Team SWAM

1. What is your favorite aspect of the proposed game? Why?

I like the idea of having enemies inside an endless runner because it adds an aspect of competition to the game and makes evading obstacles more challenging.

2. What is your least favorite aspect? Why?

I think using the shooting mechanic in order to get a speed boost is not working well with the concept of an endless runner.
I don't understand why the player should want to be faster. It would only make it more difficult to avoid crashing into upcoming obstacles.

3. Which single change or addition would you suggest to most improve the game?

If you still want to to include the speed boost, I would suggest adding a reason why the player needs to be faster.
For instance, this could be achieved by creating holes on the track which are too large to just jump across them if the player isn't fast enough.

Things I like

- I like the idea of procedurally generating an endless track
- Really creative idea to have a bathroom themed game about a rubber duck
- The replay feature is super cool

Things I am unsure about

- Maybe it can be challenging to build diverse levels with procedural generation
- It might be hard to find satisfying steering mechanics
- It might be hard to make it feel natural (from a game design perspective) to shoot water. If the goal is to go as far as possible, is it then not best to go slow and safely?

Suggestions

You probably already thought about the replay feature. But just from my quick brainstorm, I think you would at least need to store the world-seed and the user inputs to recreate the level and players movements. However absolute timestamps will not suffice as they will be imprecise and over time errors will add up. So you would need to either fix the framerate of the game and record the inputs relative to the advanced frames or maybe at least only process the inputs in fixed time steps but let the game render in a higher framerate.

The reason I was thinking about recording the inputs was, because I thought, it might be easier than to record the position and orientation of the character.

A possible -- and maybe more robust -- middle way would be to record the position and orientation of the character at fixes time steps (maybe every 3 seconds) and between that try to figure out the intermediate positions based on the recorded inputs. Like that, the replay files should not grow too big, and it should also not be possible for errors to spiral out.

A relevant talk that comes to mind is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dinUbg2h70 The presenter also had the problem to store and replay movements of a character, to be even able to rewind back in time and continue playing from there. If my memory served me right, he also opted for an approach where the stored the complete game state in fixed intervals and in between tried his best to approximate it.

This I Like:

I like the array of many different gameplay elements (more than just sliding back and forth) so this will keep every run unique and fresh.

This I am uncertain about:

So as far as I understood it, you're not moving between discrete lanes but slide freely. If this speed is too slow, it may make instantly reacting to events harder. Especially later on when the whole game increases in difficulty, these "why aren't you doing what I want you to do?"-moments can be very frustrating.

Suggestions:

My suggestion would be to add variable sliding speed options, e.g. hold shift in order to slide faster to the side

1. What is your favorite aspect of the proposed game? Why?

Very cute idea to have a rubber duck sitting on a bar of soap sliding through a bathroom themed world.

2. What is your least favorite aspect? Why?

I am not so sure about the speed-boost mechanic. Doesn't shooting water to the front push the player back? Also, I am not sure if the speed boost is actually beneficial for the player in general. (Maybe I missed an important idea here?)

3. Which single change or addition would you suggest to most improve the game?

It may change the game idea a bit, but maybe this could help to make the water and speed boost concept more coherent:
The player could start with a little push to the front and becomes slower and slower with time. You could, additionally to your speed boost mechanic, introduce boost pads which the player could use to keep sliding.