[WIP] Unnamed

So... I read these forums fairly religiously but I don't post very often, and have never posted any of my work... mostly because a lot of you guys do amazing work and I fear being critiqued by people so far above my skill. However, I have a very hard time finding any meaningful feedback from people I know IRL... and after spending so many hours working on something, I find myself completely unable to tell if it's any good or not. So I'm finally posting something for some feedback.

This is a game I've been working on for a little while. It's still very early on and lacking any meaningful gameplay, or permanent graphics, but the basic idea is there. It's sort of a platformer/shooter, I suppose. Anyway, there isn't anything to do but run around the world and kill enemies, which causes you to grow slowly. Also, if you just click play a level is randomly generated for now, and because I didn't want to spend much time on that, there are overlapping spores and such which occasionally results in some wonky behaviour such as big "gravity wells" where several are overlapping, making it very hard to jump away from the cluster, and sometimes some crappy looking rotation.

There aren't any instructions so- Use A and D to run around the "spores", W to jump, Left Mouse to fire. P pauses the game, U brings up a simple debug window. From the main menu you can also use the level editor (has instructions... and is very basic), which will let you build your own level.

Since there isn't any gameplay/balance to critique, I'm mostly looking for your thoughts on the controls and performance. Was it fun/smooth/easy to run around jumping form spore to spore? What did you get for FPS?

Anyway, thanks for checking it out and sorry for the big post you had to read through to find the controls :).

http://rorybourdon.com/wip_public.html

Runs at smooth 40 fps for me. Looks wonderful too.

very nice imo

very cool work. nice and smooth. the camera tracking was particularly impressive. the simple vector art work suites the style of the game too.
awesome job

I managed to fly far away from the world and off into space. Really nice, though. Around 40 FPS most of the time. At some points I was getting 30, I think because I was launching grenades rapidly. Also, once I was floating in space I couldn't switch weapons. Not sure what happened.

@all Thanks for all the comments. I'm glad to hear you guys like the style, I was worried people would be turned off by really simple vector art.

@Wattz Yeah at the moment there's nothing stopping you from drifting off into nothing forever if you try... and the randomly generated levels don't help much :) As far as FPS goes, it's good to hear you're all staying around 40. The particle engine isn't totally optimized and right now there isn't any limit on how fast you can fire, so it's not hard to get ~1000 particles and bring it down to under 30fps.

Looks quite nice! I had a pretty consistent 35 FPS. I recently played a game with similar mechanics, or maybe its not similar mechanics but it came to mind quickly after seeing your game. Maybe it's worth a view just to get some further creative inspiration. You can see it here: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/459147 . Anyways, keep up the good work