Thanks for your feedback!!!
Just wondering, did you promote all of your clones to knight?
Knight has really slow speed, but high in damage.
So to have a better synergy with knight, you either need to unlock skill or get a defender.
Each promoted clones has their own specialty, you can know more by hovering over them. I also just pushed a new update explaining how each of the clone AIs work.
Based on my playthrough, its better not to promote first and gather more normal clones. Also, nice idea to make clones smarter by anticipating enemy directions.
Maybe... I can lock promotion and players need to reached certain levels to unlock them? This allows players to focus more on normal clones first, and other aspect like skills.
I agree, I think the build up is quite slow, so it get tedious quite fast. I'm still trying to balance this aspect, as in the older version, player escalated too quickly and become too overpowered, it was quite fun watching them destroy the game hahahaha.
Power-ups that randomly spawn on the map is one of the things I'm planning to add too, player need to be quick to destroy it or it will be gone. Some power-ups like temp increases point gain, temp infinity shield, etc.
Viewing post in Hold My Button!!! jam comments
So I had 5 clones, and I tried to promote each one to a different class. In the first few upgrades they are so similar I didn't notice what was supposed to be different about them from watching them move and interact with the enemies. But nothing a bit of rebalancing wouldn't fix.
You can make the first few upgrades have a "great" effect, then have them get exponentially more expensive, and diminish their returns (i.e. you pay 10x the price to get 1/10th of the upgrade). That way, in the beginning, you really feel the upgrades stacking, but as you get more advanced, you really need to accumulate points to make them go from doing 1000 damage to 1100 damage. See this article.
But yeah. I was in a bit of a rush so I didn't hover over anything, I was clicking. A LOT. lol Maybe something in the UI to visualize what the upgrade (i.e. 100dmg >> 110dmg) would help communicate it.
IDK about locking the promotion. I think clearly communicating the effect on the clone should be enough. In my opinion you don't want to restrict too much player expression. If I want to promote right away, I should be able to do it and be aware of the tradeoffs.
I like the powerup idea. You could even have a special clone that just collects powerups!
As for the anticipating enemy direction thing, I made a `TargetManager` class for Recolonizer, and it's definitely overkill for your project, but who knows, you might find something in here to improve the targeting of the clones. It's where I wrote the predictive targeting logic (see GetCorrectedTargetPosition). It has quite a few dependencies for some other functionality (such as using physics to shoot a rigidbody projectile perfectly on target), so if you want me to share more just ask.
Good luck on your project!