This likely has been suggested already somewhere at some point, but it’s getting to a point and frequency where the enjoyment of the game suffers and occurrences are getting frustrating.
General problem: With all the screen clutter going on, reaching from debris, feathers, power-ups and projectiles to chickens and explosions, it’s hard to make out actual important dangers in this shoot’em’up game where your primary objective is to survive. While there is an option which supposedly makes the projectiles of chickens more visible/always in front, I keep catching myself dying to a random, to me not previously visible thing.
There are certainly also situations in which I had to say “well I was incredibly stupid just there” because I took a risk of some sort or crawled between some projectiles of different speeds, only to have no way out. But several other cases in which I couldn’t tell you what I died to afterwards.
You see, here is the argument: In many of the shoot’em’up games I have played before and still play, enemy projectiles were always highlighted to some degree so it’s much easier to distinguish them from anything else within your peripheral vision. This is great because this means you wouldn’t just die to some projectile which had the same color than the background, debris or own projectile for example.
This is incredibly difficult in chicken invaders however. a lot of the entities on the screen look similar to each other while it’s not in your center of attention. I mean, yes, we can’t just paint the eggs read or something, but we need something else. Like a glow highlight or something like this. Or dim every other object aside from the projectiles.
That would make playing a lot better and I wouldn’t have to get frustrated over something that I couldn’t foresee. And to be honest, I’m not playing hectic in any way.
Unfortunately the lord himself has spoken about this matter:
I don’t know if it is even possible, but theoretically iA can just slap a grayscale shader on everything except the player and some projectiles, without the glow effect.
Maybe it could temporarily push all the projectiles on top by making them draw last in the frame (see: Pro-gamer mode) and right before it draws, cue the epic grayscale filter.
In general, it would already be enough if we got some kind of danger sensor around the ship which hints towards the nearest dangers within a certain radius. Something like a very faint, red’ish circle which is always around your ship, slowly grows brighter in a direction a danger is located at, which would at least make the user aware that at this direction there is something which could kill you. Which would likely be a more easy solution. Otherwise, like I mentioned, making the enemies and projectiles the most visible part on the screen.
Another option - but it would be “copied from another game” - is an action fade effect. Meaning the more is going on like kills, enemies, projectiles, the more the screen will dim itself to focus on the important aspects like your own ship, eggs and chickens, whilst dimming / de-saturating everything else that is not important to the needed gameplay. That would yield the effect that during less busy moments like slow waves, the player could still see the game in it’s full glory, but when the game “detects” a very busy moment and you’d need to know what is going on when and where, the pretty effects will get dimmed down and you can focus on keeping yourself alive.
Anything beyond this is pattern-learning and trying not to die.