I purchased Eufloria about a week ago. As a developer it's not often I get to appreciate something really well built with very nice appeal that was done on your own dime. The $20 price tag was well worth the enjoyment I got out of the game. Other than 3 crashes (which were frustrating, but I understand it happens) I really enjoyed playing through all of the levels. Thanks for creating a very beautiful game. The sound and graphics are both very unique.
After playing through all 56 levels (25 normal, 8 skirmish, and 23 dark matter) here are my suggestions:
- My only general complaint about the gameplay is the whole thing becomes a zerg mode in the end. Once you reach critical mass on a single group of seedlings, it's just not possible for the computer to win. Sending 300 to 500 seedlings to a single asteroid just steamrolls it (and then the ones beyond it) to the extent where it just becomes a matter of balancing the number of Dyson trees you build rather than a balance of Dyson trees and defense trees. I wish there was a simple way to fix this, but there really isn't. If you beef up defense trees, it becomes far too difficult to take an asteroid without then building multiple 300 to 500 seedling armies and sending them one after another to an asteroid, thus propagating the whole zerg mode.
- While it's really cool that each seedling has its own set of strengths and weaknesses, speed appears to trump just about any other seedling type, regardless of its energy and strength. They can outpace the defense tree bombs and basically tear things up far too much. Speed is also the best defense in the game due to being able to move seedlings around rapidly. Due to the way the defense tree bombs work, slow seedlings just get torn apart by them (in bulk).
- When seedlings destroy a tree on an opposing asteroid, they swirl around right at the opening where the root was, which tends to cause the defense tree bombs to basically shred them. This, again, leads to zerging everything and killing in bulk rather than via strategy.
- I ran into an interesting bug a couple times where my seedlings would bounce off the left and right side of the root opening on an opposing asteroid and could never get into the root. I'd have to send more seedlings to that asteroid that would path differently and actually get into the root. I thought it was odd, but not game breaking.
- When I click on an asteroid, I would REALLY like to see what types of trees are on the asteroid (either mine or the opponents, if I've discovered that asteroid.) I realize the zoom out view shows the type via a sort of meta graphic, it's really hard to see on smaller or less well laid out asteroids (ie, asteroids with low strength, energy, and speed) and you have to zoom in just to figure out what types of trees are on the asteroid. If you put 400 seedlings around a small asteroid, it's pretty much impossible to see the trees.
- I'd like to be able to zoom out to all of the area I've discovered thus far. ASDW helps, but it's kind of a pain to scroll around, particularly if you're getting attacked from 2 different ends of your asteroid belt and can't see that one end is getting attacked because it's off the screen even while zoomed all the way out.
- In some cases, the colors are really hard to differentiate. In one game, I had 2 different reds around me and my color was deep pink. I couldn't tell which seedlings were mine and which were my opponents at times.
- I'd like to be able to tell my seedlings to focus on particular types of trees when attacking an asteroid. There are times when I want to destroy a defensive tree on an opposing asteroid in order to gain a Dyson tree. However, they tend to split up into groups based on the number of trees on the opposing asteroid and it comes down to which one basically has the lowest level. That's generally the one that dies first. If they're all max level, it's whichever one gets killed first.
- I'd really like to know what the criteria for a flower growing on any particular asteroid is. It seems pretty random. I've had asteroids grow 0 flowers, and I've had them grow 3. I did notice that as soon as a tree grows one, it won't grow another. This is particularly frustrating when the computer sends in a laser flower and blows up the flowers on one of your asteroids.
- Is there any way to periodically capture the state of the game so when an exception occurs, you can save that information in an exception handler? I played two levels where I was 30 or more minutes into the levels and the game crashed. I basically had to start from scratch on each of them. Both crashes occurred when I used laser flowers, and I think it might be related to the sound effect that occurs when you send the laser flower to a destination.
- Is there any way to tune the difficulty as an option? I coasted through most of the levels. There were a couple where I didn't know what was coming and got into situations where it was impossible for me to dig out of, but once you reach critical mass, it's just a matter of build, move, conquer. Rinse/repeat.
- I had one level where just about every asteroid had low speed attributes. It made me want to tear my hair out. Sending 40 seedlings across my asteroid belt could take a full minute to occur. It's not a bug, just an annoyance. Slow seedlings, again, are just completely annoying and I generally just stopped using them at all in favor of fast ones.
Anyway, those are the thoughts off the top of my head. I had a lot of fun playing through the levels. Wish there were more with some additional challenges. There were a couple levels where I was caught off guard by some things (as I sort of expected would happen) which was fun. Overall it was a great playing experience.
