itch.io

Fun game so far, but a bit short. Thanks for including a (simple) save system.

Here is a list of small issues and suggestions:

• Typo: “The enemy remain unbroken.” —> Use “enemies remain” or “enemy remains”.
• More consistent capitalization style:
  • The text in Upgrades seems to use some kind of title case. “Per” could be changed to lower case like “to” and “on”.
  • The 2 lines above “Enter Battle” use all lower case.
  • The line “The enemy remain unbroken.” uses normal case.
• Resounding Fragments II + III: These names are too long and go over the edges of their boxes.
• HP bar: A bigger display of your Hit Points would be more convenient than the very small bar on the far left side.
  • Use case: If your HP is low, killing a group of easier enemies would be better than hitting an isolated harder enemy since Spirit Drain is based on kills and not damage dealt. But to make those decisions, you need to keep an eye on that small HP bar …
  • A possible improvement could be a big HP bar at the top/bottom or left edge of the screen.
    • This could be made more informative with additional display of numbers current / max.
    • You could add something like - x.y / s for Blight Damage and + a.b / Kill for Spirit Drain – maybe in different colors.
  • You could also add a similar HP bar for bosses at the opposite edge of the screen.
• Add zoom to the Upgrade Tree.
  • It is already too big to fit on the screen completely and you want to add many more upgrades.
  • This would also make sharing builds easier in case that becomes relevant at some point.
• Add more save slots so players can try out different strategies/builds.
• Add run modifiers and/or difficulties: E.g. easier/harder/slower/faster enemies, more/less Gold, certain upgrades are disabled.
• Temple Huntsmen I depends on Oathsworn Guard III. This makes the army progress rather linear and feels like an unnecessary limitation of the player’s choices. Perhaps you could change the dependency to Oathsworn Guard I or some entirely different part of the Upgrade Tree.

Possible softlock

To make replaying the game a bit more challenging I decided to skip the HP upgrades and use only Spirit Drain for dealing with Blight Damage.
During my first attempt this resulted in a complete softlock after beating the 2nd boss: I had spend the Gold from that fight on some other upgrade and couldn’t get any more from the 3rd map since the 1st projectile doesn’t reach the enemies within the first 3 seconds.

While you are not responsible for players making suboptimal decisions, you should make sure such a situation (before reaching the game’s end) without any way to make more progress isn’t possible.
Here are a few solutions to prevent that specific situation:

• Make already completed (easier) battles repeatable. This might create conflicts when you add some kind of story …
• Add additional Gold income:
  • very small passive income
  • and/or small income per battle (in addition to gold for kills)
  • Both could scale with number of bosses killed and be 0 before defeating the 1st boss.
• Change Blight Damage:
  • It could depend on the number of enemies on the screen.
  • It could start at 0 (or the previous battle’s value) and ramp up to the battle’s original value within the first 10 seconds or something similar.
  • Some kind of passive HP gain (in addition to Spirit Drain) or “Blight Protection” could also work.
• Add HP gain in addition to upgrades:
  • After defeating a boss (for the first time) you could add some HP as a reward. The resulting base value without HP upgrades should be enough to survive until the 1st projectile reaches the enemies on the next map.
  • Or you could add a HP multiplier based on the number of bosses defeated. This might require scaling down existing HP upgrades a bit.
• Make upgrades refundable so the build can be changed.
  • You could make this cost some kind of currency or add some kind of (temporary?) penalty/debuff.
  • Or you could limit this to when the player has reached a situation that would otherwise prevent progress.
• Change the Upgrade dependencies:
  • You could change Spirit Drain I to additionally depend on some HP upgrade e.g. Fortitude III. This would turn the (Directed) Tree into a more general (Directed) Acyclic Graph.
  • Or you could lock some Upgrades until a specific boss is defeated. E.g. Spirit Drain only becomes available after the 2nd boss is defeated, so reaching the 3rd map would only be possible with some of the HP upgrades.

On my second attempt I changed the challenge to “minimal HP” instead of “only base HP” and kept some of the Gold from defeating the 2nd boss in reserve to prevent that softlock. It is possible to beat the

• 1st boss with Spirit Drain I and 3 HP (no HP upgrades). Without Spirit Drain and HP upgrades you survive only 30 seconds …
• 2nd boss with Spirit Drain I–II and 3 HP (no HP upgrades).
• 3rd boss with Spirit Drain I–III and 8 HP (Fortitude I–III)

It might be possible to reduce the HP-related upgrades for 2nd and 3rd boss further.