Post by Ben in Genome Guardian comments

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First off I want to say I love the level of polish on the ui, the clean graphics are satisfying and look great.

I'll keep playing this to figure it out. I imagine the upgrade tree is what is meant to make this game playable. It seems to take a lot of inspiration from brotato / survivorlikes, but it has some regressions in my opinion.

Paying money for heals? Hate it. I'd prefer to start with very little hp, and then have risk increase if I don't prioritize hp upgrades, rather than having to pay my upgrade money for bandaids every round.

No free upgrade choices starting out. You can spend multiple waves without making a single upgrade decision, which is really the core of survivor likes fun. In brotato and vampire survivors you get upgrades on level up, which happens quickly.

I don't understand the weapon letter system at all, why they must "contain a letter" and I find it annoying when half my options are for a letter I don't have. (even less choice)

The starter weapon is super annoying to use. The spread is so high, and it's unnecessarily underpowered.

Overall I think the game ramps up too quick, shows too much complexity all at once. It's okay for games to be easy, at least at first. it's fun to win. I'm gonna keep playing and figure out what this game is about, but the new player experience is pretty rough at the moment. I'd recommend giving the user upgrades from the end of wave one and generally make it easier starting out. The first couple waves can be pushovers, and in general the game could be way easier starting out, and ascensions for improvement.

Alpherior200 days ago

Hey Ben - download the updated zip for v1.0.8, which contains these updates as well as an important change that I hope will help newbies understand things better: the shop icon for each weapon will instead be the DNA letter.

Keep at it - think of the time before your first win as just the tutorial. Once you've got lots of Research and you start to really get the hang of things, it'll feel like a breeze (for example: you'll almost always be able to afford something after wave 1 after maxing out the Biomass-related researches).

Once you get further, you'll realize that "depths" are ascensions, too.

Ben199 days ago

Having letters on the upgrades is a big improvement. I got all the unlocks and got down a few depths.

Some more feedbacks / suggestions

+ I think the default weapon should be the pistol, the sub-machine gun sucks way too much early on, and it's just not fun hoping you get lucky with the spread.

+ Consider adding a "first one's free" upgrade at depth, or even just on the very first

+ It'd be very helpful / cool if you could see the weapons stats [before]->[after] when hovering with a letter upgrade.

+ When you hover over an item the available slots could light up, maybe depending on letter compatibility.

+ The notification telling you to buy unlocks is the most prominent thing on the screen, before you can even buy an upgrade

+ Gaining biomass is very subtle. Could use a sound effect / animation to indicate when it's happening.

+ Wish you could sell / delete weapon upgrades.

+ Wish you could freeze an upgrade or buy it but not equip until you unlock (or activate?) the slot. There's just so many reasons an upgrade is probably irrelevant or unusable, it could use a mitigation imo.

Game is super rad. Best of luck and congrats on the release :)

Alpherior199 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Glad to hear that I've won you over 💪

Yep, you know what, I will make the default weapon always be Pistol. It definitely feels the best before any research.

Actually kinda liking the "first one's free" idea, genuinely never thought of that... I think that would address a number of people's gripes without affecting the game's balance overall too much.

Stats before->after I would LOVE... and would also be very difficult for me to implement, believe it or not. It's hard to explain it properly/succintly, but the way stats are displayed is handled differently for each weapon - couldn't just simply get a before and after value for each stat for every weapon. I'd say this is on the "maybe someday" list.

Hovering over item and lighting slots up... is a REALLY good idea. Guaranteed I'll implement this (not sure when, but I'd like to have this in the next or next-next update)!

Selling/deleting items, admittedly, will (at the very most) be a feature in a future additional mode, but for the modes that exist, I intentionally want player item decisions to be permanent.

"Shop item locking" (freezing as you call it) has been suggested by a couple others and is on my todo list!

Alpherior199 days ago(+1)

Actually just implemented the changes described in my paragraphs 1 / 2 / 4 and uploaded version 1.0.10!

Ben198 days ago

Damn that was fast!

If you want to screen share and talk over the before->after situation I bet we could figure something out if we allow some performance atrocities to be committed at a small scale. Like, just create a whole new temp weapon on hover with all the same attachments and the new letter then read stats from that or something.

Alpherior198 days ago(+1)

Oh... huh... I guess it really would be that simple, eh?

Adding that to my todo, then!

(seriously I can't believe I didn't think of that)

btw: No pressure at all, but, the rest of the community is over in the Discord. You'll see a link to it on the game's page.

itch.io

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