anything, we did add a lot of new content into this version, we were too eager to let you see it, but we didn't make everything right without problems, we hope you understand. But we promise that we will fix every problem seriously, and listen to every suggestion from our players, consider how should we solve the questions, as we did before. The movement sensitivity settings bugs are essential, and we will add a button to "revert to default". The boss random gen will be improved. We hope bring the players better experience, but not only depend on random gen. BTW, we consider the random gen as an important element, but we can not throw the gameplay to random gen totally. We make the first level short to let fresh player see the first boss earlier, and also, beat the first boss earlier. But not every level is short, you can check it out by pushing through more levels. The menu music is still the initial version, you will hear better music and SFX in the later version. The purchase is disabled in IAP shop, because it's a testflight version. The continue item (clover) is intended to be balanced in free ways and premium ways, we will discuss about details, surely we promise to provide free ways to get continue items. Buddies unlocking time is not fair enough, we were not mean to let the buddies too hard to get. And the enemies should spawn in a better way in case the player can't get the collection items. The buddies are not planned to be unlocked using premium currency by now, we thought it's important to let every player have a variety of buddies to play, and feel different gameplay with different buddies. The coin dash event is hard to access, we found the problem, too. We will find a better way to not break the gameplay flow, everybody loves the dash, we will make it as highlight of the game. We will carefully handle the give and take in every systems, make them fair and rewarding. We will reconsider the unlocks and items especially to improved the long term player experience. Thanks again! Your opinions and suggestions are really inspiring as always, we will not let you down!
Thanks to all friends in TA community! Through last 4 rounds of testing, we received much advice and encouragement from many players. You guys made Shoot the Dragons better and better. We announced that Shoot the Dragons will be released at October 19, 2016 on the App Store.
