Dodge em or Give Up-Feedback and plans for Final Week

I will be doing this slightly out of order with the feedback dev log first. The reason for this is most of my time this week was dedicated to getting a working build on Itchio to acquire the feedback, which turned into a nightmare of resolution settings and UI elements flying all over the place. 

The main issue seems tied to the way i did my background having it set up slightly differently on each scene based on how i wanted the squares to look, this has absolutely come back to bite me and I should have made little square sprites with no colliders instead I think. 

At the very least i managed to get the buttons in the right place but they can still look wonky based on peoples different set ups. I did see one participant play where the UI was utterly perfect so it's working for someone at least! 

Feedback

I had 6 questions for people to fill out on my form, 3 relating to speed, 1 about coin visibility, a specific question about the design in the fourth level and a general feedback question for anything else.

As with all feedback it was contradictory with multiple different opinions however the majority seemed to think that the speed of the player and balls were fine with one person suggesting slower balls and 1 suggesting faster player movement. One of the more detailed responses that concluded the movement was fine across the board made the point that it was 'possible but hard and that is the point of a game like this', to which i wholeheartedly agree. 

I specifically asked players if they became aware of diagonal movement being faster (this would become more obvious in level 3) and surprisingly not a single person realised despite that being the strategy they implemented to beat the level. They did emphatically say no to any prompt explaining diagonal movement was faster as the people that made it to level 3 seemed to figure it out without even being aware.

Everyone thought the coins were visible but some confusion as to what to do was present. For the testing the coins were not mandatory for level completion and in light of the difficulty people were having I'm glad as they never would have seen the last scene if they were. I may keep coins optional for now to let people experience the game and use them as a challenge rather than a requirement until i can implement a  level selection screen. 

Only 3 people made it to the fourth level and the strategies were...surprising. The first participant to beat it just went forward constantly and died probably 50 times before making a clean run, while this was a very death heavy run it  did give an opportunity to see a bug. The gates in the fourth level didn't actually reset unlike the rest of the balls. The just keep swinging in a continual motion regardless of the scene being reloaded around them. This isn't an actual issue as it doesn't change how the player interacts with them but it does seem like an interesting thing to investigate, just to understand why it's occurring. 

Overall people liked the game, with suggestion of a scoring system being added based on deaths or time which i already intended on adding. 

I would like to design more levels but with the ongoing UI issue and background problem it may be worth trying to fix them so I can then add more levels easily.