I've received a lot of love and valuable feedback for my Compo Entry Timezone (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/timezone). Thank you all, the LD Community is really great. We are great.

I want to respond to some of feedback and criticism in this post.

Some of you mentioned (@jjjjason, @vectrex28) that the hitboxes are a little bit too large. There is also a bug I discovered after submission, that if you stand with your back next to wall and shoot, the bullet gets destroyed immediately (because the launching hitboxes collides with the wall). This is definitely a bug and I will fix it later on.

Quite a lot of you (@baraa-marwan, @fm-studio, @borys, @jiri-hysek, @wildcard, @dodormeur, @khaoz-fang, @jeremy-ryan, @grllle, @jason-lothamer, @mika-la-grand, @adam-elaoud) complained about the hard difficulty (well, some of you just mentioned it so it isn't negative in its entirety). And yes, you're right, the game is hard, and that is intended. However if you find out a few mechanics it becomes a lot easier. What you have to know is, that each shoot costs you 5 seconds. Small life capsules give you back 5 seconds and large life capsules dropped by an enemy brings you 20 seconds (and to destroy an enemy it costs you 3 bullets = 15 seconds). Often you can skip enemies if you have gained enough time to progress in the level faster and start a fight again if you running out of time.

You can also lock the enemies position. For example it's much easier to defeat them if you're able to lock them near a wall.

I also wanted to add a weapon upgrade which enables you to destroy multiple enemies with one bullet, probably with a spread shoot or something, but ran out of time implementing it :-)

@amymist, @gamepopper and @fahim-faysal also mentioned the really rough start. You haven't enough time to destroy the first two enemies that occur, so you first have to collect some time capsules before fighting them. While there might be a better solution, I did that intentional. I wanted the player to learn that shooting costs "life". And this way he learns it the hard way, because everyone who stars playing just presses the fire button, then dies, then realizes "Ok, I have to be careful". Then when the first "time capsules" appears he should realize that he gains life/time - and then he HAS to fight the first enemies to gain even more so the timer doesn't reach zero. With this approach the player should learn the core gameplay loop. However, if for some reason he can't pass this test, your basically not able to progress in the game.

Balancing was also not that easy, and could probably improved a lot. The thing I really wanted the player to experience is that the clock is constantly ticking down bringing him often in situations where he can save himself the last second before the timer reaches zero by defeating an enemy and collecting his life capsule. This worked out quite well, judging by some youtube videos I already found. :-) And I wanted that the player has to make constant decisions if he has to go into a fight or if he has enough time left to skip that enemy.

@fahim-faysal, @dodormeur and @grllle mentioned the art that was inspired by Downwell. And, yes you're right. Indeed I had the mobile version opened next to me while I pixeled it and tried to recreate this minimalistic style. The idea was that because I suck at pixelart I would probably be able to create a consistent and nice looking game in this simple style. And I think especially on the sprite I took a little bit too much "inspiration". (I just want to note, that I did not copy it pixel by pixel, indeed the sprite of Downwell is much better than my version). But of course, you were all right, that the sprite was too close to the one in Downwell, so I've replaced the sprite now with something more unique. I hope you like it anyway and it fixes the issue.

Aside from that, I was overwhelmed by all the nice words especially on the music (which I had a ton of fun creating it, listen to it here: https://soundcloud.com/jochenheizmann/timezone-ludum-dare-44) and how fun and addictive the core game play loop is Thank you all: (Check out their games to, there are quite some gems over there):

@jjjjason @purpledartfrog @baraa-marwan @strugglesingamedevelopment @johan-alexandersson @fm-studio @borys @jiri-hysek @vectrex28 @notb @wildcard @kefir @dodormeur @suchista @neverautomatic @amymist @khaoz-fang @jeremy-ryan @furtive-pygmy @gamepopper @grllle @shp @jason-lothamer @mika-la-grand @adam-elaoud @ropedog @fahim-faysal