The diagonal shot feels a lot more situational, but that’s probably a good thing. My previous strategy was “spam the alt shot button” because, honestly, if I hit a stray enemy, it was one less problem for me while I was focusing on a different one. This one feels useful strategically rather than as a benefit to button-mashing. It’s absolutely situational, but seemed useful while I was playing with it.

Of course, for nudging blocks sideways, I didn’t feel like I had a lot of control over the destination. I basically just hit it once from the side and figured “at least it has some off-chance of doing *something* now” and then proceeded to forget about it – however, I feel like that might’ve been the intent?

P.S. Interesting little glitch in the HTML5 version: it works fine in IE, but the arrow keys don’t move the ship in Firefox 6.0.2 for me. Of course, Vimeo is also broken in Firefox on my end, so take that with a grain of salt.

You got me thinking: originally the diagonal shot was intended to allow you to safely trigger the alien green-sweep thing, but instead I made it just clear out enemies.

I changed the rules a bit: the diagonal shot is now a lot less diagonal (only a few degrees off from 12-o’clock). The diagonal shot no longer clears enemies. It does two things: it triggers the green wave from the mid-size enemies, and you can use it to nudge a block piece left or right, which I think adds some strategy. Thanks for the inspiration and critique! You can try it out now, I’ve uploaded the changes.

Diagonal shot has its uses, but it seems more like a cheap fix to a bad mechanic rather than an interesting mechanic on its own. It could use a bit of thought put into it.

Also, there was an interesting gameplay feature I noted (before I remembered there was an alternate shot buttom): intentionally hitting the aliens to get my shots reflected would clear out enemies, which I used as a tactic to keep the screen from getting too flooded.

As for the asymmetry… yeah, I should fix that!

Secondary fire seems a little useless. Would dig it if I could use its diagonal nature to nudge out of place blocks to the left or right.

(Couldn’t quite find the pattern to when the smallest enemies would come to when they wouldn’t. Also there’s a fractal asymmetry in terms of small invaders ignore blocks their size, but medium invaders are wiped out by blocks their size.)

Cheers.