Post by ShoTro in First Flame comments

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Hey! Love what you did with the course! I was looking for my own twist to make the concepts my own and I loved your outcome!

Here are a few notes/ideas/bug fixes:

When you purchase a weapon after having purchased all the weapons, you get stuck in an empty menu. A back button, would be nice to back out of the choice, but also, if encountering this bug, players can get out of it.
Items collected in areas where you cannot see... maybe negate any damage to enemies until they reach a specific point on the board? Make the modulate on the sprites black then white signaling the change?
Increasing the number of projectiles was the key to making this game very easy. Maybe you only need a single upgrade? 3 seemed to be overkill.
Once you get all the weapons unlocked then you are pretty much unstoppable. To promote replay, maybe allow only a certain number of them to be unlocked, like 5.
The lag might be caused by instancing all the resources for an attack for the first time and maybe the enemies. Maybe preload those scenes so it only effects the start of the level.
Buying a knight at the beginning of the game causes them to kill everything in the darkness. As to my previous point, maybe restrict the knight's movement to only half the scene length.
The magic/flame wave upgrade description was vague compared to what it actually did IMO.
Maybe enemy health needs to scale or something. There needs to be more balancing or the game needs to end with a score card after a set point of time.

Over all I really enjoyed this game!

Thinking Of Z191 days ago

ShoTro, I'm glad you enjoyed the game and even played all the way through.

- I really need to fix this asap!

- Hmm, I hadnt considered this.

- Also good feedback, as fun as this is, it scales your power WAY too fast. Maybe you can choose to buy a weapon OR increase projectile count. They both fill the same slot. And then limit to 5-6 weapons / projectile increases.

- I made all of the nodes exist in the scene even when unused, however they are marked as "visible = false". For some reason the first time I turn an instance of a node from "visible = false" to "visible = true" it causes the game to stutter. I still havent figured this out, and it is causing issues on other games I am working on...

- I'll see if I can add a leash to bring them back if they get too far away.

- Strong yes. It does actually have a victory screen at 30 minutes, but I think the game becomes AFK at 10-15 minutes with the scaling being so broken.... so you never get there.

I found that with each item that I added ( weapon or new unit ) the game became harder to balance, and rather the learning about the game engine I was spending a ton of time tuning numbers and enemy HP etc, so I decided to take a break and publish it. But comments like this give me a lot of motivation to revisit it and see what I can improve.

Thanks again!

ShoTro167 days ago(+1)

For the visibility true/false stutter... modulate alpha from 0 to 255 and maybe disable the collision. I found out that visible goes through the whole tree to check stuff... for some reason.

As for the balance thing... yeah, that is always the hardest thing to figure out. Especially if something you really wanted is what is unbalancing the game.

itch.io

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