Re: Balloon master!
I have to admit I wasn't really understanding the hype around this game, but having played it more now, it's not bad, I'd probably give it 3.5 stars out of 5 in it's current state, and it's improving all the time.
I think it's a fun little kid friendly arcade title with good sounds, a couple twists on the formula, and decent balance (I'll have to play it more to really know) even if the concept isn't completely original and a couple of the sounds have been overused in other titles.
The price seems quite reasonable too, given that you get the main gameplay with no time restrictions for free, three computer licensing, updates are frequent, server hosting for scoreboards needs to be paid for, and it's a niche market so he won't get very many customers, plus paypal skims some off the top of every order.
I do believe that the bonuses could probably be a bit quieter though, or the balloons a bit louder, because when your aiming for one it's hard to hear the other, but maybe that just takes practice and it's on me as the player.
I don't really like that you get achievements for every little tiny thing either, like using each menu option the first time. I don't think the goal of those is really to get as many as humanly possible into the game the way people have been doing lately, but to make them more worth while. Otherwise their is no real feeling of well, achievement!
If you do something multiple times that most people wouldn't, or you make a rare choice, that's something, but otherwise, it just feels like padding to get the number up for the game blurb.
The documentation is also pretty out of date (which to be fare you did point out right at the top) for instance it doesn't explain how to use bombs, doesn't talk about balloon storms, and still says achievements aren't supported in the unpaid version. I know that your trying to get some more professional documentation done, which is good, and it's easy to just say you'll roll all the new changes up into that and release it all at once, but in the meantime, it would take two minutes to add it to the current documentation and that helps now, rather than later.
Some fun, bouncy music for the main game might be cool too, I think soundimage.org has a few tracks that could fit quite well.
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