Those don't look like robots! At least not from the distance the camera is at. I never got past the first level but I did have some fun experimenting with the various traps. I may have to come back to check this one out again.
Thanks for playing. It's true, some characters are placeholders and are in fact not robots! Eventually they will become robots. As for anyone having trouble getting started, there's now a test level players can try out trap setups in to get a feel for how to clear certain waves or manually requested spawns.
So, what I'm getting is the different difficulties aren't really 'difficulties' right now, they just add more waves. Once I got over fumbling on the first map and accepted the way of just spamming long lines of traps, the higher difficulties are the same but with more waves and over time you need to make them go longer paths so you can spam more traps. The statuses are surprisingly ineffective seeming, the trip only seems to work once, the ice slow isn't very noticable and the damage multipliers just aren't noticable when enemies just instantly die to pretty much anything (and if your frontline is designed to clear out weaker enemies, the stronger enemies will be effectively weaker enemies by the time they reach your backline, so you can just spam spears until you run out of space and have to use fire)
I do like enemies instantly dying to various traps with slow cooldowns as opposed to the usual tower defence of wittling enemies down over time so I'm not suggesting to beef all the enemies up. I can barely tell what enemies are different beyond 'small enemy' and 'big enemy' though. Being able to spot distinct enemies and setting up combos (Like freeze -> barricade to funnel down a push trap walkway -> trip trap inside the push trap's range) would be good. Actually, traps with much larger ranges would really help make combos if you can balance it because right now, every trap can only really 'combo' with stuff right next to it, I really have to push enemies to walls to get wall traps to hit and the long-ways of the push trap is only maybe 2x as long as its width-ways. Also feels weird that the push traps seem to just do damage more than actually push enemies off of edges or herd them into areas.
Minor issues, I posted in thread an image that some enemies seem to get caught on corners (but respawn at start as likely expected) and sometimes I buy extra towers because the tower-buying thing hangs around and it took me a while to realize Q un-selects it. I keep forgetting to dismiss the top-left message because I never worked out how to turn off auto-start so I'm always rushing to build right from the start and just have that text over my screen the entire time.
I don't know what you plan to do next for content, but I'd like to see the traps specialize a bit more into certain roles and enemies specialize a bit more into certain roles before you add any more enemies/towers, that's basically the summary of my post.
Thanks so much for the feedback. I think this hits on a lot of things I want to improve/add.
Higher difficulty levels add "extra" challenge by adding a few scaling spawn groups from wave 6 onward. Specifics aren't really important though if it doesn't work and even in my own testing I do agree it's barely tangible if at all. A few intended changes that may address this larger issue;
Adding "elemental" units. Removing material randomization and using color and effects to convey an enemy is resistant to some types of damage.
More unique traps and more damage types/status effects.
Better trap balancing with a specific focus on making elemental/status combos stronger.
Making the top tier units stronger but less numerous.
Push traps actually pushing alive units around is something I've wanted to do but is a performance concern. It is something I am definitely working towards supporting though.
Navigational issues are known and I am slowly improving UE's crowd path following system.
Single item building is coming very soon. Will be making it so that shift left click allows continuous building.
Manual wave start is coming very soon. Internal code is done - just needs UI and a keybinding setup.
Good to hear, it's mostly just that it's a demo and that you're working on what needs to be done, then.
I'd just like to say, I'd be wary of going for 'Enemy is resistant/immune to X so you have to use a variety of traps' and throwing in a load more damage type. It's a common route to take but could lead to bloat and not much diversity in options. Instead of a player spamming the same trap over and over, they'll be just spamming towers like 1,2,3-1,2,3.
Having, say, a tower (door) type that hinders movement until enough 'damage' is done to it and it has to reset, then having an enemy that specializes at breaking in these door-towers (and may have some other properties) would be an example of an enemy that isn't resistant but still overcomes some traps. Fast enemies that are prone to trip-traps (slowed after being tripped), an enemy that doesn't trigger floor traps (but still gets hit if others trigger it / triggers it if they have a certain status effect), an enemy that sacrifices itself to block a trap's hit, that sort of thing. Basically, posing a question to the player of how they should design a set-up to handle a unique enemy, rather than just placing down different tower types. That, along with traps that work well in some environments (long range trap long corridor, push trap to ledge, map water that slows but removes statuses so you might use non-status-dependent traps).
I'm getting carried away with ideaguying but yeah, if you try out resistances just be careful that it doesn't just turn into a different type of trap spam.
Comments
Hey. I played your game as part of a Demo Day stream. If you didn't catch the stream live, here's a link to the video:
You can see my other demo day 46 streams as well on my channel.
I couldn't get this to work because it wanted SteamVR to be enabled. Is this a VR game or did something go wrong?
Thanks for catching this. I've disabled all VR-related plugins on the project in the latest build which should address the issue.
Those don't look like robots! At least not from the distance the camera is at. I never got past the first level but I did have some fun experimenting with the various traps. I may have to come back to check this one out again.
Thanks for playing. It's true, some characters are placeholders and are in fact not robots! Eventually they will become robots. As for anyone having trouble getting started, there's now a test level players can try out trap setups in to get a feel for how to clear certain waves or manually requested spawns.
So, what I'm getting is the different difficulties aren't really 'difficulties' right now, they just add more waves. Once I got over fumbling on the first map and accepted the way of just spamming long lines of traps, the higher difficulties are the same but with more waves and over time you need to make them go longer paths so you can spam more traps. The statuses are surprisingly ineffective seeming, the trip only seems to work once, the ice slow isn't very noticable and the damage multipliers just aren't noticable when enemies just instantly die to pretty much anything (and if your frontline is designed to clear out weaker enemies, the stronger enemies will be effectively weaker enemies by the time they reach your backline, so you can just spam spears until you run out of space and have to use fire)
I do like enemies instantly dying to various traps with slow cooldowns as opposed to the usual tower defence of wittling enemies down over time so I'm not suggesting to beef all the enemies up. I can barely tell what enemies are different beyond 'small enemy' and 'big enemy' though. Being able to spot distinct enemies and setting up combos (Like freeze -> barricade to funnel down a push trap walkway -> trip trap inside the push trap's range) would be good. Actually, traps with much larger ranges would really help make combos if you can balance it because right now, every trap can only really 'combo' with stuff right next to it, I really have to push enemies to walls to get wall traps to hit and the long-ways of the push trap is only maybe 2x as long as its width-ways. Also feels weird that the push traps seem to just do damage more than actually push enemies off of edges or herd them into areas.
Minor issues, I posted in thread an image that some enemies seem to get caught on corners (but respawn at start as likely expected) and sometimes I buy extra towers because the tower-buying thing hangs around and it took me a while to realize Q un-selects it. I keep forgetting to dismiss the top-left message because I never worked out how to turn off auto-start so I'm always rushing to build right from the start and just have that text over my screen the entire time.
I don't know what you plan to do next for content, but I'd like to see the traps specialize a bit more into certain roles and enemies specialize a bit more into certain roles before you add any more enemies/towers, that's basically the summary of my post.
Thanks so much for the feedback. I think this hits on a lot of things I want to improve/add.
Good to hear, it's mostly just that it's a demo and that you're working on what needs to be done, then.
I'd just like to say, I'd be wary of going for 'Enemy is resistant/immune to X so you have to use a variety of traps' and throwing in a load more damage type. It's a common route to take but could lead to bloat and not much diversity in options. Instead of a player spamming the same trap over and over, they'll be just spamming towers like 1,2,3-1,2,3.
Having, say, a tower (door) type that hinders movement until enough 'damage' is done to it and it has to reset, then having an enemy that specializes at breaking in these door-towers (and may have some other properties) would be an example of an enemy that isn't resistant but still overcomes some traps. Fast enemies that are prone to trip-traps (slowed after being tripped), an enemy that doesn't trigger floor traps (but still gets hit if others trigger it / triggers it if they have a certain status effect), an enemy that sacrifices itself to block a trap's hit, that sort of thing. Basically, posing a question to the player of how they should design a set-up to handle a unique enemy, rather than just placing down different tower types. That, along with traps that work well in some environments (long range trap long corridor, push trap to ledge, map water that slows but removes statuses so you might use non-status-dependent traps).
I'm getting carried away with ideaguying but yeah, if you try out resistances just be careful that it doesn't just turn into a different type of trap spam.