Alright, pretty addicting arena shooter I have to admit.
The concept of putting down turrets, but also being able to use them as your own weapons and retaining the upgrade is brilliant. It is a very solid concept for an arena shooter.
It took me a couple of waves to understand everything, like how to upgrade weapons, swapping them out, and then it took me another couple of waves to realize that by standing next to one it "repaired". A mini tutorial wouldn't hurt or maybe just a "how-to" in the main menu with some animated gifs.
There are some really nice risk-reward factors like the bonus waves, perfect waves enabling a 2x wave, etc.
It was kind of hard to tell what enemies did what. I was running past enemies that I didn't really know what they did most of the time, just dodging stuff. I liked the outline that melee mobs did before attacking you though that is a good telegraph.
I think the art style is charming but more color variety would help
Some of the upgrades might need to be a bit more detailed. I picked the artillery card and I did not like what it did.
Speaking of which maybe let players remove upgrades they don't like for a cost.
Music is fantastic I dunno if it's an original composition or what.
Only 1 playthrough, didn't mess with melee stuff because I feel like that never works out in these kind of games, but I might revisit this later again. Fun game!
Thanks for the feedback and kind words, happy to hear I'm on the right track with the gameplay concept, and the visuals especially.
>It was kind of hard to tell what enemies did what.
All the non-animated and hue-shifted enemies are placeholder, so adding more models/animations should help with enemy behavior clarity. I'll be sure to pay attention to it.
>I picked the artillery card and I did not like what it did.
Yeah artillery is kind of... bad. I think it's interesting though, so I'll tweak it and try to make it better. At some point I'd like to have a tooltip system where you can mouse over keywords to expand, so you could read exactly what it does.
>Music is fantastic I dunno if it's an original composition or what.
It's all ripped from various bullet hell games I like, namely: Battle Garegga, Armed Police Batrider, DoDonPachi DaiOuJou, Ketsui, and Espgaluda. The final music will without question be significantly worse, lol
>Frustratingly laggy, in general and especially when using the special ability. Would prefer to play it as a download.
Yeah I keep doing optimization but the stuff I want to do is just inherently laggy since my enemies are slightly more intelligent than in most Survivors games. I've still got a couple big optimizations to do, so I'll get on that.
>you can actually destroy progress on a turret by changing the weapon? that sucks, made me almost quit
Oh yeah, I had grand ideas for how this would tie into the upgrade system and sometimes be the right choice, but never really finished it. I'll probably just take it out, thanks for shining a light on it.
>so far it was quite entertaining (only reached level 18)
great to hear
Double-thanks for the playthrough video, those are always super helpful
Known bug: "fodder" enemies in boss rounds are sometimes invisible, I'll upload a fix later. Your turrets will still target them properly and clear them out
I mostly worked on the visuals this time, so let me know if the enemies look like ass.
Other than that, I'm always interested to hear your thoughts on the difficulty curve, how far you got on what difficulty with what build/strategy, etc.
Comments
Alright, pretty addicting arena shooter I have to admit.
The concept of putting down turrets, but also being able to use them as your own weapons and retaining the upgrade is brilliant. It is a very solid concept for an arena shooter.
It took me a couple of waves to understand everything, like how to upgrade weapons, swapping them out, and then it took me another couple of waves to realize that by standing next to one it "repaired". A mini tutorial wouldn't hurt or maybe just a "how-to" in the main menu with some animated gifs.
There are some really nice risk-reward factors like the bonus waves, perfect waves enabling a 2x wave, etc.
It was kind of hard to tell what enemies did what. I was running past enemies that I didn't really know what they did most of the time, just dodging stuff. I liked the outline that melee mobs did before attacking you though that is a good telegraph.
I think the art style is charming but more color variety would help
Some of the upgrades might need to be a bit more detailed. I picked the artillery card and I did not like what it did.
Speaking of which maybe let players remove upgrades they don't like for a cost.
Music is fantastic I dunno if it's an original composition or what.
Only 1 playthrough, didn't mess with melee stuff because I feel like that never works out in these kind of games, but I might revisit this later again. Fun game!
Thanks for the feedback and kind words, happy to hear I'm on the right track with the gameplay concept, and the visuals especially.
>It was kind of hard to tell what enemies did what.
All the non-animated and hue-shifted enemies are placeholder, so adding more models/animations should help with enemy behavior clarity. I'll be sure to pay attention to it.
>I picked the artillery card and I did not like what it did.
Yeah artillery is kind of... bad. I think it's interesting though, so I'll tweak it and try to make it better. At some point I'd like to have a tooltip system where you can mouse over keywords to expand, so you could read exactly what it does.
>Music is fantastic I dunno if it's an original composition or what.
It's all ripped from various bullet hell games I like, namely: Battle Garegga, Armed Police Batrider, DoDonPachi DaiOuJou, Ketsui, and Espgaluda. The final music will without question be significantly worse, lol
Took more than three minutes to get half the load bar full.
No commentary video
thanks for the feedback, m8
>Frustratingly laggy, in general and especially when using the special ability. Would prefer to play it as a download.
Yeah I keep doing optimization but the stuff I want to do is just inherently laggy since my enemies are slightly more intelligent than in most Survivors games. I've still got a couple big optimizations to do, so I'll get on that.
>you can actually destroy progress on a turret by changing the weapon? that sucks, made me almost quit
Oh yeah, I had grand ideas for how this would tie into the upgrade system and sometimes be the right choice, but never really finished it. I'll probably just take it out, thanks for shining a light on it.
>so far it was quite entertaining (only reached level 18)
great to hear
Double-thanks for the playthrough video, those are always super helpful
My pleasure. Keep it up!
Known bug: "fodder" enemies in boss rounds are sometimes invisible, I'll upload a fix later. Your turrets will still target them properly and clear them out
I mostly worked on the visuals this time, so let me know if the enemies look like ass.
Other than that, I'm always interested to hear your thoughts on the difficulty curve, how far you got on what difficulty with what build/strategy, etc.