None of the upgrade buttons seem to do anything. There's no clear price for upgrades. There's a lot of stuff on the screen and no clear indication of what it is. I don't know why there are two lanes of the same thing. Overall, it feels like it's not finished.
Edit: and I forgot to mention, the reason for 2 lanes (and maybe more in the future) is so you need to do strategic choices for where and what to deploy on which lane, to counter the enemies’ choices. This will at the very least be heroes and some spells, but likely also special upgrades, defences, etc. in the future.
Do you mean the in-game upgrades or out of game upgrades? They both do stuff, but very small upgrades at this time.
You’re absolutely right that this is not a finished game per se, and I have a lot of stuff queued up that I am releasing over the next few weeks - this is more about how the core gameplay feels - in essence (from my Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/playtesters/s/R73zH35P9W):
- First 2 minutes: Did you know what to do? Where did you first get confused?
- Fights: Could you tell who was winning and why? What was unreadable?
- Choices: Did anything you built feel like it mattered? What felt useless?
- Best moment and worst moment, one line each.
- Would you come back for a second session? What would bring you back, or what killed it? (Plus: phone or desktop, and which browser?) (Small note, I have a lot more features in the pipeline I am adding over the next month or so before I want to push it, but want to ensure the core mechanics work and make sense first)
In any case, thank you for your feedback!
The only upgrades I'm aware of are the ones at the bottom of the screen -- a shield, water?, an arrow, etc They turn orange at some point if I click on them. No idea what that does.
I can deploy things?
1. I did not know what to do. It looked like I could buy upgrades like a typical incremental but nothing seemed to do anything useful.
2. I reckon as that line moves back and forth, it's closer to whoever is losing. I saw that the blue guy started taking damage (or at least, explosions were happening). It wasn't clear what I could do about it though.
3. Nope. Everything.
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I am trying again now and I see that if I click an "upgrade" the blue outline goes away and coins go down. So, that seems to do something. Not sure what though.
I would be fine with tooltips over the buttons as a start, just to be like "this is X and it costs Y".
Just pushed an update built directly on your feedback:
- A proper title screen
- A hands-on "field guide" that pauses the battle while it teaches (you click your Spire, buy the upgrades, summon a hero)
- Tooltips with prices on every button
- A permanent "YOU: BLUE" badge (might be a bit overkill in the long term imo, but I think it works for people trying it for the first time).
Full details in the devlog. If you have another 10 minutes at some point, I would love to hear if the first run makes sense now.