Hi Joseph! Thanks for such great feedback. I think you really understood my intentions with the game. I couldn't find any good game to play during short work breaks, just to clear the head for a while. Most games are just too complicated, feature bloated or lengthy for that, or just doesn't have that right aura. As you mention, I also found that getting shot at directly is not very pleasent, and ruins the feel-good experience. So I decided to make a game with a predefined length, where you just get more stuff to shoot at, the more stuff you manage to clear. Just enjoyable score collection, as simple as that. The "shot cost" is a way to reward good precision with an extra edge in the score, because I also found having to reload breaks the meditative flow.

This game was just released and currently I'm a bit overwhelmed with the response. I just got started, and try to figure out how all this works. Thanks to all of you for you nice words! They really gave me new energy.

I'll be working on the website cartridge81.com a bit more, add tips about the game mechanics etc. For instance the large spider (boss 2) actually becomes stressed by excessive shooting, and goes wild. Just shooting few well-aimed shots at the joints is a lot better. Doing that you can also change its rotation by shooting at its body, so you can work through the legs systematically. I intentionally didn't want that to be too obvious, but something for the player to figure out over time.

Just making the music was pretty time consuming, especially since I wanted it to be varied and illustrate the events along the rail in a good way. Balancing the difficulty also took a lot of time. Shooting in VR is so easy compared to other gaming devices, so it was important to make it harder by requiring the laser beams to progress (as you mention). This is also why I decided not to add power-ups in this one. They just made it even easier.

Maybe these levels are all there is for Cartridge '81 for quite some time, although I think I'll tweak a few things in an upcoming update. Also, I'm thinking about maybe charging a few bucks for it, to finance the development of Cartridge '82 and Cartridge '83, which I have sketched on. They will have different mechanics but the same enjoyable feeling. We'll see what happens... It's so time consuming and hard to deliver games only on a spare time basis, with kids and all. Maybe I must stop doing things for free :)

// anders (the author)