Some Thoughts From Black Rock!

What I Liked Most

I think that there might be a lot of fun to be had with the idea. The two player battle element could work really well. There's also some nice humour in the background story which you can use for the overall presentation.

I really like the idea of the players having a different knowledge of the environment. I made me think of Pac-Man Vs. Maybe there's more that you could make of that feature with the human player having to guess at where the alien might be?

The ball rolling and use of inertia reminds me of lots of games such as Asteroids or Super Monkey Ball. I think it could make for a fun control system if tweaked correctly.

Trading off fuel for different purposes could be a good tactical element too.

What I Liked Least

The design doesn't contain much information about how the game environment will be laid out and how the environment will affect the game. It left me with a lot of questions. How large will the playing area be? Will there be different playing areas with different layouts that provide part of the challenge? Will there be slopes that you roll down? or walls that you bounce off?

I'm not so keen on the round system where the players switch sides. If the game is balanced fairly then hopefully the players will be happy to play either side in a single battle.

I think you should be careful about the gameplay consequences when a Rolling Object is damaged. The RO should always remain fun to navigate.

Ideas For Improvement

I wonder whether a first person view is going to be the most fun? To get a feel for rolling around the environment maybe a 3rd person camera would be better? Or even a fixed camera not tied to the player? I reckon it would be worth playing with the different options before deciding.

I think the idea of the idea of the players having different knowledge of what's in the environment might be fun. Maybe the human can see things that damage the alien which the alien can't see and can lure the alien into a trap?

I think the game idea might extend to more players too. You could potentially have one alien and several humans.

Also how about a power up where the powers are somehow reversed briefly (like the power pills in Pac-Man)?

Thoughts on the Scope of the Design

I think that the design is well scoped and there's a fun game in there that doesn't depend on any of the tech being too ambitious. I like that the Functional Minimal stage of the design has everything in it needed to "find the fun" and that the riskier tech is being handled later.

Thoughts about Where You Should Focus Work

I think that you should spend some time finding out what will be most fun about your game. The feel of movement through the world and the camera style will have a big impact on that.

If you get a prototype world early on then you can play with that and also consider:

• how you balance the power between the players to make it competitive
• how you can add "depth" to the tactics maybe with your power-ups or world layouts

Ideas for a Physical Prototype

How about a turn based game on a board?

Or maybe blindfold two people and have two other people shout out directions? The blindfolded people should respond slowly to the directions to simulate the inertia.