I finished a run with the witch girl. You really nailed the Vampire Survivors gameplay! The witch became insanely OP at the end and was just vaporizing everything in sight. I like the colorful graphics and particle effects. My only complaint is that it's a bit hard to see which direction you're aiming sometimes; maybe make the arrow longer? Also there should be more descriptions about what the powerups do and how much they stack, and you should be able to see what powerups you currently have in the game screen, without going to the menu.
Thank you for the feedback, showing the power ups on screen is a planned feature I will implement in the future, about the pointing arrow, I will see how to make it more visible. I'm glad you liked the gameplay so far.
I played a full run with the witch character last time I touched this game so I tried the other characters this time, starting with the bomb elf. Her main attack is interesting but feels pretty lackluster, it requires a lot more effort than the witch's spam fireballs without much reward. This is not only frustrating but makes the character feel unfun. You could increase the explosion radius and make the bombs deal a lot more damage when hitting enemies near the center of the explosion, as it would still encourage players to have good timing while also bringing up the overall power of the character. There should also be some sort of indicator for your bomb charges, I recommend something like circles representing your bombs around either the cursor or the character sprite.
The cyclops character is just boring, it's the most passive gameplay imaginable. Maybe it's entertaining to VS lovers but I don't see it. I would give something for the player to actually do on top of having the drones, like charging up the drones and having them fire a beam in the direction the player is aiming, then putting the attack on a long cooldown.
The blonde character has an interesting mechanic and it does scale fairly well, not many complaints there. Just make it more obvious you're losing health when you have the damage aura.
The enemy variety is nice but the environment is lacking in both visual and gameplay substance. It would be easy to make some tile variations to spice up the floor, e.g., cracked and mossy tiles. There's only a handful of props with fixed spawns, maybe make more stuff periodically spawn in. I still think your choice of VFX style is poor and doesn't fit the game but you don't seem interested in changing it, so I will leave it be.
I found a bug: pausing and unpausing during the upgrade screen will cause the game to return to x1 timescale while the player is still selecting an upgrade.
Thank you for playing the demo, is good to see opinions on the characters gameplay, to be sincere, I'm taking a risk here, other games inspired in the Vampire Survivors have a lot of characters but all are the same at the core, in some cases, just a sprite swap with different stats. Here I'm trying to make characters really different from each other, like a MOBA. I expect players liking one character more than the rest and only playing with the other ones for achievements and unlock stuff. About the cyclops, she is gonna the classic VS style gameplay, and I'm doing it like that because some people want a character that do everything automic without input, and she is perfect for filling that role. About the blonde, I will tweak the effects so people know when she is burning herself.
Thank you for the bug report, I will look on that.
I tried all the characters and they seemed pretty different in power level. With the first one I blitzed trough everything and I don't think I even got hit once. She leveled up super fast and became overpowered very quickly. The bomb girl and the healer had interesting attacks but they were also a lot more difficult to use and get kills with consistently. There's also a bug where you attack when you pick a level up and that doesn't matter for most of them but its pretty annoying for the last character because it switches between heal and damage. Oh and occasionally I would start the game without a character, not sure what caused that.
The core gameplay is fun and I like that there are hordes of enemies but the progression was a little weird, at some point in the midgame there weren't a whole lot of them on the screen but then before the boss spawned there were suddenly dozens of them everywhere. The level also gets a little empty after you destroy the barrels, I would like to see some different terrain features or obstacles. Oh yeah and it took me some time to actually find the boss, I know he spawns in the middle but its hard to tell where you are exactly.
I didn't look at the masteries very much, they seemed a little buggy. I couldn't exit the menu once and had to reset.
Other than that, it's pretty fun to play, good work
- When you start the game without a character, it's because a variable responsible of the character selection reset to zero and the code doesn't know which character to choose, so the map load empty.
- The attack while the game paused, it's because the codes is still running, I will make sure to pause it while on the selection screen.
- The masterry one, it's because of the text, it was blocking the buttons from being selected.
Thank you for playing the demo, the bugs you mentioned are being fixed right now.
Hey dude, I tried the game lol I did 2 runs with the witch girl, first round I lost but after that once you know the powerups you can get pretty OP quite early, I liked that to be honest, you get to be a little power drunk hehe. I did find a few bugs and I'm sure you are aware of, I'll mention just one that is when i press ENTER while on the game itself it acts as a pause button, but when i press it again it activates the pause menu back again (as if it was never paused).
Other than that I think the VFXs looked really good and that the characters were charming. Keep it up, good work!
sometimes when i have to select the next power up, clicking on one of them alternates between the green "fast movement" circle and the orange "combat" circle. the only way to bypass this is selecting a different power up, which means that sometimes i cannot pick what i want.
it took me a while to realize that going into "combat mode" drains my health pretty fucking quickly. is she supposed to be some kind of hard mode?
Her aura changes every time you click the fire button with your mouse or gamepad, the player can change the modes at will anytime, when the aura is orange, it burns her life and deal a massive fire damage to all enemies inside base on how much life she lost, when the aura is green, she moves faster and health regeneration is doubled. Using the orange aura all the time in the beginning will mostly make lose, but if the player invest on health regeneration and area increase(bullet size) they can overcome the self inflicted damage and have the aura activated all the time, making it on the most powerfu/brokenl abilities right now in the game.
Thank you for playing the demo, watching the video help me found bugs I didn't saw, but I already know how to fix them:
- When you select a character, there's a INT variable that changes, 1,2,3,4 are for Luna,Zelvy,Iris and Selene, but everytime you go to mastery it resets to 0, which made the not know which character spawn in the map.
-The Ice Aura have a static Bool for check if it was activated before, this is part of the old code when I wanted the player to not spawn many ice auras, I will remove it.
- Enemies disappearing when they are too far from you, this is intended. It optimize the game but also give the opportunity to the player to have a higher score, if the player makes a good build, will defeat many enemies and level up, if the player run away instead of defeating the enemies as the DUNGEON WATCHER he/she is, less XP and less score.
I will balance visual effects and tweak the game progression of the characters, but making broken builds will be part of the game:
See those games?, I've been playing the games from the same genre (because I myself didn't even play this type of games), and after reading reviews of those games, my conclusion is that people wanna "broke" the game, watch gameplay of Vampire Survivors or Soulstone Survivors and you will see how all the screen covers in projectiles and explosions to the point you don't understand what are you watching, even I get lost many times in VS because I can't see anything, its madness.
I also at the beginning I thought, for example, that too many thunders is bad because they block the screen view and where too shinny. But, in November of last year I uploaded a small demo on Newgrounds (ver 0.0.2) and I remember a comment telling me how fun was too just pick "more thunder" and not shoot a single fireball...
Anyways, the challenge of this type of games is balancing the "power level growth curve", I want the player become a OP menace by the end of the round, but.... not so fast.
Well I gonna start fixing more bugs and prepare to rewrite a good chunk of the code because I learned last week C# events and inheritance, and there's a lot of potential for those, I already have some ideas.
Again, thanks to everybody who played and give opinion on the game, they were very useful.
- New Character available: Selene the Lunar Priest, alternated her aura between burning her live to deal massive dmg or having a massive boost of hp regeneration
- New Power ups: Lunatrium, the spinning ice sword and MoonIce the boomerang projectiles of ice.
- New Stat upgrade: More Experience, I think it's OP right now, is fun you should try it.
- Some Stat upgrade buffed and tweaked.
- Fixed a bug which make an enemy not spawn, now you will see some Metal Slimes
- UI improved with effects and new icons, this includes the title screen, character menu and pause menu.
- New art for icons in the power ups buttons, no more text on them.
- New decorations on the map with lights on the pillars.
- Summoner is harder, HE SPAWN AT THE CENTER OF THE MAP.
- New Music made for the main level, is more dynamic, opinions are welcome.
- The gold you receive at the char menu it's not a bug its intentional so you can buy the characters for testing.
Beside all of this, I improve a lot the code and made a Steam Page, if you wanna see it and give me advice/opinions your welcome.
Comments
I finished a run with the witch girl. You really nailed the Vampire Survivors gameplay! The witch became insanely OP at the end and was just vaporizing everything in sight. I like the colorful graphics and particle effects. My only complaint is that it's a bit hard to see which direction you're aiming sometimes; maybe make the arrow longer? Also there should be more descriptions about what the powerups do and how much they stack, and you should be able to see what powerups you currently have in the game screen, without going to the menu.
Thank you for the feedback, showing the power ups on screen is a planned feature I will implement in the future, about the pointing arrow, I will see how to make it more visible. I'm glad you liked the gameplay so far.
I played a full run with the witch character last time I touched this game so I tried the other characters this time, starting with the bomb elf. Her main attack is interesting but feels pretty lackluster, it requires a lot more effort than the witch's spam fireballs without much reward. This is not only frustrating but makes the character feel unfun. You could increase the explosion radius and make the bombs deal a lot more damage when hitting enemies near the center of the explosion, as it would still encourage players to have good timing while also bringing up the overall power of the character. There should also be some sort of indicator for your bomb charges, I recommend something like circles representing your bombs around either the cursor or the character sprite.
The cyclops character is just boring, it's the most passive gameplay imaginable. Maybe it's entertaining to VS lovers but I don't see it. I would give something for the player to actually do on top of having the drones, like charging up the drones and having them fire a beam in the direction the player is aiming, then putting the attack on a long cooldown.
The blonde character has an interesting mechanic and it does scale fairly well, not many complaints there. Just make it more obvious you're losing health when you have the damage aura.
The enemy variety is nice but the environment is lacking in both visual and gameplay substance. It would be easy to make some tile variations to spice up the floor, e.g., cracked and mossy tiles. There's only a handful of props with fixed spawns, maybe make more stuff periodically spawn in. I still think your choice of VFX style is poor and doesn't fit the game but you don't seem interested in changing it, so I will leave it be.
I found a bug: pausing and unpausing during the upgrade screen will cause the game to return to x1 timescale while the player is still selecting an upgrade.
Thank you for playing the demo, is good to see opinions on the characters gameplay, to be sincere, I'm taking a risk here, other games inspired in the Vampire Survivors have a lot of characters but all are the same at the core, in some cases, just a sprite swap with different stats. Here I'm trying to make characters really different from each other, like a MOBA. I expect players liking one character more than the rest and only playing with the other ones for achievements and unlock stuff. About the cyclops, she is gonna the classic VS style gameplay, and I'm doing it like that because some people want a character that do everything automic without input, and she is perfect for filling that role. About the blonde, I will tweak the effects so people know when she is burning herself.
Thank you for the bug report, I will look on that.
I tried all the characters and they seemed pretty different in power level. With the first one I blitzed trough everything and I don't think I even got hit once. She leveled up super fast and became overpowered very quickly. The bomb girl and the healer had interesting attacks but they were also a lot more difficult to use and get kills with consistently. There's also a bug where you attack when you pick a level up and that doesn't matter for most of them but its pretty annoying for the last character because it switches between heal and damage. Oh and occasionally I would start the game without a character, not sure what caused that.
The core gameplay is fun and I like that there are hordes of enemies but the progression was a little weird, at some point in the midgame there weren't a whole lot of them on the screen but then before the boss spawned there were suddenly dozens of them everywhere. The level also gets a little empty after you destroy the barrels, I would like to see some different terrain features or obstacles. Oh yeah and it took me some time to actually find the boss, I know he spawns in the middle but its hard to tell where you are exactly.
I didn't look at the masteries very much, they seemed a little buggy. I couldn't exit the menu once and had to reset.
Other than that, it's pretty fun to play, good work
- When you start the game without a character, it's because a variable responsible of the character selection reset to zero and the code doesn't know which character to choose, so the map load empty.
- The attack while the game paused, it's because the codes is still running, I will make sure to pause it while on the selection screen.
- The masterry one, it's because of the text, it was blocking the buttons from being selected.
Thank you for playing the demo, the bugs you mentioned are being fixed right now.
Hey dude, I tried the game lol I did 2 runs with the witch girl, first round I lost but after that once you know the powerups you can get pretty OP quite early, I liked that to be honest, you get to be a little power drunk hehe. I did find a few bugs and I'm sure you are aware of, I'll mention just one that is when i press ENTER while on the game itself it acts as a pause button, but when i press it again it activates the pause menu back again (as if it was never paused).
Other than that I think the VFXs looked really good and that the characters were charming. Keep it up, good work!
Thanks for playing the demo. I wasn't aware of the pause menu error, I'll check it and fix it. I'm glad you liked the characters.
i played with the new character
sometimes when i have to select the next power up, clicking on one of them alternates between the green "fast movement" circle and the orange "combat" circle. the only way to bypass this is selecting a different power up, which means that sometimes i cannot pick what i want.
it took me a while to realize that going into "combat mode" drains my health pretty fucking quickly. is she supposed to be some kind of hard mode?
Her aura changes every time you click the fire button with your mouse or gamepad, the player can change the modes at will anytime, when the aura is orange, it burns her life and deal a massive fire damage to all enemies inside base on how much life she lost, when the aura is green, she moves faster and health regeneration is doubled. Using the orange aura all the time in the beginning will mostly make lose, but if the player invest on health regeneration and area increase(bullet size) they can overcome the self inflicted damage and have the aura activated all the time, making it on the most powerfu/brokenl abilities right now in the game.
ahoy
we played dungeon watchers on stream
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2190078151
starting at 2:05:10 and until 02:57:00. we had fun but broke it a bit!
Thank you for playing the demo, watching the video help me found bugs I didn't saw, but I already know how to fix them:
- When you select a character, there's a INT variable that changes, 1,2,3,4 are for Luna,Zelvy,Iris and Selene, but everytime you go to mastery it resets to 0, which made the not know which character spawn in the map.
-The Ice Aura have a static Bool for check if it was activated before, this is part of the old code when I wanted the player to not spawn many ice auras, I will remove it.
- Enemies disappearing when they are too far from you, this is intended. It optimize the game but also give the opportunity to the player to have a higher score, if the player makes a good build, will defeat many enemies and level up, if the player run away instead of defeating the enemies as the DUNGEON WATCHER he/she is, less XP and less score.
I will balance visual effects and tweak the game progression of the characters, but making broken builds will be part of the game:
See those games?, I've been playing the games from the same genre (because I myself didn't even play this type of games), and after reading reviews of those games, my conclusion is that people wanna "broke" the game, watch gameplay of Vampire Survivors or Soulstone Survivors and you will see how all the screen covers in projectiles and explosions to the point you don't understand what are you watching, even I get lost many times in VS because I can't see anything, its madness.
I also at the beginning I thought, for example, that too many thunders is bad because they block the screen view and where too shinny. But, in November of last year I uploaded a small demo on Newgrounds (ver 0.0.2) and I remember a comment telling me how fun was too just pick "more thunder" and not shoot a single fireball...
Anyways, the challenge of this type of games is balancing the "power level growth curve", I want the player become a OP menace by the end of the round, but.... not so fast.
Well I gonna start fixing more bugs and prepare to rewrite a good chunk of the code because I learned last week C# events and inheritance, and there's a lot of potential for those, I already have some ideas.
Again, thanks to everybody who played and give opinion on the game, they were very useful.
- New Character available: Selene the Lunar Priest, alternated her aura between burning her live to deal massive dmg or having a massive boost of hp regeneration
- New Power ups: Lunatrium, the spinning ice sword and MoonIce the boomerang projectiles of ice.
- New Stat upgrade: More Experience, I think it's OP right now, is fun you should try it.
- Some Stat upgrade buffed and tweaked.
- Fixed a bug which make an enemy not spawn, now you will see some Metal Slimes
- UI improved with effects and new icons, this includes the title screen, character menu and pause menu.
- New art for icons in the power ups buttons, no more text on them.
- New decorations on the map with lights on the pillars.
- Summoner is harder, HE SPAWN AT THE CENTER OF THE MAP.
- New Music made for the main level, is more dynamic, opinions are welcome.
- The gold you receive at the char menu it's not a bug its intentional so you can buy the characters for testing.
Beside all of this, I improve a lot the code and made a Steam Page, if you wanna see it and give me advice/opinions your welcome.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2497840/Dungeon_Watchers/