Pretty cool for 70+ hours, no real issues. Managed to win only losing a single gnome, poor bugger.
Feedback:
- Having a currently assigned units / max available unit count would be nice. To show how many units player can utilise. Basic unit stats; health, speed, damage, short description of the unit's logic and or backstory. Pretty much have all useful information about each unit in the raid group area.
- UI displaying current gold at all times, throughout each scene/level.
- Boar clan map: have a simple strength level for each location, to indicate how strong the forces are there. Player also has one, clearly visible. Strength level is just all units combined based on their effectiveness in battle(Goblin = 0.8, Boar = 1.0, Troll = 4.0, for example). Had no idea if Hog Clan or Boar Clan Leader was stronger, luckily chose correctly.
- Having off map raids that could be repeated to gain gold/troops. Once you lose some troops, you don't have much chance to win.
- Some type of battle of power UI, displaying current strength of you vs enemy during the battle.
- To save time on the next Game Jame, i'd suggest not adding a separate tutorial and focus on making everything streamlined. E.g. having all relevant information displayed in key locations during game play. Highlight viable targets to attack on the map(glowing, slight breathing animation or twitch, UI saying attack, etc), and darken or add fog to the other locations, clearly showing they are not intractable as of yet. Add big red text buttons to the war table and gnome, currently it's a tad difficult to see what is clickable(Yes it has a highlight, but a button instantly tells your brain I can click here.) Focus more on directing the player's attention, and add interactive tutorials if needed. Blocks of text and dialogue all in one go, causes people to skip it. Breaking it up into short concise information, spread throughout the game is the way to go. For example; player starts with only goblins(fragile, but have long pointy sticks), eventually they get a few boars(high health tanks, knocks back enemy) and notice goblins can stay behind the boars to safely stab enemies yet weak when unsupported. Let the player have an option to fight a troll at the beginning of game, and get decimated by it showing it's relative strength or have it aid you in a starting battle. Show how deadly your opponent is, as they attack in full force raiding your camp after 2-3 turns, afterwards gnome hints we should defend the camp from now on(A small goblin/boar raid that succeeds if player isn't defending is fine also). Stuff like this is how you can teach the player without directly telling them. Aside from that, adding short refined dialogue and input popups ever so often is fine. Also don't be afraid of letting the player die/fail, as long as your game play loop is tight with little to no padding dying over and over slowly learning is a valid option.
- Save currently assigned unit's each time player enters a battle. Had to manually remove boars and max goblins/gnomes every time.
- Possibly make your camp followers jump up and down ever so often and flip axis randomly.
- Battle Juice: each time a unit takes damage, flash their sprite to white and back to normal. On death launch them backwards high into the air, like they were punched into the sky or just do a quick shove 2-4 meters backwards rapidly.
- Having each unit be unique would help a lot. Currently they all are just variants of close range melee. And yeah i know, time constants.
- Goblins throw spears, or have extended attack range, low health.
- Boar charges at enemy stunning them for 1 second, attacks for 2-4 seconds runs away then charges again, high health and damage, slow attack.
- Trolls do an area attack hitting max 6 enemies per attack, massive health and damage, very slow movement and attack speed. Possibly throw rocks ever so often.
- Gnomes are invisible until they attack or spawn from behind enemy, and focus attacking goblins. Super fast attack speed, poor health.
- Demons knock back enemies with their mace, with a slowing effect
Overall well done. Gamedev is tough, especially with a time crunch. Keep it up.