Oranisms Game, in need inspiration

[jimmynewguy]

I started making this a while back. Started off looking nothing like this, but I feel like I got better at art recently. Mostly this knida cartoony stuff.

Anyway, the point of the game was to do "Research" on organisms. (Really collect power-ups and shoot them up.) I made a system for the organism to move around inside the petri dish and grow bigger and the player can either be draged around the circle with the mouse (or finger in iphone's case) or tilt the device right for counter clockwise and left for clockwise.

I exported all the pictures for web and devices and used midi music and so far I play around with it and there's no frame drops on my older ipod touch, which is good so far.

The problem is I sort of lost interest in making this for lack of inspiration mostly. I want to make it not just like every shooting game out there, but it's sort of hard to come up with ideas that haven't been over used yet. The power-ups I have so far are double shot, speed up shot, and double the player (the second one is one pi in front of you or half a circle) so they can all stack up. Ie. 2 players shooting 2 bullets 2X as fast.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this more of a fresh game? Ideas for what the player should look like? I'll take anything into consideration. Power-ups, criticism on how dumb this looks, graphical changes, scrap the project, words of inspiration, ect.

Thanks for reading all that if you did, if nothing else I can get constructive criticism on my new graphics style and what-not.

Cheers!

[Jagmaster]

This is the most Beeeeeeeezare idea I've come up with in a long time, but anyway:

1: Make a bunch of goofy-looking scientists with big noses standing around the table, poking in random places in the dish. Give a penalty for giving a zap to a fellow scientist in the finger.
2: Combo meter?
3: Make one of the scientist (or someone) sneeze in a random spot on the dish if a certain amount of time has passed without a combo thus, creating a gigantic booger that is incredibly hard to zap (or game over).
Maybe this is all too bizarre for your game, but by the looks of it, this seems to be an intentionally weird game anyway. What do have for penalty right now anyway? The more diverse the penalty you have, the more interesting the game is.

[jimmynewguy]

Thanks Jagmaster, I actually like those bizarre ideas. I thought about earlier and think it's best to just forget this idea. It doesn't seem very fun to play and that's what really matters, I believe this project is scraped.

[Jagmaster]

*Sighs* While getting a program to work is one thing, finishing a game and making it fun is a completely different challenge altogether. This is why I have a high appreciation for the people who finish games. It's not as easy as it looks.

I did want to mention, I like the the "cartoony" style artwork you have here. Keep up the good work!