Bubble Domination game + your ideas?

[aimia]

Hi,
some days ago, I finished my next game – Bubble Domination. It is a simply strategy game. You control blue bubbles in water world, with goal to conquer all others color bubbles.

You can play it for example here http://www.kongregate.com/games/Aimia/bubble-domination

I have a plan to continue with this game. So if you have some comments or ideas how to improve the game, or what you want to see in this type of game, please let me know.

BR,
Tomas

[Son of Bryce]

Technically, your game is good. At first I thought this was a unique game but, as someone in the comments posted, it's a blatant rip-off of Phage Wars. You copied the mechanics of Phage Wars but missed the details that made it interesting.

Right off the bat, I could tell Phage Wars was well made. The presentation is nice and the gameplay starts off exciting. It kind of lures you in right away. But I didn't feel that way about Bubble Domination.

Phage War's gameplay, it starts off at a faster pace. The AI is much more aggressive and the bullets fire a lot faster. It starts with a great pace and feels exciting. I played a few stages of your game and it was incredibly slow. The bubbles moved slow and it took a lot of bubbles to capture another bubble.

It doesn't help that Bubble Domination's presentation is bland. Nothing but a blue gradient in the background? Even if the gameplay was well polished, having such plain graphics just makes the game look boring. You've got this idea of "Bubble Domination" so why not give character to the bubbles? Make it a battlefield. Maybe give them eyes and personalities, make each color bubble a different character. Liven up the background with swirling bubble currents. Is it under water? Would you have reefs, and fish swimming around? These details help the player get sucked in and start believing in the world.

By the way, I think the framerate is suffering from the gradient background. Try turning the background into a movieclip and turn bitmap caching on ( bg.cacheAsBitmap = true; ) or import the background as a PNG image.

I think your game is well made, but you didn't take the time to really polish it. Rather than squeezing out 50 stages, you should've spent more time polishing the gameplay on individual stages and giving more thought to the visuals.

I would suggest to get some people you know to play it and give you feedback and adjust it based on that. Watch them play if you can. Sometimes when you're so caught up with programming and focusing on just making it work, it's hard to see what the game actually plays like. I don't think there's anything wrong with gameplay besides the pace being slow and it going on forever. Try and think of things you liked from other games and add those features in -- experiment.

Don't be afraid to throw away stages as well. It's usually best when you put in all the best stages and cut out the weaker ones when you get to the end of the project.

Good work!