Team 4 2nd Upload: Volcano Vanquish

1. I would have liked the ability to spam the grappling hook :)
2. Maybe the screen gradually turning red and shaking would be a fun/scary lava indicator. 
3. I think a lava count down at the beginning would be a good idea, I kept dying right away before I knew what was going on. I like the idea of spam clicking the grappling hook. 

1. In my personal opinion, I actually preferred jumping around like a madman in your previous build, so I do not like the cool down as much. Especially because you can't tell when you can use it again, it was really frustrating when the lava catches up and you can't do anything because the cool down is too long. If you wanna keep the cooldown I would make it significantly shorter so it doesn't kill the pace of the game, and also add some visual or UI element so I actually know how long the cool down is. 

2. I think it makes sense to have some kind of bar that visually shows how much distance is between the lava and the player. 

3. As I said above, I think you should just start off with a much faster cooldown, and if the player gets too far from the lava you can have it do some sort of rubber band effect to catch up and keep the difficultly consistent.  That way difficulty doesn't rely on the player waiting around to be able use the grapple again.  

1. The cool down felt really frustrating to me. It is a little hard to correctly grapple into the wall and if you mis-click then you aren't able to use the grapple hook again and this often means losing. It made the game harder, but it didn't seem like a fair way to die. It also was difficult to tell it was a cool-down. It just felt like the grapple hook wasn't working. Having some sort of cool-down UI element might help with that so the player knows when they can use the grapple hook again. As a side note, it also might help if the mouse shows where the player can click to get the grapple hook to "stick" to the wall. This could be shown with a circle around the mouse- red means the grapple hook won't stick to the wall and green means that the grapple hook will stick to the wall. 

2. I think having a number with a visual to show how far the lava is would be a nice way of showing its position relative to the player. Maybe have the distance listed at the bottom and once it reaches a certain distance away from the player you could have some sort of visual effect (like a red glow on the edge of the screen that gets more intense/brighter when the lava is close- like how Leviathan does it) to warn the player that it is close. You could also look into having camera effects (like shaking) or particle effects for when the lava is getting close.

3. Unless there is an in-game reason why the cool-down time period changes, I think it wouldn't make much sense and would feel unfair to change it randomly in the game. If you wanted to change the cool-down rate you could have faux "levels" to the game. This could be pre-determined checkpoints that the player reaches that you can use to change the lava/player speed. For example, after the player reaches 100 in game meters then you can change the values for the speed of the lava, cool-down time, and the player speed. For this to work without feeling random, you can display that they have reached a new checkpoint/level and have some visual to make the game feel like they are in a new/harder level. Alternatively, you can have pick-ups or have areas that the player has to go through (like how racing games have a boost area- attached is a picture from Crash Team Racing Nitro to show what I mean) to either increase the player speed or reduce the cool downs for the grappling hook. You can have the collectibles/areas be more frequent later in the game to balance out the lava. Alternatively, you can have the player collect something to give them the ability to slow down the lava. Maybe it could be like a "freeze time" ability.

Overall, you all have improved the game a lot since the last play test. Great job! I love the player animations, the lava, and how the game is coming together. I look forward to seeing the final product.

-Breanna Flickinger

1) I feel like the cool down made the game more enjoyable.  I  agree with previous comment that it was a little frustrating at first, but after a few rounds I got the hang of it.  It seems better than your previous version where you could just click like a mad man to shoot up the level. Definitely more challenging.

2) I think showing maybe a small mock up of the volcano off to the side with indicators of player and lava position could be a good way to visually show how far away you are from the lava.  A number of total distance climbed would also be nice and also give a good metric to display at the game over screen so players can see how well they did.

3) I think a small scaling down of the grapple hook cooling with lava speed would work but may run into issues if the player can just get really far ahead.  Also I didn't notice any indicator for the cooldown or when the hook was available again, so maybe adding something to visually represent that would be nice.  

1.) I think the cooldown on the grapple can work, but there are two things going against it in my experience.  First, the random level generation can be frustrating to navigate with in some configurations.  In some places I felt like I couldn't grapple to where I needed to go very easily, and being under the time pressure of the lava made that feel a bit frustrating.  Second, I couldn't tell when I would next have the grappling hook, which made me jump to my doom a few times.  On the plus side, I felt the cooldown made me think about how I was going to grapple a lot more than in your previous prototype.

2.) I think either way you mentioned would work fine.  Personally I think I would prefer a number, perhaps near the bottom of the screen.  I think on top of that a number showing the distance you've climbed so far would also be good.

3.) I never got to that point (at least I don't think I did), so I didn't experience the quick lava.  That being said, I think changing the grappling hook's cooldown would make it very frustrating to know when it's available.  Instead, I'd recommend thinking of some way of slowing down the lava instead.  Perhaps some sort of collectable?