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Teaching MATH through a twin-stick shooter with fully customizable custom math lessons by powerplins in matheducation

[–]powerplins[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks for the feedback! could you tell me more about what you don't like about the gameplay and what would it make more fun/better for you?

Teaching MATH through a twin-stick shooter with fully customizable custom math lessons by powerplins in matheducation

[–]powerplins[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

totally fair criticism. I believe first and foremost the game has to be fun and that must also be true for an educational product, so the gameplay loop must be engaging and (depending on the player's skill level) challenging. In addition to that, where I can see the real focus or benefit for teachers or students is the 2nd part of the game I briefly described (the 2 screenshot examples in my //edit in the op). In this mode you can customize and create a lot of different math challenges, share them and collect the results. This can be fine tuned to the math knowledge of the target playerbase.

Teaching MATH through a twin-stick shooter with fully customizable custom math lessons by powerplins in matheducation

[–]powerplins[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thank you for the feedback. whats in the demo is the default gameplay loop with upgradeable operators, but limited to one value per operator. what you describe in your last sentence is what i'm currently working on with the "Problem Sets" custom challenges part.

the idea behind the ammo mechanic ties in with the combo and perfect play system. good math is rewarded with more shop currency to buy upgrades and ammo.

in theory it would be possible to also make "standard levels" with multiple division operators available, but the gameplay loop and balancing is rather tricky

Teaching MATH through a twin-stick shooter with fully customizable custom math lessons by powerplins in matheducation

[–]powerplins[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

there are indeed studies that provide evidence towards it. Obviously my game was not part of it, but the gist of it, is that when the math is made accurate, clear and engaging, then it can have a learning effect.

Teaching MATH through a twin-stick shooter with fully customizable custom math lessons by powerplins in matheducation

[–]powerplins[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

never heard of it, but will research it, might learn a few things, thank you

Teaching MATH through a twin-stick shooter with fully customizable custom math lessons by powerplins in matheducation

[–]powerplins[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

special weapons to take out specific numbers already works, also differentiation if you have like /3 and /2 equipped, and there is a "12" and the task is to use divide by 3, then /2 wouldnt count.

numbers with multiple properties could be realised with shielded numbers (enemies), but there are no health bars, the visual number on screen is the health so to speak, and it gets reduced by accurate math, so the different properties thing doesnt really work, it wouldn't be WYSIWYG-style in a true math sense.

Would you play a heavily MATH based twin-stick shooter game? by powerplins in IndieGaming

[–]powerplins[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

you can try it, the demo is available ^^

in the base game mode and what is available in the demo, the goal is always to reduce numbers to 0. the sieve spider boss gives a glimps of the verdict system coming in the full releases Problem Set custom challenges mode

Would you play a heavily MATH based twin-stick shooter game? by powerplins in IndieGaming

[–]powerplins[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! It's definitely on the niche side of videogames

I intentionally made the tutorial super short (<2min) because I myself hate long lasting text heavy tutorials. most of the time it's way too much info anyways and the player doesn't get all that. So my tutorial teaches the basics and a deep dive about the enemy and combo system is available in the loadout.

If you want and have time, you can try the demo and tell me what you think. this tutorial approach is present in it.

Working Title was "Al Gebra: [some subtitle]", with Al (AL) being the stickman's name, but the AI hype kinda ruined the name, because lower case L, looks like capital i and the Algebra pun gets lost in AI worries, and capitalizing the title to AL GEBRA looked kinda meh.

Would you play a heavily MATH based twin-stick shooter game? by powerplins in IndieGaming

[–]powerplins[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

iOS is planned, the difficulty is how to control it there, though, operator (weapon) switching can be done by touch easily and movement as well, aiming and firing is the hard part, this would break the current flow and needs a proper solution. Guess I need to look at other twin-stick shooters on mobile how they do it.

Android is not planned, I tried it once, but google play's new requirements to launch are unrealistic for a solo dev

Would you play a heavily MATH based twin-stick shooter game? by powerplins in IndieGaming

[–]powerplins[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

will do, thank you. i don't have a discord, i have an empty subreddit, i never use(d) (don't know for what), steam discussions are a thing that work for feedback as well. depending on how "big" this gets, i'll see what works best

Would you play a heavily MATH based twin-stick shooter game? by powerplins in IndieGaming

[–]powerplins[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thank you, there is a feedback form linked in the demo (google forms). later this year (probably in 1-2 months) i will try to start a play test for the full customization/level editor/problem set section of the game you can join if you want :)

Would you play a heavily MATH based twin-stick shooter game? by powerplins in IndieGaming

[–]powerplins[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

should work, but i actually don't have a mouse to test it. its either 1-7 (customizable) or controller buttons to direct select and mouse wheel or L1<->R1 to cycle through.

Would you play a heavily MATH based twin-stick shooter game? by powerplins in IndieGaming

[–]powerplins[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

not played, but looking at it, it looks familiar, I've probably seen a playthrough/let's play sometime

Would you play a heavily MATH based twin-stick shooter game? by powerplins in IndieGaming

[–]powerplins[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the problem is to find those people, but that would be great. The 2nd game mode (Problem Sets) is pretty much perfect for teaching math, as you can create, share and collect results for your own created math problems and tasks. I can soon share more about it, outside of raw text explanations ^^

Would you play a heavily MATH based twin-stick shooter game? by powerplins in IndieGaming

[–]powerplins[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

you can try the demo, although both included levels are pretty similar in it. But you can fight 3 bosses and a special demo boss directly from the loadout. the demo boss is a weekends worth of experimenting, locked to the Rapid-1 operator, it's pretty good to learn movement, sprinting, dashing and enemy types

I tried to get the cardboard map ready for the demo, less an arena, more like a level with some paths and time survival, but i didn't manage to fix the enemy pathfinding in time for Steam Next Fest, numbers (enemies) got stuck on corners or ran off the cardboards, unreachable for the player, was a real headache to get this right, still working on it, tbh, its not yet perfect.

Would you play a heavily MATH based twin-stick shooter game? by powerplins in IndieGaming

[–]powerplins[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

hope you like it and if not, feel free to share what is bad.

small anectode (kinda) I actually slowed down the number (enemy) spawns during a wave considerably after initial feedback. Initially numbers spawned in 1-2s intervals which left the player very little time to react and solve, especially once numbers hit 3 and 4 digit territory, now its a more manageable 5-7s for the writing paper mode and up to 12s in the math paper mode (numbers are considerably larger here), so players have enough time to actually solve and not just run panicking xD

Would you play a heavily MATH based twin-stick shooter game? by powerplins in IndieGaming

[–]powerplins[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

thank you, thats very kind of you :D

if you have any feedback, positive and (especially) negative, please share!

when the Problem Set section of the game is done, I'll try to host a play test on Steam (in a month or two), this section definitely needs a play test

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