The "exit the character screen and enter again to get more money" bug is alive and well, so I managed to get in game with the girl that's still not done.
Played as a cyclops and the bomber girl. Cyclops girl feels like she doesn't have all the skills present yet, but having autoturrets is great. After some upgrades I could almost stand in place and do nothing. Floating orbs are OP btw.
Bomber girl is interesting, I never got behind the kicking mechanic, so I just upgraded the explosion size and went nuts with it.
Upgrades at the start of the game are also OP, and you really feel the lack of them on the cyclops.
Thank you for playing the game, it's always helpful see how other interact with what I made. I liked your idea of the bombergirl auto targeting enemies with kick, I will implement it in the future.
The game feels pretty good, the controls are responsive and the UI is well made. I played one full run with the starting character and it felt very easy, I wasn't at risk of dying at any point. Maybe I was just smart/lucky with my build, I dunno. I was admittedly a little bored by the end of the run, but that might just be because I'm not much of a VS-like lover. I then tried out the two other characters for a bit, but I didn't play full runs with either.
The game sprites are very charming and all look cohesive together. That being said, I'm not a fan of the the VFX: they don't match the game's art style at all. I would try doing something closer to your hand-drawn sprites, the default-Unity-looking explosions and trails are kinda soulless. On that note, the post-processing effects like chromatic aberration and bloom don't fit in too well either. The environment could use a little more visual interest as well, and as others have mentioned, the sound design leaves a lot to be desired.
I would often get the wrong description when hovering over an upgrade, and sometimes the description wouldn't update at all when I hovered over to another icon. That was the only bug I noticed.
The game looks promising overall, I have no doubts you can polish it more and end up with a very fun product. :)
Thank you for sharing your experience and thoughts with the game. I know the chromatic aberration don't fit very well in the game, it's just a placeholder effect for taking damage.
Survivorslike? Another game equivalent to doing coke lines? Hook me up fam
UI is nice and readable. Bloom effects and the general graphics are well done, nothing harsh on the eyes which is necessary for this type of game. There definitely needs to be a bit more going on with the sound design, it's pretty quiet when you hope that you'd be hearing the sounds of hundreds of enemies getting wiped out or hit. I was also hoping for some more attacks that knock back and push the enemies out of your radius, but other than that I quite enjoyed my time with it.
" I was also hoping for some more attacks that knock back and push the enemies out of your radius"
Yeah, I will work on that, the problem right now is that the knockback is hard coded, so I have to rewrite some code for that, in fact, I'm doing a big rewrite to implement a great quantity of new stuff for the gameplay in the next update. SFX will be implement too.
Thank you for playing the game, I'm glad you liked the bomber girl.
Hmm, another Survivorslike. Can't say I'm too excited about endlessly holding down LMB. Maybe it could be a toggle? You press "1" to start shooting skill 1 towards cursor, or press "2" to switch over to skill 2, etc. Or you have potentially an array of skills that all fire at the same time, but you have to aim them all individually by pressing their number and then using the cursor to lock in a direction of shooting. That could bridge the gap to that other character which plays like a normal Survivorslike. I mean, it's a bit weird to have manual shooting on some chars and not on others.
Anyhow, game feels fine, I would have played a bit longer, but it seemed like I had seen everything; at least no new challenges were coming up. Characters look good! edit: Sometimes I could not pick a certain skill from the selection, or others were redundant, etc. but I think you know about all this.
"it's a bit weird to have manual shooting on some chars and not on others."
I know that, but I decided taking a risk here with Dungeon Watchers, which is making many characters with really different gameplay styles, other survivors games the characters are just different stats, here the witch have an elemental magic affinity, the bomber elf unleash mayhem with explosions, the cyclops deploy an army of robots (which make here like a summoner type character) and the upcoming priest character will have a mechanic related to sacrificing her life in order to deal damage. My vision is making characters with their own perks and player have to find and discover how to make a build with them. Similar to picking a character on a MOBA. Anyways, I think I will be able to make the witch have an auto fire mode, but not all character in the future will be like that.
I’m no survival connoisseur, and the other comments have covered a lot of what I was going to say.
I played the bomb-elf first and got all the way to the end on the first try without getting a single health upgrade. It got pretty exciting when a horde of enemies started showing up at once, I’m surprised I even managed it.
I died playing as the witch about 1/3 of the way, I really couldn’t tell what was doing damage most of the time. I think the little bullets the eyeball enemies shoot should be a lot more visible because they seem to get lost among the particles from your own character and I think that’s what killed me.
With some appropriate SFX I’d say it’s pretty close to feature complete already, pretty good.
Thank you for testing the demo, what you say about the eyeball enemies is true, I have plans to make it more obvious in the screen, I think I will make a shader for that. Anyways, I will fix it for the next update.
It really needs attack and hit sounds. It's like all the juice went into the pretty particles and bloom to compensate.
There's a skill with regen icon and ice aura description.
The game takes a bit to get going, but once it does the waves are fun, although it's still not that challenging. I like having a bossfight at the end, but the summoner is too simple as it is. I expected being gatekept and build-shamed by it.
The bomb character is kind of meh when it comes to the basics, but it eventually does get the job done with bomb spamming. Animation bugs out when you press both mouse buttons.
I know there's many visual bugs, I will work on that for the next update. The summoner will be increase on difficulty too, right now is there just for testing the his code, but I will make him cast spells at the player and summon more dangerous monster, not only devil balls.
"There's a skill with regen icon and ice aura description."
I will check that and fixed it.
Thanks for playing the demo, I will sure to make a Summonner that build shame players the next update.
Testing the new character, jutting down my thoughts as I go.
Setup with the autofire orbs and the spiderbots is neat.
Just noticed that I do not really like the circular splash effect when a bullet hits an enemy, not sure what would be better though.
One upgrade idea for inventor would be deploying stationary turrets, seems on brand. These could be locked on to one position of the map, may be interesting. Cooldown would have to be pretty big though. It would make it possibly to sort of make a "camp area".
Enemy waves and variety adds a lot of fun to the gameplay.
I did it for balancing, because I thought that some players will just pick up that skill all the time and have an army of 10 air bombs, they can feel the game is too easy, but I was thinking about how make it without limit and maybe I will configure the "droprate" to decrease the more levels the player have in that particular skill.
Thank you for playing my game, I'm happy you liked the new character. I will consider the idea about the turrets.
Pretty fun survivor like, did my playthrough as the witch. decent amount of build variety. Charming art style.
Keep it up!
Couple of issues.
>Gem drop rate seems a bit inconsistent, i would go minutes without any dropping only then for the spawn rate to go nutty. Maybe make every enemy drop a gem and increase the exp threshold to compensate.
>Bug where the description at the bottom would not match the hovered power up box. Power up was health regen and it gave me the description for frost aura. May be worth pointing out that frost aura was in that slot before in the previous menu.
>"random" is misspelled in the thunder power up
>The summoner at the end spawned miles away from me.
Thank you for your observations, the gem drop rate is made by chance, it's not fixed, so probably was bad luck, I will look on that and see if I can do something about it.
Witch is okay, bomber is awkward at first but fun later, inventor is just great all across the board. Overall, very pleasant survivorlike, I like it.
It would sometimes be nice to have more enemies to kill, there are moments around ~4 mins left on the timer where you're just chasing after anything that'll give you more XP, before the great slime horde appears.
I will update the waves of enemies in the next update, I will check my code on the 4min section, I'm glad you liked the game so far, thank you for playing my game.
you already know i love this game and the art in it, so i'll go straight into my thoughts. i wanted to play as Iris since i've played as the previous characters before.
so, i boot up the game and buy Iris. going into the dungeon with her immediately kills you
i resolved this by buying bomb girl, starting, exiting, then starting with Iris.
i immediately noticed more sound and maybe a change in the music? it's very nice.
holding left-mouse-button with cyclops girl makes me use her Idle animation. i can move around as i do this, which looks silly. since i see you're using unity, look into how you should handle animation layers for 2d objects. it's simple enough for 3d, but i figure there's probably something similar for 2D sprites. either that or divide the sprite into halves so you can animate only the legs on movement and only the arms on attacking.
on level up, a bunch of buttons appear to select a powerup. if your mouse is in the middle of the screen, as the buttons appear you technically "mouse over" all of them , playing their sounds. ideally make the colliders for these buttons inactive while the animation plays, and active once its done. this is a very minor thing.
having fireball, mines, helicopter bots, ice aura and thunderstrike is a lot and there are many particle effects playing at the same time. not sure if this is an issue or not, but if you add more skills it might clutter the screen too much. not sure what to do about that, it's just an observation anyway.
for the spider-mines, consider making them auto-deployable. it might be interesting to have a character that doesn't need to attack, the robots automatically do it for her! it fits her style anyway, since she's shown with her hands in her pocket, like she doesn't have to do any more work.
text stuff:
couple of typos i noticed. i wasn't paying that much attention but these are simple
>Rise your X Y Z -> Increase your X Y Z. Rise is to get out of bed and "Raise" is to increase something, but just saying Increase sounds better
Leveling up the Aerial bomb says it increases by 1 up to 3. i first understood that as "you will have 3 after this upgrade" and i was confused, but i found out you meant the Maximum possible amount of bots is 3. if this is the case, you should not write that and instead simply not allow the skill to show up again on level up.
as always, great stuff. the game is progressing nicely and improving every DD. keep it up!
Thank you for the feed back, I will fix the typos.
About the too many power up on screen, I have played many games of this kind and it's something common in this type of games, but have plans to add some configuration in the graphics menu for player that don't like it (for example a bloom slider or having an option to deactivate the particles effects).
"on level up, a bunch of buttons appear to select a powerup. if your mouse is in the middle of the screen, as the buttons appear you technically "mouse over" all of them , playing their sounds. ideally make the colliders for these buttons inactive while the animation plays, and active once its done. this is a very minor thing."
I have stuff to add like more graphics options and sounds, when I work on those menus I will add windows mode too.
Sorry for having to lock priest but I'm still working on her and her current state is unplayable, right now I will have to rework some code in order to implement her gameplay, for the next update.
I'm glad you liked the game so far, thank you for playing it.
I had a pretty fun time, the bomb girl has to be my favorite. Stacking auras Specifically fireball seems like the way to go.
I'm not 100% sure how the masteries work, but the enemies are varied and interesting.
It did take me a while to figure out how to alt fire, maybe a button prompt can alleviate that. And kicking bombs seems kind of difficult its not really worth it. Lining up the hit box + timing the bomb isn't something you can really do with hordes of enemies on you, at least I couldn't pull it off.
Looking forward to where you take this, but best girl (blonde) is locked so 0/10
Sorry for having the blonde girl blocked, but right now she is not complete, I have to rework some of the code in order to allow her playstyle. Next will have her for sure because I'm work harder this next weeks for a page/demo on steam. I'm glad you liked the game so far.
Comments
The "exit the character screen and enter again to get more money" bug is alive and well, so I managed to get in game with the girl that's still not done.
Played as a cyclops and the bomber girl. Cyclops girl feels like she doesn't have all the skills present yet, but having autoturrets is great. After some upgrades I could almost stand in place and do nothing. Floating orbs are OP btw.
Bomber girl is interesting, I never got behind the kicking mechanic, so I just upgraded the explosion size and went nuts with it.
Upgrades at the start of the game are also OP, and you really feel the lack of them on the cyclops.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2138119332
your stream starts at around 29:00
Thank you for playing the game, it's always helpful see how other interact with what I made. I liked your idea of the bombergirl auto targeting enemies with kick, I will implement it in the future.
nice! yeah it was quite fun. glad you found the playtest helpful
The game feels pretty good, the controls are responsive and the UI is well made. I played one full run with the starting character and it felt very easy, I wasn't at risk of dying at any point. Maybe I was just smart/lucky with my build, I dunno. I was admittedly a little bored by the end of the run, but that might just be because I'm not much of a VS-like lover. I then tried out the two other characters for a bit, but I didn't play full runs with either.
The game sprites are very charming and all look cohesive together. That being said, I'm not a fan of the the VFX: they don't match the game's art style at all. I would try doing something closer to your hand-drawn sprites, the default-Unity-looking explosions and trails are kinda soulless. On that note, the post-processing effects like chromatic aberration and bloom don't fit in too well either. The environment could use a little more visual interest as well, and as others have mentioned, the sound design leaves a lot to be desired.
I would often get the wrong description when hovering over an upgrade, and sometimes the description wouldn't update at all when I hovered over to another icon. That was the only bug I noticed.
The game looks promising overall, I have no doubts you can polish it more and end up with a very fun product. :)
Thank you for sharing your experience and thoughts with the game. I know the chromatic aberration don't fit very well in the game, it's just a placeholder effect for taking damage.
Survivorslike? Another game equivalent to doing coke lines? Hook me up fam
UI is nice and readable. Bloom effects and the general graphics are well done, nothing harsh on the eyes which is necessary for this type of game. There definitely needs to be a bit more going on with the sound design, it's pretty quiet when you hope that you'd be hearing the sounds of hundreds of enemies getting wiped out or hit. I was also hoping for some more attacks that knock back and push the enemies out of your radius, but other than that I quite enjoyed my time with it.
Bomb chick is best girl.
" I was also hoping for some more attacks that knock back and push the enemies out of your radius"
Yeah, I will work on that, the problem right now is that the knockback is hard coded, so I have to rewrite some code for that, in fact, I'm doing a big rewrite to implement a great quantity of new stuff for the gameplay in the next update. SFX will be implement too.
Thank you for playing the game, I'm glad you liked the bomber girl.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2138783045
Hmm, another Survivorslike. Can't say I'm too excited about endlessly holding down LMB. Maybe it could be a toggle? You press "1" to start shooting skill 1 towards cursor, or press "2" to switch over to skill 2, etc. Or you have potentially an array of skills that all fire at the same time, but you have to aim them all individually by pressing their number and then using the cursor to lock in a direction of shooting. That could bridge the gap to that other character which plays like a normal Survivorslike. I mean, it's a bit weird to have manual shooting on some chars and not on others.
Anyhow, game feels fine, I would have played a bit longer, but it seemed like I had seen everything; at least no new challenges were coming up. Characters look good!
edit: Sometimes I could not pick a certain skill from the selection, or others were redundant, etc. but I think you know about all this.
"it's a bit weird to have manual shooting on some chars and not on others."
I know that, but I decided taking a risk here with Dungeon Watchers, which is making many characters with really different gameplay styles, other survivors games the characters are just different stats, here the witch have an elemental magic affinity, the bomber elf unleash mayhem with explosions, the cyclops deploy an army of robots (which make here like a summoner type character) and the upcoming priest character will have a mechanic related to sacrificing her life in order to deal damage. My vision is making characters with their own perks and player have to find and discover how to make a build with them. Similar to picking a character on a MOBA. Anyways, I think I will be able to make the witch have an auto fire mode, but not all character in the future will be like that.
Thank you for testing my demo.
I’m no survival connoisseur, and the other comments have covered a lot of what I was going to say.
I played the bomb-elf first and got all the way to the end on the first try without getting a single health upgrade. It got pretty exciting when a horde of enemies started showing up at once, I’m surprised I even managed it.
I died playing as the witch about 1/3 of the way, I really couldn’t tell what was doing damage most of the time. I think the little bullets the eyeball enemies shoot should be a lot more visible because they seem to get lost among the particles from your own character and I think that’s what killed me.
With some appropriate SFX I’d say it’s pretty close to feature complete already, pretty good.
Thank you for testing the demo, what you say about the eyeball enemies is true, I have plans to make it more obvious in the screen, I think I will make a shader for that. Anyways, I will fix it for the next update.
playing your game is always a pleasure.
i tried the cyclop doctor
getting hit should give some sound feedback.
also, the music does not loop properly, which is pretty jarring.
aside from that, good progress. the game was unironically already fun to play months ago and it just keeps getting better.
"the music does not loop properly"
I will check what happened in the code.
"getting hit should give some sound feedback."
I know, there's many sfx I still have to implement in the future. Future update will fix that.
Thank you for playing the game, it's good to know many people is having some fun with it, even at this alpha state.
It really needs attack and hit sounds. It's like all the juice went into the pretty particles and bloom to compensate.
There's a skill with regen icon and ice aura description.
The game takes a bit to get going, but once it does the waves are fun, although it's still not that challenging. I like having a bossfight at the end, but the summoner is too simple as it is. I expected being gatekept and build-shamed by it.
The bomb character is kind of meh when it comes to the basics, but it eventually does get the job done with bomb spamming. Animation bugs out when you press both mouse buttons.
I know there's many visual bugs, I will work on that for the next update. The summoner will be increase on difficulty too, right now is there just for testing the his code, but I will make him cast spells at the player and summon more dangerous monster, not only devil balls.
"There's a skill with regen icon and ice aura description."
I will check that and fixed it.
Thanks for playing the demo, I will sure to make a Summonner that build shame players the next update.
Testing the new character, jutting down my thoughts as I go.
Setup with the autofire orbs and the spiderbots is neat.
Just noticed that I do not really like the circular splash effect when a bullet hits an enemy, not sure what would be better though.
One upgrade idea for inventor would be deploying stationary turrets, seems on brand. These could be locked on to one position of the map, may be interesting. Cooldown would have to be pretty big though. It would make it possibly to sort of make a "camp area".
Enemy waves and variety adds a lot of fun to the gameplay.
Why set a limit for the amount of airbombs?
New character is fun!
"Why set a limit for the amount of airbombs? "
I did it for balancing, because I thought that some players will just pick up that skill all the time and have an army of 10 air bombs, they can feel the game is too easy, but I was thinking about how make it without limit and maybe I will configure the "droprate" to decrease the more levels the player have in that particular skill.
Thank you for playing my game, I'm happy you liked the new character. I will consider the idea about the turrets.
Pretty fun survivor like, did my playthrough as the witch. decent amount of build variety. Charming art style.
Keep it up!
Couple of issues.
>Gem drop rate seems a bit inconsistent, i would go minutes without any dropping only then for the spawn rate to go nutty. Maybe make every enemy drop a gem and increase the exp threshold to compensate.
>Bug where the description at the bottom would not match the hovered power up box. Power up was health regen and it gave me the description for frost aura. May be worth pointing out that frost aura was in that slot before in the previous menu.
>"random" is misspelled in the thunder power up
>The summoner at the end spawned miles away from me.
Thank you for your observations, the gem drop rate is made by chance, it's not fixed, so probably was bad luck, I will look on that and see if I can do something about it.
Witch is okay, bomber is awkward at first but fun later, inventor is just great all across the board. Overall, very pleasant survivorlike, I like it.
It would sometimes be nice to have more enemies to kill, there are moments around ~4 mins left on the timer where you're just chasing after anything that'll give you more XP, before the great slime horde appears.
I will update the waves of enemies in the next update, I will check my code on the 4min section, I'm glad you liked the game so far, thank you for playing my game.
you already know i love this game and the art in it, so i'll go straight into my thoughts. i wanted to play as Iris since i've played as the previous characters before.
so, i boot up the game and buy Iris. going into the dungeon with her immediately kills you
i resolved this by buying bomb girl, starting, exiting, then starting with Iris.
i immediately noticed more sound and maybe a change in the music? it's very nice.
holding left-mouse-button with cyclops girl makes me use her Idle animation. i can move around as i do this, which looks silly. since i see you're using unity, look into how you should handle animation layers for 2d objects. it's simple enough for 3d, but i figure there's probably something similar for 2D sprites. either that or divide the sprite into halves so you can animate only the legs on movement and only the arms on attacking.
on level up, a bunch of buttons appear to select a powerup. if your mouse is in the middle of the screen, as the buttons appear you technically "mouse over" all of them , playing their sounds. ideally make the colliders for these buttons inactive while the animation plays, and active once its done. this is a very minor thing.
having fireball, mines, helicopter bots, ice aura and thunderstrike is a lot and there are many particle effects playing at the same time. not sure if this is an issue or not, but if you add more skills it might clutter the screen too much. not sure what to do about that, it's just an observation anyway.
for the spider-mines, consider making them auto-deployable. it might be interesting to have a character that doesn't need to attack, the robots automatically do it for her! it fits her style anyway, since she's shown with her hands in her pocket, like she doesn't have to do any more work.
text stuff:
couple of typos i noticed. i wasn't paying that much attention but these are simple
>Allow Iris too deploy spider bombs -> Allow Iris *to* deploy..
>Rise your X Y Z -> Increase your X Y Z. Rise is to get out of bed and "Raise" is to increase something, but just saying Increase sounds better
Leveling up the Aerial bomb says it increases by 1 up to 3. i first understood that as "you will have 3 after this upgrade" and i was confused, but i found out you meant the Maximum possible amount of bots is 3. if this is the case, you should not write that and instead simply not allow the skill to show up again on level up.
as always, great stuff. the game is progressing nicely and improving every DD. keep it up!
Thank you for the feed back, I will fix the typos.
About the too many power up on screen, I have played many games of this kind and it's something common in this type of games, but have plans to add some configuration in the graphics menu for player that don't like it (for example a bloom slider or having an option to deactivate the particles effects).
"on level up, a bunch of buttons appear to select a powerup. if your mouse is in the middle of the screen, as the buttons appear you technically "mouse over" all of them , playing their sounds. ideally make the colliders for these buttons inactive while the animation plays, and active once its done. this is a very minor thing."
I didn't know that, I will fix it. Thanks.
Why lock character in demo? I want to use priestsan :(
Witch - very unsatisfied, maybe I did not unlock too much skill for her. maybe make her fire ball deal more damage. Did not play her much.
Bomb chick - Very satisfied.
Doc - Very good too but not much to do before unlock spider bomb.
Not encounter any bugs so far. Overall I like it very much 8/10. Also, no window mode?
Bless, GMI.
I have stuff to add like more graphics options and sounds, when I work on those menus I will add windows mode too.
Sorry for having to lock priest but I'm still working on her and her current state is unplayable, right now I will have to rework some code in order to implement her gameplay, for the next update.
I'm glad you liked the game so far, thank you for playing it.
I had a pretty fun time, the bomb girl has to be my favorite.
Stacking auras Specifically fireball seems like the way to go.
I'm not 100% sure how the masteries work, but the enemies are varied and interesting.
It did take me a while to figure out how to alt fire, maybe a button prompt can alleviate that. And kicking bombs seems kind of difficult its not really worth it. Lining up the hit box + timing the bomb isn't something you can really do with hordes of enemies on you, at least I couldn't pull it off.
Looking forward to where you take this, but best girl (blonde) is locked so 0/10
Sorry for having the blonde girl blocked, but right now she is not complete, I have to rework some of the code in order to allow her playstyle. Next will have her for sure because I'm work harder this next weeks for a page/demo on steam. I'm glad you liked the game so far.
Bug fixes:
- Shy Ghosts had a bug with Zelvy the bomber elf, the didn't get shy when they are supposed to. Now it's fixed.
- Sometimes, when picking too many experience, some exp points where lost when leveling up, that should no longer happen.
New Character:
- Iris, the cyclops doctor: This character will use robots to deal dmg to the enemies around.
New Skill Powers:
- Fire Orbs: Damaging fire orbs float around the player up to a max of 4.
- Aerial Bombs (unique skill for Iris): Summon a guardian bomb which auto aim near enemies.
- Spider Bombs (Skill): Deploy spider bombs which follow enemies until close enough to explode.
Gameplay changes:
- Amount needed for level changed.
- Enemy spawn rate modified, should be more challenging than previous versions.
- They are now gems with other colors: yellow and red. They give more experience.
Changes on UI:
- New small redesign for the pause menu.
- Player select menu have now a music.
- Pause menu now show the data of most characters stats (will be improved in the future).
- Power up selection have now some SFX.
- Some power ups now have a unique icon redesign , in the future all icons will have they own design.
Additional note:
- Next version will have a heavy rework, because I will rewrite a big chunk of code to implement new features I have in mind.