Hi there Axyre, first of all cool game! I try to leave detailed feedback on every game I play to help people, so I hope this doesn't come across as daunting - these are just my thoughts, so feel free to disregard feedback you think is irrelevant!
Thoughts in order as I played:
- I love the UI and color scheme!
- The game is a TD? Well I might be biased toward it now cuz I love TDs.
- There's a bug with the help panel text overlapping at page 2 onward. It always happens at the start of each game, possibly related to startup lag. (Screenshot below)
- HAHA LOVE THE META when submitting "Submitted after deadline, score 0.5" love the humor!
- "SHIFT+ESC to end the game" <-- I think should rephrase to "end the jam" because you have the "game" window and the "jam" submission, and the wording here is ambiguous between the two, which confused me. I thought there were multiple games.
- Took awhile to learn the game because you actually have to type the inspiration AND the field to replace. I think that part should've been bolded in the instructions maybe. But it was very cool to see the values actually affected the game. I made enemy speed 35 and that was wicked!
- That said I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do - there were multiple values for each script so I wasn't sure if I was just supposed to guess what made the game most balanced and how to gauge what values were balanced. This part was unclear to me. I just plugged values I thought made sense, but I always got the same 0.5 score each time, which made me feel like an idiot because I didn't know what I was missing.
- I'm assuming based on all the info so far that I'm supposed to make a "balanced" game but the game doesn't define what balanced entails.
- I wish the end screen told me what I did wrong, so that I can do better in my next playthrough like player reviews "turret is too strong! enemies spawn too fast! needs more range on the turret"
- Then I would at least know what I did wrong and correct them? Right now I was just guessing and failing which wasn't very fun.
A few more games later, these thoughts crossed my mind:
- The inspirations screen get flooded with new entries very quickly and this blocks the viewport screen, making it difficult to see if the changes I am making were applying in the way I wanted, such as if I was applying fire rate correctly. Speaking of fire rate:
- I wasn't sure if Tower.Fire_Rate being a high value, or low value was better. In this case tooltips when hovering over it, even if to simply say 'higher=better' would succinctly clear up any doubt
- I wasn't sure what values I was supposed to aim for for each variable - was attack being high a good thing? Or a bad thing because it breaks balance? I like to see it kill enemies so I always assign it high and I'm guessing most players may intuitively do this?
- Also the turret by default one shots the enemy so I didn't really see a reason to change the Enemy.scrp values. The only thing that felt like it mattered was move_Speed, it makes them all slow so the turret can kill them all in time, and thus, it makes enemy.damage irrelevant since they don't hit me. Turret HP and HP regen also become irrelevant stats.
- I think I had the most fun when I made the turret super strong with 45 range, 0.28s fire rate and 19 attack. Just by changing these 3 variables, the turret basically kills anything the moment it comes on screen. I didn't even have to mess with the enemies or world script. This point in the game was where the fun peaked for me - seeing the turret super strong, but I didn't know if that's the intent. I submitted with these stats and got 0.5 score.
- Throughout my playthrough, I felt like there is some info I'm missing out to make this fun, but I couldn't quite figure it out. I did a serious playthrough with values that seemed sensible but still 0.5 rating.
- I noticed the console window, but wasn't sure what I was supposed to be doing or looking at here. It shows me all the info but I don't know what I can do with those info to make a balanced game.
Overall, I still liked the UI and the concept though, and despite its flaws it managed to engage me to an extent because I wanted to try my best to figure out what I needed to do, something that I don't do often for games that bore me, so that was nice. Maybe I'm not the best audience and perhaps this would be a game relatable to game developers which is basically everyone else here haha.
Screenshot of the bug:
