A roguelite tower defense. Draft weapons, merge them auto-chess style, and protect the crystal in short 15-minute runs. · By
The math in this current build is wild, and I need your help to tame it.
If you find a weapon that feels useless, an enemy swarm that feels impossible, or a Gold/Platinum economy exploit, please reply below with the following data:
The more specific you are, the faster I can patch the scaling!
Don't have any math analysis but here are the two impressions from my first two runs:
Run1: chose minigun, clicked around but never found anything to do with gold other than raw upgrade. clicked lots of circles, nothing happened. clicked squares of what appear to be other weapon bays, nothing happened. sometimes a choice popped up about how to improve my minigun but i never knew why. lost to the first large purple square i saw
Run2: found the chest thing i'm supposed to be spending my money on (i think), and got a stack of three weapons to split upgrades across. used the penality-timer things this run, but not as much as i could have. lasted to like 7:20 but then routine enemies suddenly started to overwhelm my weapons and i wasn't sure why. but i felt like i had a better overall idea of the economy. maybe my mistake was that i stopped paying attention to the penalty-reward thing. overall feeling of losing was "oh i guess i've lost" out of nowhere without any sense of it approaching. but i'm not expert in this genre.
7:20 is pretty damn good on a second try not gonna lie. The plan for this game is that you need to decide based on the quests (middle yellow menu) where you want to invest your gold, "sideways" or "upward". You either buy a new weapon/ try to get to a new tier (3 copies or 9, similar toTFT or presumable any other auto-chess game) or level a specific weapon up (the right button with the choices every 10 levels, it even glows on the 9th to signal its arrival). These are the only 2 ways to spend gold currently.
High tiers can have massive impacts on the game, but they take up a lot of resources and with more incoming weapons they'll be even harder to hit, but it's always worth it (after at least unlocking them in the Refinery [out-of-game 3rd menu]). Base levels can get you out of trouble in a short notice, but they can fall off faster as well.
Currently it's coded that the game starts to ramp up after 6 minutes and gets even harder after 8 (so players can't "win" a 15 minute run on their first try, without any outside upgrades in the second out-of-game menu) the soft cap of the game, 15 minutes is when it ramps up even harder, trying to kill the run as fast as it can, but that's intended currently.
I really appreciate you trying it out and leaving a feedback, it helps a lot (more than people think, because it suggest to me, that the layout isn't that intuitive currently and will need to fix it later). I hope you like it and will return for the new stuff I plan to implement in the next fe days/weeks.
-Cheers
