Since most of the feedback that I received from here stated that It Never Ends was too hard, I took steps to make it easier. I simply made as many alien traits as possible 25% less powerful. Unfortunately, I think that the cumulative effect is too great.

I realize that my opinion regarding my game's difficulty is meaningless, so I once again need your help. If you have the time, could you try the game again for as long as it interests you? I would like to know the following:

Did you encounter a crash when starting? (If you did, try pausing before clicking start.)

Did you play it to the end?

Did you win?

Did you retreat at least once?

Did you use the Nuke special at least once?

What was your score?

You can download the newest demo here:

http://www.misterdonovan.com/2014/03/24/demo-18-take-it-easy/

As always, I am willing to return the favor by providing feedback on your project.

Thanks.

In demo 18, inertia is still annoying, and the pace is glacially slow.

In the first few waves, the player has enough firepower to kill all enemies, but the combat takes place as if in slow motion, 10 or 20 times slower than in a normal game; requiring many shots to kill the humblest enemies wastes time without an apparent purpose.

Enemy energy blast are so slow that they can be dodged despite inertia, which is quite the opposite of the right way to balance difficulty.

Increasing firing speed would have an important special benefit in a game about evolving enemies: the player would treat enemy waves as a unit, and compare successive waves with each other, instead of focusing on shooting efficiently each ship without paying attention to waves and enemy behaviour.

There are games where shooting is slow but every hit counts (like Space Invaders) and games where enemies take their time but the player can dispatch them quickly (like Dodonpachi); in your game the enemies are few and boring but they require an extraordinary effort to kill, producing an unpleasant atmosphere of sad ineffectiveness.

Requiring the player to press CTRL repeatedly to shoot instead of providing autofire is player-hostile; there's no reason to charge shots or to stop shooting. I suggest eliminating charged shots completely.

Bad collision detection and absence of feedback when enemies have been hit is an unpleasant defect; spending several seconds to line up a shot only to have it tunnel through enemies is always disappointing. Any collision detection bugs should have a much higher priority than adjusting difficulty or enemy mutations.

Choosing collision shapes in the player's favor (i.e. every opaque pixel of the enemy against a circle that is slightly larger than the bullet sprite) is the "industry standard".

Overlapping enemies are a related problem (without feedback, how can I tell whether my bullet hit an invisible enemy?) which should be addressed with less random and less ugly enemy movement (for example, you could space enemies evenly on each row of the screen, making late comers slow down to avoid overlap).

Reducing shot power with distance is quite bad in your game because without vertical movement the player has no control over shot flight time: in the first part of the level, when all enemies are far up in the first rows, the player is completely ineffective.

Rewarding short flight times would work in a game with normal movement as a way to encourage the player to boldly apprach enemies and shoot them from very close in order to kill them fast.

Example: Raiden III, where weapons with very wide firing patterns do much more damage at point blank range (no shots are wasted) and there are large score bonuses for quick kills. Please play Raiden III to understand why 2D movement would be a good thing.

Inertia: Part of my vision for the game is to have some level of realism and a story. I realize that this may be a disastrous failing when it comes to appealing to as many people as possible, but as much as I want to please gamers, I also want to stick to my vision. Some people feel the same way about the shield walls at the edges of the screen.

But realism doesn't require damaging fun, ergonomy and practicality.

It could be argued that, realistically, a starfighter with severe handling problem wouldn't even have reached the prototype stage, and no sane air force would allow pilots to fly with inadequate engines. Realistically, if touching screen borders is a problem, simple flight control systems can override improper steering and avoid contacts, leaving the pilot/player to deal with actual obstacles.

None of the criticized features of your game appears to be useful to tell a story about aliens attacking Earth; they are only basic problems.

I feel that the nature of the game is to change the design of the ship to overcome problems, and spending points on stabilizers and the Shield Key player special can address these problems if necessary.

Shooters with well developed ship customization features let the player use the right ship for the job, given knowledge of what's in next level, trading off different qualities.

Instead, you are devoting slightly over half of the current customization choices (Thrusters, Stabilizers, Blaster Recharge, plus Shield Key) to addressing problems that shouldn't exist in the first place; the choice is completely trivial and independent from enemy characteristics.

Not too too hard, but you're going to have to scale the difficulty. Casual players are going to find this way too difficult.

You need to set a timer, or create an algorithm that punishes players for success.