It's Geometry Wars AND Super Stardust HD - and has less Sony, too!
I found something which I think could be a bug. For me, the first time I start a game the first wave of enemies appears noticeably earlier than on subsequent games until I quit and reopen Super Geometry Dust. I typically "Return to menu" (via pause) to start a new game if I lose my first life too early, maybe that's relevant.
Furthermore, I have some ideas:
Pause:
When the player presses "Start" to un-pause the game, you could also show "Move!" instead of using a counter, and un-pause the game as soon as the player tries to move the ship. It seems to me that this would be more efficient and flexible.
Name input:
If Super Geometry Dust remembered what name had been entered the last time a highscore had been reached, it could put this name into the input field the next time a highscore was reached. This way, everything the player would have to do the next time she reached a highscore would be to press X repeatedly to start a new game as quickly as possible (unless she is not the person that had reached the previous highscore, in which case she would have to push backspace, which would delete the whole name at once).
Unlockables:
Just as the games it's based on, Super Geometry Dust can be quite addictive the way it is right now. However, it would be nice if it was full of interesting things. I have some ideas here.
For instance, with more songs, the first time a player reaches a certain score (100000?) a second song can be unlocked and a sound menu appear in the main menu where the player can listen to the songs and select which of them should never be played ingame. Every time the player reaches the set score a new song is unlocked, and that very song will be played the next time the player plays. We could make a competition for this where every song that gets at least a certain number of votes will be included in the game, but that's just an idea that I didn't think through at all.
Also, unlockable modes with simple parameter changes can be a good thing, but from my non-representative experience are often not really being experienced as something interesting unless they are really great. Enemy variations for instance are not typically exciting unlockables for most people.
One example for a refreshing unlockable item could be "sanity check world", where in one spot of the sphere there's a text that shows an arithmetical problem, a newline, and then "Collide with this enemy.". Since there are enemies which are chasing the player, she has to try to remember the problem and solve it in the head while evading and shooting enemies. Every enemy color has a number associated with it that changes with each new arithmetical problem. When you shoot an enemy, it dies and a text that has the same color as the enemy and displays the number which is currently associated with the color spawns at the position where the enemy has died and fades out immediately.
The numbers that enemies spawn should always be one (or maybe two digits with higher diffculty) so the player won't get visually confused.
Example: The text that is displayed on some random place of the sphere says "4-2=\nCollide with this enemy." For this arithmetical problem, it is randomly determined that yellow enemies use the number 3, red enemies use the number 4, green enemies use the number 2 etc. Whenever the player shoots a red enemy, it dies and spawns a red "4" that fades out quickly. After a while, the player finds out that green enemies are "2", which is the correct answer to the problem, and if the player's intelligence and skill are sufficient, she will collide with a green enemy, which causes all existing green enemies to die, upgrades the laser and replaces the arithmetical problem with a new (probably more complicated) one.
You can regularly display two arithmetical problems, with the one saying "PROBLEM=\nCollide with this enemy." and the other one saying "PROBLEM=\nExtra Bomb." (make sure that doesn't happen in the first round so that players will understand what "PROBLEM=\nExtra Bomb." means) If the player chooses to solve the extra bomb problem, she gets another bomb and can then continue with solving the upgrade problem. However, if she solves the upgrade problem first, she gets the upgrade earlier but the extra bomb problem disappears.
If the player goes game over, the game displays: "Result: INSANE" instead of "Game Over!". The sanity check world highscore of course adds " (INSANE)" to each name a player enters, but not for the ones that already are in the initial "insanity check world highscores" list as you provide it. After all, if the player is insane, then that's clearly not the game's fault, right?
Enemy visibility:
I can not really say for sure if these suggestions would work, but from my experience they are probably worth giving a try,
If you made the sphere a very, very, very dark grey (with the small stripes in the middle changing from black to a dark green, then a dark red as you get closer to getting the quad laser) and the background a dark blue, and if you reduced the brightness of the enemies on the other side of the sphere, the enemies that are important to the player would be much better visible. To better separate the sphere from the background, you could use a small
corona. You can also put a giant, wireframe
this (the images that show "Bronze knobbed mace")) around the sphere so that the camera is inbetween the sphere and the mace, which can also give a great visual impression when the player is moving.
