Oh thank you so much!
And those aren't nits, they are feedback that really help!
I didn't get as much time on it as I wanted too to work on this given how ambitious it was, and as a result I didn't get as much play testing/feedback in, cause I didn't have like a build with all core features until uhh 6 hours before. Compared to Necromancer Nonsense which I would have been happy to submit a week and a half early, so the last week was just playing it and having other folks play it and trying out different thing.
So important reminder on how important a beta period is! So I think you're right on basically all of these!
1. Yeah I think having some sort of audio theme for all friendly vs enemy things would have been nice. That was a big part of why you only got ally orbs, so you only have to recognize the one sound. But I think it fell into the mess. Gotta think how to clean it up.
2. Good point! I say you wanna be behind it, but in the chaos of the game it's probably hard to tell right away.
3. So the sonar "should" be what you're asking for, but maybe it's not working intuitively. It gives you little pings based on what is in front of you, but with a delay based on how far away they are. Idea being it's like a real rardar, where it's based on how long it takes for sound to hit the thing then get back to you. Maybe this is just a tutorial thing, or maybe I can print results of radar to log to make it more obvious what it did? Probably both!
4. So the enemy distance noise is game saying "You are in range of attack", assuming you mean the danger thing. IDK if that ended up being all that help though except for the tower.
5. Yeahhh idea was you'd need to bounce between the other lanes, protecting the lane you weren't on, then jumping back to push your other lane because the lane you weren't on would be destroyed if you didn't. I guess moba like? But I reallllly struggled with balance. Anytime I got the enemies pushing right, players died too fast. If I weakened the defenses, then it felt like there was no time to do anything on the other lane. I really need to decide how long I want a game to last, then time out "Okay if I push like I expect a player to do, it takes me X time to push a lane. So I need the other lane to fall in less time than that if the player doesn't intervene" and buff/weaken things to make that happen. I keep thinking I should add some sort of "pressure" unit called flankers that are extra units that only spawn on the lane you aren't on, and the longer you aren't on that lane the faster they spawn. That might be easier than trying to perfectly balance a level.
Or opposite, where there is a "hunter" character that spawns on the players lane if they spend too long on it.
6. Ahhh so many noises to balance. You are totally right, I just gotta figure out how I need to clean up the sound scape in general. Maybe I just need to get more into having very distinct audio pings for things that play as well as the pretty stuff that cuts through since players have full control of audio levels, they can always lower them if not wanted. Or tie all "advanced accessibility" alerts to one thing.
7. Idea was I didn't want player to be able to body block for forever. I made the player rather tanky, so didn't want it to be like "respawn, step in front of gate, kill a few things, die, repeat" and instead be you need to stay safe for a second and heal. Having the enemy get something beneficial, or a longer respawn timer, probably does this just fine though.
8.Hmm there are audio tells when abilities come off cool down, but as part of balance I will admit they didn't have the impact I wanted. But again, audio sound scape crowding was a problem.
9. Me and fonts man. I picked a font, used it in places... oh dang looked unreadable in this menu, okay lemme change it here then go change it elsewhere later... oh crap in another place the new font is unreadable, uhhh new font. Then never actually got around to finding one that was half decent everywhere. So yeah... just right.
So yeah a lot of the feedback is "soundscape and audio balance is off" but you gave good specific issues with it, which is good cause as the dev I'm like "I recognize it's a mess, but my silly brain hears all the alerts fine and knows their purpose, because i made them" so very helpful!