I tried the v1.5.2 a couple of times and there's a lot to say. I even recorded a video of me playing (I got an easy win with the archer; I killed the big black dragon, and in fact it didn't even touch me). So if you are interested how a "veteran player" (😃) played the game, you can look at it at https://is.muni.cz/de/darek/horde.mp4 (beware though, it has ~200M and since it's on a temporary deposit provided by my university, it will remain there only for 30 days). I will probably refer to it when I write more.
oh wow, that was a powerful build! Even got the winged boots there, paired with freeze control!
I completely agree that the Archer right now is the very definition of "be the bullet hell", and scales up a bit too fast. When you have more kills than turns there's something off! Haha!
Well done though, you made a lot of small tactical choices there that gave you such a dominant powercurve, but the archer is definitely a bit OP right now. And this was even without an artifact bow!
I've got some work to do to rebalanced this for 1.6! But thanks again man, super valuable insight!
Thanks! Some bits I wanted to offer:
- First off, as noted by other commenters, the game is too long now. Personally, I think it would be the best if you could get to the first dragon (and the regular victory) in 10-15 minutes. Now it is 30 minutes which definitely feels too much. And I don't mean that the game would necessarily be boring, I just mean that you want the players to "fail faster". If you die 5 minutes into the game, it's OK. If you die in the bossfight 10 min into the game, still it's OK and you will want to try again. Die in the bossfight half an hour into the game though, and the player will feel exhausted/frustrated. Mostly they will say "I'm not playing that again for now" and go away.
- Others have said that there was too little pressure, but I don't really agree. There needs to be more pressure, but not by much. I tried playing with the other classes and the pressure is actually quite okay for them; it's more like the archer needs to be nerfed 😃. If you would like to make it shorter, I think it would be good to keep the delays between the waves more or less as they are and just cut a couple of the waves (esp. the wolves and the orcs). I guess it would also be better to choose some waves randomly, e. g. in each game, send either the bats or the weird white spheres but not both. Maybe also randomly choose between the wolves and the basic green orcs (they seem to be pretty similar and it can start to drag a little bit).
- The chests and the items are a nice idea, however so far they are a bit too simplistic. The main problem is that there seems to be more or less a strict ordering of the items (maybe I'm just thinking too rigidly but it looks like it is so). Some examples: with boots: any speed bonus > resistance, and among two resistances, the higher is better. With weapons: artifact weapon > upgraded weapon (crossbow, nice staff, battleaxe etc.) > your basic weapon > everything else. With books, I as the archer ranked freeze book > burn book > the other two. In this way, you're waiting for a very small subset of items, and most of the chests you ever open are then useless (and that can feel frustrating) — see the video, where I was constantly offered axes, staves and other stuff that I didn't want 😃. A solution to this problem could be introducing a couple of more items with incomparable effects that would be useful for any class (I have some wild ideas, I can give you a raw unsorted list if you want to, but no guarantees that it will be useful 😃).
- The artifacts are a really nice idea. I got one only once, but it's great to occasionally be able to try and fight through up to the big black dragon.
- Random stuff: the fireball sound is way too loud and long, listening to it for half an hour straight can get tiring fast; the music still gets messed up occasionally (the treasure music often replaces the main music totally, sometimes they both get played simultaneously); a pointer in the form of equilateral triangle is not very practical (hard to see which way it is pointing); I don't understand the sun book description at all (does it do anything?) and not sure about workings of the burn book either; "melee speed" is quite a confusing description but I found out that it equals more reach with axe slash (a hugely useful thing) — perhaps it would be better to talk about "melee reach"; when you get the amulet for 1024 XP, it shows as "+102" on one line and "4" below that; potions and food seem to be grabbed by the greed skill and that sometimes leads to an accidental gobbling of these precious consumables when you didn't intend to eat them (btw. it would also be nice if the 3 potions at the southern boss could be taken one by one; I mostly manage to grab two at the same time and much of the healing is wasted)
I tried the archer again and... wow. I had a very rough time. Here's another video: https://is.muni.cz/de/darek/horde-v16-archer.mp4 (171M, ~26 min).
I wholeheartedly agree with the bow nerf, except for starting with 1 arrow. I would still start with 3. There are two reasons for that: 1) the bow has always been a great weapon against single targets but not really good against large hordes of enemies (until late game if you can upgrade it). So the archer had a problematic start even before the nerf. 2) I would often take the bow with the other classes because it is a good supplementary weapon for clearing the space in front of you. I especially like to get it with the wizards, because their spells hit more or less randomly and they badly need something to clear a path to run through. But if it starts just with 1 arrow, it is useless in this regard. And I think we'd like to encourage various mixed builds at least a bit.
By the way, sometimes if the bow is fired at an enemy which is right in front of you, the arrows fly right through the enemy but they deal no damage. I never noticed this before, so it looks like it's a new bug. See for instance 00:53 or 05:16 in the video.
Finally, thanks for all the little "quality of life" improvements!
thanks again for providing such thorough insight and feedback from your experience! I've been considering giving the starting ability per character an extra level in that ability at the start, so that the archer would start with 3 arrows, while if a mage picked up the ability he would start with 1 arrow, and would then have to invest another point into it.
I have also considered whether a weapon would come with a given ability, that wouldn't take up a character ability slot. So that if you are a mage you could decide to wield a bow to get bowshot, even if you already had 4 abilities from levelup. That could be interesting, specially once more abilities make it into the game so that the build choices are much wider than they are right now.
I'd very much like to get to the point where a spell caster "can" operate as a pure caster "class" if you want to, but its intentional that the strong spells feel less controllable. Let me know if you have some cool ideas for new spells.
I'm the same way I'd like the archer to feel like a hunter, so maybe he's adept in laying down snares and other hunter things.
I'm glad to hear that the whirlwind warrior is viable now. Did you use fireballs or did you go pure warrior spec? When I eventually get around to add achievements, more meta incentive could be added to gain different types of achievements, like pure-spec'ing classes vs hybrid. Battlemage and Paladin are of course very typical class choices in rpgs.
I like the idea of spells being powerful but a bit random, and it's very obvious from the start that the spells were meant to be this way.
A couple of ideas for spells — of course with no guarantee of usefulness 😃:
- Lightning — several arcs of lightning would shoot out of you and go in "lightningy-random" fashion, more or less outwards. Good damage but shorter reach. The point is to have a spell that you can rely on to clean your immediate surroundings, but it wouldn't work like the spark and the fireball do (i. e. run away and the spells do the work for you).
- Tornado — one whirlwind going more or less straight towards random enemies (like fireball?), it would grab the enemies and throw them around, giving mild damage. The point: it should be good for scattering big hordes. Then you can defeat them part by part. Or, at least, the scattered horde will be easier to run away from. A con is that it can make your other attacks less effective.
- Poisonous mist/wall of fire/whatever — the spell would make a cloud of poison in a (not totally) random position. The catch is that the cloud would linger there for an extended period of time (20 rounds perhaps?), maybe slowly moving around ("with the wind"). Anything caught inside would be damaged, monster or player, each turn, as long as it remains inside. The point: a powerful damaging spell, but it's sort of a double-edged sword. Looks like it could make the game more interesting because you would like to go around the clouds while maneuvering the monsters into them. This thing should have a huge cooldown (having more than 2 clouds at the same time should be rare).
- Generic debuff spells — they would hit a bunch of monsters and debuff them for several rounds. The monsters could be e. g. slowed down, have their attack reduced to half, or they would take 50% more damage from each attack, while debuffed.
- Mistform — after casting it, you would become invisible for several rounds. The monsters would stop following you and you would be able to pass right through them without being attacked. Probably a good idea for some kind of powerup but a bad idea for a spell 😃. Not sure how it should be triggered.
- Mind control spells — one possibility would be a confusion spell that would hit several monsters and make them mull around randomly, perhaps attacking other monsters. Another would be a more direct control spell that would hit one monster, that would turn around and instead of running at you, it would run at the nearest monster and start attacking it. (Probably hard to implement but could be nice if the player can build combos around it.)
- Polymorph spell — it would transform a couple of monsters into frogs for a couple of rounds. It would do no damage but the monsters would have only 50% health and no attack power while polymorphed.
- Something that would detonate gems around you, destroying them and dealing damage to monsters around them. Probably useless idea, as the spell would wildly oscillate between useless and overpowered.
- Fetch spell — an utility spell that would fetch some gems and/or chests nearby every couple of rounds. Not sure if it makes any sense to have this alongside the greed skill.
- Rebuild wall — exiting a square where a wall has once been while casting this spell will renew that wall. Probably not worth a skill pick.
There's some detail left to work out, of course, e. g. bosses should be immune to some of those.
Ad the whirlwind guy: I had a single point in fireball and the other 10 skill picks were melee (whirlwind, slash, bash). So I had the fireball, but I don't think it was very useful. I guess it would probably be better to pick something else.
By the way, I managed to get a win with the fireball wizard. I got the life-draining artifact staff, so after obtaining it, I maximized sparks as much as I could. In the bossfight, I was hit 2 times but ended with full 100 HP nevertheless 😃 (I tried to continue but I couldn't obliterate the elemental giants as fast as I should. As soon as the little dragons came, I had to run like hell and grab the amulet. And I got hit for ~ 40 in in only five or six rounds just before that.)
Some awesome ideas in there Evolvent! Thank you! I've been trying to think about cleric style spells too. So if you have any ideas in that direction let me know ;-)
Lifeseed is a very powerful artifact isn't it! I probably need to nerf it a little bit, but fun to hear you've been able to discover some of these artifcats. Sounds like the end was hectic enough to where it ended up not being just a total OP item, so perhaps it's ok.
I don't think it needs to be nerfed. You need a lot of cannon-fodder to power it up, and the battle needs to be stable enough to give you time. WIth the dragon, it was possible because it has amazing numbers of those blobs with it. Sparks tear through the blobs by dozens and the HP grows nicely. In hectic situations, it's not very useful.
I would keep it as it is just for "coolness".
By the way, I managed to win with the whirlwind guy, so he's no longer as useless as he was before. I obtained the freezing sword artifact and that essentially decided the battle with the dragon. After some initial wrong moves, I found a cycle of moves in which it was permanently frozen and I could beat the heck out of it.