Free Bird. CS491 Team 3

Like the art style you guys got going, works really well.  To address your questions:

1. I think movement is fine as is because of how little space there is to navigate. I think a better thing to improve would be to improve enemy behavior more than movement. Since this plays like Galaga, you should make your enemies telegraph attacks more and give the player more time to react. With those improvements and how movement is currently, I think that'll make the game feel really good. 

2. Projectiles seem alright so far and I think maybe a power up or ability for a full auto fire would be helpful too. 

3. I think your player health was fine, I didn't have any issue with it.

4. Definitely the UI scaling. I also had some similar issues like others with how the UI was scaled. A lot of the informational stuff was cut off pretty much. I could still play the game but I couldn't really read the other info you guys had. For reference I was running this on a 1440p monitor so I think making your executable windows scalable would help this. I think also cleaning it up and getting it looking better would do wonders as well for the look of the game too. I think for the final release that's a good improvement to go for. 

So far it looks good and I think you guys will have a good product come final release time. Good luck on the rest of the development!

-Micco 

1. I think since the player move area is so small, if you were to add a movement ability it would need to be focused on giving the player i frames rather than scaling a distance.
2. I think the projectiles are fine but a bit too spamable.
3. I think the health is fine.
4. Some ideas on where you could improve on is sound fx/music or giving the enemy birds animations or tells when they attack (make the dive bomb bird glow a different color or play a sound when they are about to attack)
   
   I think you guys are having some resolution issues with the text. I am on 16:9 and the text is cut off on both the left and right sides of the screen. Also the text is really blurry. Fun game!

The game is coming together really nicely, great job! I am going to try to answer these questions in as much depth as I can. This is not a criticism of your game, just a way to try to be helpful. 

1. I thought the player movement was intuitive and smooth. Having added movement capabilities could be fun but it is something you might have to play around with to see what works and what doesn't. If you have to collect eggs to rescue them it could be fun to have to go get them instead of shooting projectiles at them. Otherwise, there isn't a big need to move up/down since the birds are fairly easy to hit and you can only shoot up. Dashing might be something fun to try to implement, especially if the player is invulnerable while dashing and can only use it every so often. This could add some strategy in to help avoid the dive-bombing enemies.

2. I think the projectiles that the player shoots at the enemies are fine. They are a little slow to watch but the easily hit oncoming enemies so it doesn't hinder the player. If you increase enemy movement/speed then I think increasing the speed of the projectiles will be necessary too.  It would be cool to see a powerup for the player that would allow the projectiles to either move faster or to shoot multiple directions at the same time. You could try having the powerups come as a collectible falling down the screen for the player to collect or you can have it be a special key/mouse button. 

3. Since there isn't a way to regenerate health or pick up items that give health, I think the player has a fairly good amount of health. The amount of damage the enemies give is a good amount too. I think if the enemies were a little faster/unpredictable it would add to the difficulty of the game. So, if you make some small changes to the enemies without changing the health it'll make the game harder. Right now, it is fairly easy to go through the waves of enemies without losing too much health. The only exception is when the enemies dive bomb the player at the start of a wave. They do a lot of damage which doesn't really feel fair since the player doesn't have much time to react. Having a delay when the wave starts might help with that. In the middle of a level, the dive-bombing birds are fun to try to avoid since they are so quick. 

4. Overall, I think having more movement from the enemies would increase the difficulty and make it more fun. It is really fun when the dive bomb the player and move around but right now most of the birds just stay in one place which makes them easy to hit with the projectiles. So, I would love to see more overall movement from the enemies. I would also love to see the baby birds/eggs that the player is trying to find since right now they are missing from the game.

Also, this is just a side-note: I have an ultra-wide monitor and the game plays full-screen by default. This made a lot of the text very blurry. When I played it on a smaller monitor it didn't adjust properly so the panel on the left with the health was cut off a bit. 

Overall, great job! I love the art style. It really communicates the feel and story that your team pitched. The background scrolling in the background is smooth and it just makes the game come across as really fun/cute. With a few tweaks to the enemy behaviors, I think the game will end up being really fun to play. I look forward to the final product.

-Breanna Flickinger

I am a huge Galaga fan so I really enjoyed playing a couple rounds on Free Bird. A few things that I noticed right off the bat is that once you get past round 3 on level 2 it continues to count upward. So it say level 2 round 4, round 5, etc. Also when you do eventually lose the game didnt give me an exit option so you have to kill it with the task manager. Im sure this is being implemented just wanted to mention it. As for the player movement I actually think it works very well. If you do decide to implement the ability to move up and down I think the entire feel of the game will change and youll have to change the way enemies spawn into the map. As for the projectile speed I thought it worked well but I did notice that the fast blue projectiles only took off after the enemy in front of them had been defeated. Maybe I just didnt see it correctly but if this is the case I would allow the projectiles to move from any space on the board at any time. If the fast ones have to wait in order to take off then it makes them very easy to eliminate. I think the player health is perfect. I do think that the enemies do a good amount of damage as well. Taking 3 or 4 hits seems like the perfect amount of life for the player. As you move up in level it would be cool if you were given more life based on the difficulty of the level. Or maybe increment the life by 1 every 5 levels? The only thing that I really thinks needs improvement is the HUD. It didnt really fit the style of the game overall and it was blurry and difficult to read for me. I like the set up though as it is like a classic arcade game. Great work guys!