I just
love the concept! It's an amazingly simple, yet intuitive thing - in games, everyone loves to try out limits, and jumping from high places as well as getting really fast is just the right thing!
So here's what I'd change - lots of things you may conveniently ignore ... or not
The sense of speed combined with the ground coming towards you in high velocity is, I believe, what makes this game. So I'd do everything to improve this feeling. A "woosh"-sound that might get louder the faster you are is a good start - and I think it's already implemented?
- but try other things too. Apart from blur, try
shaking the camera as a function of speed: The faster you are, the more it shakes (see: Every racing movie in the history of time). Maybe you could also experiment with changing camera.arc. In order to highlight certain events - i.e. if someone races through one of those bonuses - freeze time for just a bit (<0.1s, a simple "freeze_mode=1" (C-Script?:D) might be enough for testing), and always increase the frequency of the sounds that play when you do that. Combine that with a combo-system: If I manage to get all those bonuses that you've aligned in a row, then multiply those with the amount of tiles I've hit in that row. Then use something like "snd_tune(snd,100+20*(place_in_combo),0)" (C-pseudoscript).
NEVER be afraid of using large happy text with colors. I once read from a tester at nintendo that they encourage gamedesigners to always provide visual feedback: Place confetti all over the screen, make a huge text appear in a nice animation, or something along those lines. Make it something that I want to see as often as possible. The supersmall text you use currently just doesn't have any impact behind it.
Don't forget audio feedback. Since this is so over the top, consider an announcer and audience. You know how in Super Smash Bros. everyone is all excited once the audience is calling their naem? Use this to your advantage and place lots of this audiofeedback. An audience going "ooooh" if you JUST miss a bonus or wild thunderous applause if you DO make it against the odds are amazingly satisfying! It's basically the only thing that worked in
Audience Artist (and there are far too few of these events!). And maybe one could increase the pitch of the music (just a bit! Not too much) according to the speed the player goes.
Use large numbers: Never award points in increments less than 50. Consider this great quote from Jason Kapalka (PopCap co-founder and Chief Creative Officer - PopCap are the guys creating virtual crack which they call "Peggle" and "Bejeweled")
JK - There are some tricks and shortcuts we’ve learned… like, always have sound cues of rising pitch associated with combos, and never award points in increments of less than 10. These are often non-intuitive little things that just work with gamer psychology for some reason. But beyond a few things like that, it becomes a black art rather than a science. Everyone has theories about what makes a game fun, or can revisit a successful game in retrospect and analyze it, but if it were really that simple to understand the elements of what makes a great game, everyone would be cranking them out like popcorn, and that just isn’t the case. It comes down to a lot of trial and error, abandoned prototypes, and trying different things until you find something that’s fun.
What I *don't* like about the game is the landing sequence. It seems to take the speed out of the game, just when it starts to get funny. Maybe there could always be a "safe" landingzone in which I could land with any speed, but its a lot harder to hit. Like in
"Monkey Target", you might want to consider placing a giant "dartboard" on the ground: These are the multipliers for the score that the player has accumulated.
The HUD is, probably, still in progress, but I don't really think it's fitting. Plus, do you even use it? My eyes are probably always glued to the action on the screen, and checking the speed is just a nice little extra I don't care for. You could make it "more exciting" by not giving me the speed, but the threat: A text like "1230 metres remaining" in bright red could be a more exciting "timelimit", but might be difficult to implement with different slopes. Please also don't forget - if you stick with speed - to implement a way to switch between mph and km/h.
The diving stance is... just there? It doesn't really fit with the HUD in any way, but I guess it's just temporary.
So... I like it, I really do. I think, however, you could get a bit more out of it, without too much work. But then, what do I know, right?
