I didn't get too far in because the game is pretty dense from the get-go, while not exactly being friendly. I feel like there should be a clearer display of what each modifier does and how swapping their order is actually something meaningful. The more modifiers you get, the more experimentation becomes discouraged if this is not a fast, intuitive process. Arguably it may be the case once you get used to the process, but I didn't play as far as to get to that point, sorry. It wasn't very well reflected ingame with the starter modifiers either; perhaps a tutorial level with stronger, very distinct & disctinctly combinable upgrades is in order.
Aside from that I think the game seems fun enough, though I agree with congusbongus on the pacing a little. It's just the frontloading that gets to me.
This game is pretty cool; the mechanics are great and there’s a satisfying level of juice.
I wonder what your ultimate plans are, because I feel as great as it already is, it is missing things that will make it truly awesome.
For example: the pacing is not ideal; each level starts very hard when all (or most) of the enemies are spawned), and gets easier and even boring as the enemies are defeated. A good pacing should instead go from easy to hard, with spikes and lulls every now and then. Will you work on the spawning logic next?
Next there is the gameplay. It works well, but I feel that most enemies take too long to defeat. In some shooters, enemies die in one shot but they are numerous, in others they take longer to die but there are fewer of them, so there’s a balance, and here I feel the balance is slightly off. This is especially apparent with the tank enemy, which persists and becomes a chore to finish off. Also since the game map is pretty simple, every game boils down to circle strafing. Will you add maps (walls etc), powerups to collect, or other mechanics that zone out the player or encourage them to break their movement? Consider Crimsonland as an example, which has no walls but heavily relies on powerups to keep things interesting.
Finally this game needs some audio love; the visual effects are on point but some sounds are just basic sfxr/bfxr stuff. And music! These would really make things pop.
Anyway don’t want to make it sound like I’m down on this game, it’s great overall. Looking forward to what you do with it next.
The heavy chaser is super fun. The way it makes you dodge is great. The "fra" modifier is incredibly powerful. I like the idea of the absorver, but it is a difficulty enemy for something introduced so early. The ship takes a very long time to kill and creates a ton of little ships with ease. Also it bouncer all over the place so it is easy to get unpredictable behavior. I don't mean that it is a bad, just that its stats could be looked into.
While playing, I realized a custom mouse cursor could be welcome. At least for me, I lose track of the mouse position really easily. Each level has become much busier since everything creates bullets or ships.
Overall, the game is a lot tougher now. Maybe too much. I would love to know what is the maximum level other players reached, because now I cannot go further from level 25 and earlier levels were finished with single digit HP remaining. All of that while abusing FRA by the way.
Also after writing the post and going back to the game window, a ton of little ships spawned on the top left corner of the screen. It is the mothership level so it might be related to that.
This game is really great. Took me a while to get it, but after a few play throughs it started to make sense and I really enjoyed the challenge. The gun modifier system is really cool, it adds a lot of depth to the game. I would really like to be able to see some sort of information panel that gives the jist of how modifiers are affecting each other or what the order is doing to the final stats.
Oh something that I forgot to mention - it would be super helpful to see where my mouse pointer is or to even give a laser sight. During bigger action sequences I would frequently lose my mouse, and it made it harder for me to shoot.
Fun game, I really like the gun modifiers, reminds me of Noita. Enemy variety is good, I can see the game becoming better and more complex just by adding new ones. Although it can be a bit difficult to distinguish them, but I guess it gets easier with more experience. Other than that I just have a few things:
Accidentally dragging a mod outside the game view causes the browser to go to address "null", might not matter that much but could be extremely frustrating if you've gotten really far and do it.
Bullets from the previous level stay on the screen. Again maybe it doesn't even matter but if you really want to min-max its optimal to go into the test screen and fill it with bullets before entering a level.
Full screen mode is only a small portion of the top left of the screen, tried it with 3 different browsers so I guess its like that.
Double click to remove a mod could be nice, not sure if it'd fit with having dbl click to add one though.
Its a bit unclear exactly what benefits stacking/leveling up some mods are, for example in what way is a Rii better than a Ri? Perhaps you want people to experiment to understand what happens like with the ordering of mods, which I'd understand. Also Pi seems to increase damage but the text says it lowers, tried it in the test area to confirm and it wasn't just the UI. Maybe I'm missing something though like that armor can get negative?
I wish there was a way to add and remove mods in the testing area, a bit cumbersome having to go in and out while testing. Unless you can and I missed it? Tried finding the (Stats) button you mention in the instructions but couldn't find it, is it from an older build?
I didn't find any downside to spam changing guns in combat. That is you'll shoot a lot more if you keep changing guns as fast as you can and fire, so just keep scrolling that wheel. For example I'd have one gun equipped and another that lowers armor, if you change fast between them its like shooting both at the same time. I found that the best way to play was to make 5 guns right away and you'd potentially have x5 the firepower. My mouse has a way to unlock the scroll wheel so you just have to spin it once in a while and it'll toggle between all guns really fast. I guess you could do it with a script too if you really want to. I doubt this is the intended way to play though, but it seems optimal to me, but perhaps not that fun.. I'll include an example video of what I mean, this is with 5 empty guns right at the start. For TGiG I wanted to avoid this and its partly why there's a delay between switching guns. I don't think that would fit for this game though, and I'm not really sure what would be the best way to handle it. Unless you think its fine now.
Accidentally dragging a mod outside the game view causes the browser to go to address "null"
I never dragged a modifier outside the screen before, but sure, I can fix it, and I just did.
Bullets from the previous level stay on the screen.
Yeah, I think you're right, so now they are removed before the level begins.
Full screen mode is only a small portion of the top left of the screen, tried it with 3 different browsers so I guess its like that.
That's cause fullscreen is still not implemented. Actually, I don't even know if I'm gonna implement it, cause it's turning out to be more difficult than expected. Actually, the button to enable the fullscreen mode is only there because Archtower dev asked me to add it, cause otherwise links to jams that the game was showcased at would take up part of the game screen.
Double click to remove a mod could be nice,
There's no doubleclick to remove a mod, but there's right click for that instead.
Its a bit unclear exactly what benefits stacking/leveling up some mods are, for example in what way is a Rii better than a Ri
Yeah, I think I'll add a tooltip on hover that shows concrete stat changes, as Goblin Resort dev asked me to do. But in general, an upgraded modifier has the power of 2 modifiers of previous level combined together, even though they require 3 to be upgraded, but an upgraded ones takes up as much space as lvl 1 does, so I think it's fine.
Also Pi seems to increase damage but the text says it lowers, tried it in the test area to confirm and it wasn't just the UI
Yeah, that was a bug, it's fixed now.
I wish there was a way to add and remove mods in the testing area, a bit cumbersome having to go in and out while testing. Unless you can and I missed it?
No, there's no way to add mods during testing, you need to return to the inventory and go to testing mode again. And I probably won't add it, cause I can't be bothered, it's gonna be a mess with drag'n'drop and mousemove events interfering with each other. Also, there's no stats button anymore, cause players didn't use it, so stats are just shown inside each gun's panel now.
I didn't find any downside to spam changing guns in combat.
I thought it was fine, cause I didn't think people would keep scrolling the wheel to boost the firerate, but now that you mention unlockable scroll wheels and scripts... I added a short delay after switching.
I enjoyed this one a lot, it was fun to mix and match the upgrades.
I found the idea of multiple guns confusing, do they all fire at the same time? Or were there more buttons I was missing. I couldn't tell if there was a balance to the amount of guns I should have vs having fewer, other than dispersing upgrades.
The wireframe art is excellent and I appreciate the accurate Bresenham lines that most people miss.
As a final note: The arenas always felt too tight to me, maybe shrink the enemies or give a bigger play area.
It's really cool. Enemy encounters, despite being simple, consistently hit the fun zone. I love the symbols showing up before enemies spawn. I'm not crazy about the roguelite part, but combat is definetely solid.
Also, I think piercing upgrade increases damage instead of decreasing.
Really fun. Only thing I can say is to add music and to reduce the Armor the Splitter has, since they take forever to kill unless armor piercing is on a gun and even then it still takes a bit. Made it to level 10 before stopping.
The link is going to expire in 3 days. It was my second run of this version. My first run only lasted 3 minutes, so not much point sharing it.
I am probably going to play more over the next couple of days when I got more time.
I like the UI additions. I probably didn't get far enough to see your newest enemy types.
Playing in fullscreen still puts the game in smaller window in top left corner.
Sometimes the "Your enemies" section has weird sprite scaling.
Now with your ui icons, I think it would be nice to have modifiers be written as "+5.0 to x, but -2.0 to y" instead of full text sentences like e.g. Sca description.
Maybe when you hover over a modifier, you could have two separate sections; one for the pros, and one for the cons, and have those new icons show up in there.
Which browser did you use? Cause I tested it in Chrome and Firefox on Windows, and the scaling works fine.
Yeah, that's cause fullscreen is still not implemented. There's a fullscreen change event in JS, but a handler for it needs to be attached from a parent element, but the game runs inside an iframe, so there's no way to attach it. So... I don't know how to do it yet.
Yeah, showing more concrete changes applied by mods could be possible.
As for your video, if you ever play the game again, I'd suggest exchanging your low-rarity modifiers for higher-level ones. And using brakes.
I only played in fullscreen to record it. I used firefox on linux. You just told me fullscreen is not implemented, so don't worry about it. It's fine when played in a window.
I'd suggest exchanging your low-rarity modifiers for higher-level ones. And using brakes.
I forgot there were brakes. I will try exchanging more in future.
The UI with the stats symbols is great and the new enemies are cool. The absorber feels like a mini-boss with its current health. I tried different setup and it always takes 40+ seconds to kill it. I ran a expp setup for a while, it took a while to kill things so I tried removing it because it said "no armor penetration" to later realize it added butloads of damage and losing wave 18. I should have tested the change beforehand.
The rebalancing is palpable and I don't think the strategies I used in my past runs work anymore, specially against the absorber. Everything feels much tankier.
When I tried to start a new run after losing, the game stuck on the kill screen from my previous run and it became unresponsive.
I will play another run later today or on saturday to give other strategies a try.
Yeah, Exp description is not worded that well, it means that the AOE of the explosion has no armour penetration, but the bullet itself has it, although I should probably remove it. Also I decreased the push force of the explosion so that the enemies stay inside the AOE and take damage.
Next time the game crashes, could you please open the browser console and send me the error message?
I'm gonna play "Poke all toads" today in the evening.
Comments
I didn't get too far in because the game is pretty dense from the get-go, while not exactly being friendly. I feel like there should be a clearer display of what each modifier does and how swapping their order is actually something meaningful. The more modifiers you get, the more experimentation becomes discouraged if this is not a fast, intuitive process. Arguably it may be the case once you get used to the process, but I didn't play as far as to get to that point, sorry. It wasn't very well reflected ingame with the starter modifiers either; perhaps a tutorial level with stronger, very distinct & disctinctly combinable upgrades is in order.
Aside from that I think the game seems fun enough, though I agree with congusbongus on the pacing a little. It's just the frontloading that gets to me.
This game is pretty cool; the mechanics are great and there’s a satisfying level of juice.
I wonder what your ultimate plans are, because I feel as great as it already is, it is missing things that will make it truly awesome.
For example: the pacing is not ideal; each level starts very hard when all (or most) of the enemies are spawned), and gets easier and even boring as the enemies are defeated. A good pacing should instead go from easy to hard, with spikes and lulls every now and then. Will you work on the spawning logic next?
Next there is the gameplay. It works well, but I feel that most enemies take too long to defeat. In some shooters, enemies die in one shot but they are numerous, in others they take longer to die but there are fewer of them, so there’s a balance, and here I feel the balance is slightly off. This is especially apparent with the tank enemy, which persists and becomes a chore to finish off. Also since the game map is pretty simple, every game boils down to circle strafing. Will you add maps (walls etc), powerups to collect, or other mechanics that zone out the player or encourage them to break their movement? Consider Crimsonland as an example, which has no walls but heavily relies on powerups to keep things interesting.
Finally this game needs some audio love; the visual effects are on point but some sounds are just basic sfxr/bfxr stuff. And music! These would really make things pop.
Anyway don’t want to make it sound like I’m down on this game, it’s great overall. Looking forward to what you do with it next.
Played a bit more runs.
The heavy chaser is super fun. The way it makes you dodge is great. The "fra" modifier is incredibly powerful. I like the idea of the absorver, but it is a difficulty enemy for something introduced so early. The ship takes a very long time to kill and creates a ton of little ships with ease. Also it bouncer all over the place so it is easy to get unpredictable behavior. I don't mean that it is a bad, just that its stats could be looked into.
While playing, I realized a custom mouse cursor could be welcome. At least for me, I lose track of the mouse position really easily. Each level has become much busier since everything creates bullets or ships.
Overall, the game is a lot tougher now. Maybe too much. I would love to know what is the maximum level other players reached, because now I cannot go further from level 25 and earlier levels were finished with single digit HP remaining. All of that while abusing FRA by the way.
Also after writing the post and going back to the game window, a ton of little ships spawned on the top left corner of the screen. It is the mothership level so it might be related to that.
This game is really great. Took me a while to get it, but after a few play throughs it started to make sense and I really enjoyed the challenge. The gun modifier system is really cool, it adds a lot of depth to the game. I would really like to be able to see some sort of information panel that gives the jist of how modifiers are affecting each other or what the order is doing to the final stats.
Thanks. I'll probably add a tooltip for that later.
Oh something that I forgot to mention - it would be super helpful to see where my mouse pointer is or to even give a laser sight. During bigger action sequences I would frequently lose my mouse, and it made it harder for me to shoot.
Fun game, I really like the gun modifiers, reminds me of Noita. Enemy variety is good, I can see the game becoming better and more complex just by adding new ones. Although it can be a bit difficult to distinguish them, but I guess it gets easier with more experience. Other than that I just have a few things:
https://files.catbox.moe/t0zum8.webm
Thanks for the detailed comment!
I never dragged a modifier outside the screen before, but sure, I can fix it, and I just did.
Yeah, I think you're right, so now they are removed before the level begins.
That's cause fullscreen is still not implemented. Actually, I don't even know if I'm gonna implement it, cause it's turning out to be more difficult than expected. Actually, the button to enable the fullscreen mode is only there because Archtower dev asked me to add it, cause otherwise links to jams that the game was showcased at would take up part of the game screen.
There's no doubleclick to remove a mod, but there's right click for that instead.
Yeah, I think I'll add a tooltip on hover that shows concrete stat changes, as Goblin Resort dev asked me to do. But in general, an upgraded modifier has the power of 2 modifiers of previous level combined together, even though they require 3 to be upgraded, but an upgraded ones takes up as much space as lvl 1 does, so I think it's fine.
Yeah, that was a bug, it's fixed now.
No, there's no way to add mods during testing, you need to return to the inventory and go to testing mode again. And I probably won't add it, cause I can't be bothered, it's gonna be a mess with drag'n'drop and mousemove events interfering with each other. Also, there's no stats button anymore, cause players didn't use it, so stats are just shown inside each gun's panel now.
I thought it was fine, cause I didn't think people would keep scrolling the wheel to boost the firerate, but now that you mention unlockable scroll wheels and scripts... I added a short delay after switching.
I enjoyed this one a lot, it was fun to mix and match the upgrades.
I found the idea of multiple guns confusing, do they all fire at the same time? Or were there more buttons I was missing. I couldn't tell if there was a balance to the amount of guns I should have vs having fewer, other than dispersing upgrades.
The wireframe art is excellent and I appreciate the accurate Bresenham lines that most people miss.
As a final note: The arenas always felt too tight to me, maybe shrink the enemies or give a bigger play area.
Thanks for the comment.
No, only one gun fires at a time, but you can switch between them using number keys or the mouse wheel.
Actually, I don't know if these are accurate Bresenham lines, they are whatever lines the GPU draws, cause I use WebGL.
Tight arenas are kind of the point.
It's really cool. Enemy encounters, despite being simple, consistently hit the fun zone. I love the symbols showing up before enemies spawn. I'm not crazy about the roguelite part, but combat is definetely solid.
Also, I think piercing upgrade increases damage instead of decreasing.
Thanks! And yes, it does, but it's fixed now.
Really fun. Only thing I can say is to add music and to reduce the Armor the Splitter has, since they take forever to kill unless armor piercing is on a gun and even then it still takes a bit. Made it to level 10 before stopping.
Splitter has 0 armour, though?
The enemies that split into multiple enemies aka the third enemy shown, when introduced they said they have armor.
They have 0 armour.
Whatever it was, they have more HP than anything else and it takes a long time to kill each one.
Upgrade you gun and it will become easier.
I played it last DD, and I had a lot of fun making different guns, even though I am really bad at games like this.
I recorded some gameplay (no commentary, just gameplay)
https://litter.catbox.moe/iz8uga.mp4
The link is going to expire in 3 days. It was my second run of this version. My first run only lasted 3 minutes, so not much point sharing it.
I am probably going to play more over the next couple of days when I got more time.
I like the UI additions. I probably didn't get far enough to see your newest enemy types.
Playing in fullscreen still puts the game in smaller window in top left corner.
Sometimes the "Your enemies" section has weird sprite scaling.
Now with your ui icons, I think it would be nice to have modifiers be written as "+5.0 to x, but -2.0 to y" instead of full text sentences like e.g. Sca description.
Maybe when you hover over a modifier, you could have two separate sections; one for the pros, and one for the cons, and have those new icons show up in there.
I might add more comments the more I play.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for the feedback.
Which browser did you use? Cause I tested it in Chrome and Firefox on Windows, and the scaling works fine.
Yeah, that's cause fullscreen is still not implemented. There's a fullscreen change event in JS, but a handler for it needs to be attached from a parent element, but the game runs inside an iframe, so there's no way to attach it. So... I don't know how to do it yet.
Yeah, showing more concrete changes applied by mods could be possible.
As for your video, if you ever play the game again, I'd suggest exchanging your low-rarity modifiers for higher-level ones. And using brakes.
I only played in fullscreen to record it. I used firefox on linux. You just told me fullscreen is not implemented, so don't worry about it. It's fine when played in a window.
I forgot there were brakes. I will try exchanging more in future.
I was talking about the scaling of sprites and buttons in the next level preview. This is how it's supposed to look like:
Are you by chance playing an older version? Could you clear the browser cache and see if this issue persists?
oh, that's what you meant. I am on the new version, because I see the stat icons when choosing modifiers.
take a look at this
https://files.catbox.moe/p2nmw6.mp4
The scale is fine if I hide the description, but it looks like that button shouldn't be as wide as the window.
I just tested in Brave browser, and it looks fine just like in your screenshot
Edit: but for some reason the fps in brave makes it completely unplayable
The UI with the stats symbols is great and the new enemies are cool. The absorber feels like a mini-boss with its current health. I tried different setup and it always takes 40+ seconds to kill it. I ran a expp setup for a while, it took a while to kill things so I tried removing it because it said "no armor penetration" to later realize it added butloads of damage and losing wave 18. I should have tested the change beforehand.
The rebalancing is palpable and I don't think the strategies I used in my past runs work anymore, specially against the absorber. Everything feels much tankier.
When I tried to start a new run after losing, the game stuck on the kill screen from my previous run and it became unresponsive.
I will play another run later today or on saturday to give other strategies a try.
Hey, thanks for the feedback!
Yeah, Exp description is not worded that well, it means that the AOE of the explosion has no armour penetration, but the bullet itself has it, although I should probably remove it. Also I decreased the push force of the explosion so that the enemies stay inside the AOE and take damage.
Next time the game crashes, could you please open the browser console and send me the error message?
I'm gonna play "Poke all toads" today in the evening.