I managed to get to wave 17, level 300+ before I decided to give it a rest. The strategy I found was to get each ability once, then rush Higher Voltage to level 15, and then focus on leveling Magnet and Kobold Blast for a while. Eventually, you'll start to level up fast enough to catch up on the other upgrades, especially at the later waves when they seem to go on for a very long time.
Anyway, the formula for this game is a lot of fun, and as others have mentioned, some variety as the game goes on could definitely improve the game. Here are a few ideas I had for upgrades/kobolds/enemies:
- A passive that allows you to get more mana from each TF
- Some way of healing your shack in a pinch, maybe an ability the commands nearby kobolds to make repairs.
- Some way to heal kobolds, could be an ability, or a special kobold type.
- A passive upgrade that improves kobold stats (health/damage)
- A "chain lightning" ability that does damage and jumps from human to human within a certain range of each other.
- A "tail strike" ability that knocks back humans within a certain range of the shack.
- A "magic breath" ability that does damage in a cone/line originating from the shack.
- An ability like poof, but with a longer cooldown, that spawns a special kobold type.
- A passive that adds a small % chance that a TF becomes a kobold variant instead.
- Maybe different enemy types, that then become special kobold types.
- Some kobold ideas: A healer kobold or repair kobold like mentioned above, a quicker kobold, a healthier kobold, one that does more damage, or one that does damage in an AoE around it.
These types could all be distinguished by color or size, or they could have unique sprites/animations.
-Some enemy ideas: A knight that has more health/damage but is considerably slower, a wizard that does damage in an AoE, a rogue that cannot be individually targeted, but is susceptible to AoE abilities, a paladin that can revert kobolds (this would be a major threat). They could first appear as bosses at the end of earlier waves, but then start to appear regularly at later waves.
Finally, I've got a few quality-of-life suggestions:
- An expanded game area will be very important if you're going to add more features. I would suggest a 1:1, square-like aspect ratio for the field. With that, the humans could spawn a little further from the shack, and there could be more of them without overwhelming the player too much.
- A description of what upgrading your abilities will do. For example: "Increases AoE per upgrade," or, "Increases mana production per upgrade."
- Bugs mentioned by other users, plus a bug where the shack became invisible around waves 12-13. I'm not quite sure what the exact cause is though.
- A downloadable executable, and a way to save progress if the game becomes much longer.
- Once you have a lot of kobolds, and a high level Kobold Blast, the sheer amounts of mana droplets can really cause the game to chug. One way I could think of to help with this, is to combine larger amounts of mana output into fewer (maybe larger) blobs.
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I realize I dumped quite a lot here, but I figured I'd just vomit out all of these ideas and let you see if any of them are interesting enough to implement. IMO, this game and Ewemanity are the two best in the jam, and it really goes to show that a simple, but effective game loop really goes a long way. Also, I'm glad to see some of you teaming up to make games, there are a lot of talented devs in the community. Keep up the good work, and good luck!