itch.io

Some feedback on current version:

-needs tweaks in terms of difficulty, its an easy win if you get a corner start and impossible if you are in the middle.

-the ressource generator building should be brought back since spamming expansive Hives for income gets laggy because of drones ( or consider making spawning toggleable by clicking on buildings ).

-building and units should regenerate health over time / make drones sacrifice themselves to heal buildings.

-the tentacle spell needs to have a health bar.

-Consider making the spells to attract your units integrated into the mouse click ( for example holding down the left click somewhere makes the two options appear and you can just flick the mouse towards what you want and it automatically puts it down on the spot without a cost but with a cooldown ).

-Add buildable walls to help funnel enemies ( make it very low on enemy target priority and you'll have a use for siege enemies that will come later on in developement ).

-Make the creep spread / corrupt the water and mountains + add a more detailed creep texture to differenciate better from the uniform color from enemy influence zones.

-update the screenshots on this page since you removed the skill tree.

Otherwise nice work on the enemy art.

Cool, im a bit sad that you're going full fantasy but hopefully you'll make it work, i won't complain if its gritty and gory.

Also if you need inspiration i suggest looking at the tile and tower art design of the tower defense "Cursed treasure" i think it could give you some ideas to change the atmosphere of the game.

Also even if its called "Swarmborn" i think that you should completely embrace the starcraft clone aspects and replace enemies with protoss and terran that fight each other and have different building mechanics (terran no creep can build everywhere, protoss needs to build next to pylons) this way you'd no longer have these awful area of influence around enemy bases, rename souls as biomass. Going this path instead of the fantasy one would make this very eye catching and you'll have a lot of players + 2 iconic factions you'd be able to play so even people who don't really like swarmy factions can be attracted.

Sorry for the bloat hopefully you'll really consider going the copycat route.

This was really refreshing to play. depending on how much time and effort you want to put into it this could really end up as a game i'd even be willing to buy, reminds me a lot of Buggos on steam.

Now for the feedback/suggestion part:

Art:

-i feel like there's an identity crisis (probably because of free assets you took here and there) you can either choose to go full on fantasy which in my opinion would be bland and soulless or you could just go all out with the starcraft flash game aesthetic.

-add more tileset, weather shouldn't be this high up in your roadmap since it risks adding visual bloat.

Gameplay:

-you should add a cursor and hotckeys for skills and clicking a skill should automatically deselect building construction.

-Skills should be moved to the Skill tree along with the different buildings you unlock automatically would make progression a bit better, make an evolution chamber building that can research the speed/health/damage upgrade to reduce bloat in skill tree.

-Units should be able to pass over buildings but be included in the grid (you can only have one unit in a square) this would stop the massive deathballs from forming and make higher quality units more valuable, for further update it'll also probably make it easier to program ranged unit since you'll be able to calculate range by block distance and air units would be valuable because they could stack one time on top of your ground units.

-Creep spread needs some tweaking to stop it from removing large patches of it when one of your building dies despite having other buildings around it.

-Add more elevations level that future ranged units and defenses can take advantage of.

-Consider some roguelike elements to make it replayable.