Did 5 floors. The general concept is great, but the pacing is off. The start is reaaally slow, but after a few floors it gets way more hectic, which is when the fun starts.
The menu between floors is missing a quit button or something similar, had to alt f4 out of there. Art style is great, even though i wish i had more space to work with, like in a survivors game.
I noticed two other things:
Skeleton archers tend to shoot almost exclusively to the left. Maybe that only happens once you were to their left and they never change?
Not being able to loot the gold from the last few mobs is frustrating . Maybe set a timer for the end screen so it only appears once the gold disappeared. The gold has a timer itself too, so it wouldnt be too hard i guess
If there were more arenas/enemies this could become great!
Thanks for playing, agree on the pacing. I've thought about opening the map up more, especially once larger numbers of enemies spawn. Will need to experiment and see if it feels better. Will also fix the gold issue (its bugged but supposed to go to you after level is complete)
Not a bad concept but sorta just boring. The first time I had a melee guy so it was a bit interesting to try and maneuver around enemies to get nearby only when I could hit them, but after that run ended shortly I started another one with a cleric who would hit for sure, at infinite range, with a long long cooldown. Quit after a couple rooms. It would be more charming if the text was readable and the game used its own assets, and gave me something to do other than turn, or if levels were not an empty box.
Quite a lovely game, played until floor 11. The main gameplay loop is pleasing as fuck, music and sound effects are good and the graphical style is neat.
For long term engagement I think this would work well with some kind of outside system, while satisfying I think you need something more for players to get really hooked. Perhaps some kind of outside progression system outside of combat, such as investing in a village or something like that.
Also, more varied areas, more songs, necromancer character, bard character and a monster character.
Thanks for playing - yes the longer term vision is to have a meta progression system to unlock more abilities, classes, and items for runs so agreed there. I think the idea of growing a village is a good one, I might steal that. For this DD I wanted to try to nail down 4 classes but have 5 more planned.
this game is really great, it started slow and felt silly. but by floor 3 when you start to get more heroes in your crew it quickly gets very engaging. the balance between upgrading or acquiring more heroes works pretty well. as its hard to control a longer snake but you get more damage output. i wonder if you cant try and push the snake to be even longer, let the player decide between the trade off. i think the difficuly should be pushed further. it was satisfying to see my rangers destroying everything but i feel like that feeling should be earned. i'd like the gold to be auto pickuped when you clear a floor, or let the player walk up and grab it. i feel its a shame you cant dismiss heroes from your crew, but it adds a layer of strategy that might be for the better.
Appreciate the feedback, yeah I really need to rework the early game to get off the ground faster. Balance wise more enemy variety and stronger enemies are needed, will have to create more varied rooms as well to run around in. Dismissing heroes is planned for later updates for sure
-Fun idea, I like it. However, I don't like how vague the move direction of the character is. A simple arrow or other indicator would make it more clear.
-If I kill the last guy, his money gets sucked into me. However, if there was gold from another guy I killed, it won't also get sucked into me. Doesn't feel good to lose out on that. Maybe I could keep controlling my guys while the victory screen is displayed?
-Being able to walk into the wall to stop moving feels kind of weird, like it was almost cheating.
-Multiple guys in the party is fun, I especially like poison with a piercing archer, has a ton of DPS if you get the right angle.
-More damage upgrade for ranger's throwing knives is free for some reason.
-Beat the game, had a decent time. Very much a snowball kind of game. First couple of levels were mildly challenging, then after you get a couple of kitted out guy's it's a piece of cake. That's fine if you want this to be a casual game, but a better balance would be nice.
Appreciate the feedback, I had a tough time getting the balance right between early and late game. I think a lot of the abilities are overtuned, but I also like that you can have a number of powerful combinations. I'm going to try seeing what happens if I make the walls deal damage to incentivize the player to avoid hitting them.
I ended up realizing fairly fast that the best choice was to just roll a bunch of dwarves, because they seemed to have higher HP/defense. The game was a little buggy in the menus when it came to selecting abilities. The fact that I could kill a large amount of enemies and lose the gold because they all died at once and ended the round sucked. The player should get all the gold left on screen at the end of a round. I also wasn't a huge fan of the tank controls nor the fact that the snake itself didn't really behave like a snake in the actual game snake where every node (character) followed the exact same path at the same speed. The tank controls might be more tolerable if there were an arrow pointing in the direction you move by the head.
The gold at the end of the level is actually bugged, there is logic to move it to the player after the round ends. I'll be sure to fix that. Agree that the directional feedback should be added, I'll look into that next.
is this SNKRX inspired? i'd have a lot more to say about this, but all of it would boil down to "you should have done it the way SNKRX did". if you've arrived at the same type of game through convergent evolution in game design you might be right not to just plainly copy SNKRX, but there's still a lot to improve that you couldn't take 1:1 from SNKRX
i hate the pixel inconsistency/mixels. not just the text, but the way the characters move on subpixels
there's no reason for the battle to not start until i press space
movement is too slow
even if you don't bounce off of a wall, being able to continually walk into it mustn't be the best way the interaction between player and wall can be handled
enemies take too many hits
even if that weren't the case, the first fight takes too long
enemies predicting my movement/randomly shooting slow projectiles near me isn't very fun
being able to walk through them despite this is odd
having different "skill trees" on one character but only being able to use one per battle isn't fun (i must be missing something because this seems like a very strange decision)
losing a (very expensive) character on death isn't fun (early on, at least. i'm sure there are late-game reasons you would design it like this)
No, but I realized about a month into development that SNKRX already existed. After watching SNKRX gameplay I actually changed the snake movement because I realized it worked better than direct grid movement.
I actually slowed down the movement because projectiles, enemies, and players were moving too fast to actually react, but moving fast definitely feels good.
Agree on the wall interaction, need more time to determine the best way to interact with it.
Had a tough time balancing difficulty and round length from early to latter rounds and wanted to have the pace of each wave pick up as you advance but I agree the early round is too long as is. As for enemy health, after you upgrade abilities and take items they die mostly in one shot.
I originally gave the ability to equip multiple abilities on a character instead of just one, but felt that you lose character diversification and build variety when doing that. The idea was to build the snake with specific characters in specific slots doing specific things, otherwise it seemed more boring to just unlock everything on every character and immediately explode the level. Of course I can see how that just points to poor design on my part; probably could spend more time balancing around this by allowing the player to use multiple abilities but locking more abilities behind deeper skill trees so that you could really only invest in a handful but still use multiple abilities.
Thanks much for the feedback, this is very helpful
-Got to level 2 I can't bear how slow it is to beat levels. there's no reason for attacks to recharge so slowly It's weird a melee character(axe man) needs to run away from enemies and damage them from afar. seems like an opportunity to create different snake builds with some going into enemies with melee characters. -Shop page screen is godawful. the style, being too small and inconsistent between different objects -On the settings changing the volume bars causes the UI elements to shrink or extend in size.
Agree that the early levels are too long. It seems like the pace can definitely be sped up both in terms of movement and round length.
Yeah I need to scrap that whole UI if I move forwards with this game. Believe it or not it used to be even worse before a couple more iterations. Need to swap the font.
Comments
Couldn't play for too long since the screen was flickering every couple of seconds, and the animations were jittery. No idea why.
Did 5 floors. The general concept is great, but the pacing is off. The start is reaaally slow, but after a few floors it gets way more hectic, which is when the fun starts.
The menu between floors is missing a quit button or something similar, had to alt f4 out of there. Art style is great, even though i wish i had more space to work with, like in a survivors game.
I noticed two other things:
If there were more arenas/enemies this could become great!
Thanks for playing, agree on the pacing. I've thought about opening the map up more, especially once larger numbers of enemies spawn. Will need to experiment and see if it feels better. Will also fix the gold issue (its bugged but supposed to go to you after level is complete)
Not a bad concept but sorta just boring. The first time I had a melee guy so it was a bit interesting to try and maneuver around enemies to get nearby only when I could hit them, but after that run ended shortly I started another one with a cleric who would hit for sure, at infinite range, with a long long cooldown. Quit after a couple rooms. It would be more charming if the text was readable and the game used its own assets, and gave me something to do other than turn, or if levels were not an empty box.
Thanks for playing, appreciate the feedback
Quite a lovely game, played until floor 11. The main gameplay loop is pleasing as fuck, music and sound effects are good and the graphical style is neat.
For long term engagement I think this would work well with some kind of outside system, while satisfying I think you need something more for players to get really hooked. Perhaps some kind of outside progression system outside of combat, such as investing in a village or something like that.
Also, more varied areas, more songs, necromancer character, bard character and a monster character.
Thanks for playing - yes the longer term vision is to have a meta progression system to unlock more abilities, classes, and items for runs so agreed there. I think the idea of growing a village is a good one, I might steal that. For this DD I wanted to try to nail down 4 classes but have 5 more planned.
got to the end screen with 4 rangers and 2 mages.
this game is really great, it started slow and felt silly. but by floor 3 when you start to get more heroes in your crew it quickly gets very engaging. the balance between upgrading or acquiring more heroes works pretty well. as its hard to control a longer snake but you get more damage output. i wonder if you cant try and push the snake to be even longer, let the player decide between the trade off. i think the difficuly should be pushed further. it was satisfying to see my rangers destroying everything but i feel like that feeling should be earned.
i'd like the gold to be auto pickuped when you clear a floor, or let the player walk up and grab it.
i feel its a shame you cant dismiss heroes from your crew, but it adds a layer of strategy that might be for the better.
it's a really great demo, i enjoyed playing it
Appreciate the feedback, yeah I really need to rework the early game to get off the ground faster. Balance wise more enemy variety and stronger enemies are needed, will have to create more varied rooms as well to run around in. Dismissing heroes is planned for later updates for sure
-Fun idea, I like it. However, I don't like how vague the move direction of the character is. A simple arrow or other indicator would make it more clear.
-If I kill the last guy, his money gets sucked into me. However, if there was gold from another guy I killed, it won't also get sucked into me. Doesn't feel good to lose out on that. Maybe I could keep controlling my guys while the victory screen is displayed?
-Being able to walk into the wall to stop moving feels kind of weird, like it was almost cheating.
-Multiple guys in the party is fun, I especially like poison with a piercing archer, has a ton of DPS if you get the right angle.
-More damage upgrade for ranger's throwing knives is free for some reason.
-Beat the game, had a decent time. Very much a snowball kind of game. First couple of levels were mildly challenging, then after you get a couple of kitted out guy's it's a piece of cake. That's fine if you want this to be a casual game, but a better balance would be nice.
Appreciate the feedback, I had a tough time getting the balance right between early and late game. I think a lot of the abilities are overtuned, but I also like that you can have a number of powerful combinations. I'm going to try seeing what happens if I make the walls deal damage to incentivize the player to avoid hitting them.
I ended up realizing fairly fast that the best choice was to just roll a bunch of dwarves, because they seemed to have higher HP/defense. The game was a little buggy in the menus when it came to selecting abilities. The fact that I could kill a large amount of enemies and lose the gold because they all died at once and ended the round sucked. The player should get all the gold left on screen at the end of a round. I also wasn't a huge fan of the tank controls nor the fact that the snake itself didn't really behave like a snake in the actual game snake where every node (character) followed the exact same path at the same speed. The tank controls might be more tolerable if there were an arrow pointing in the direction you move by the head.
The gold at the end of the level is actually bugged, there is logic to move it to the player after the round ends. I'll be sure to fix that. Agree that the directional feedback should be added, I'll look into that next.
is this SNKRX inspired? i'd have a lot more to say about this, but all of it would boil down to "you should have done it the way SNKRX did". if you've arrived at the same type of game through convergent evolution in game design you might be right not to just plainly copy SNKRX, but there's still a lot to improve that you couldn't take 1:1 from SNKRX
No, but I realized about a month into development that SNKRX already existed. After watching SNKRX gameplay I actually changed the snake movement because I realized it worked better than direct grid movement.
I actually slowed down the movement because projectiles, enemies, and players were moving too fast to actually react, but moving fast definitely feels good.
Agree on the wall interaction, need more time to determine the best way to interact with it.
Had a tough time balancing difficulty and round length from early to latter rounds and wanted to have the pace of each wave pick up as you advance but I agree the early round is too long as is. As for enemy health, after you upgrade abilities and take items they die mostly in one shot.
I originally gave the ability to equip multiple abilities on a character instead of just one, but felt that you lose character diversification and build variety when doing that. The idea was to build the snake with specific characters in specific slots doing specific things, otherwise it seemed more boring to just unlock everything on every character and immediately explode the level. Of course I can see how that just points to poor design on my part; probably could spend more time balancing around this by allowing the player to use multiple abilities but locking more abilities behind deeper skill trees so that you could really only invest in a handful but still use multiple abilities.
Thanks much for the feedback, this is very helpful
-Got to level 2
I can't bear how slow it is to beat levels. there's no reason for attacks to recharge so slowly
It's weird a melee character(axe man) needs to run away from enemies and damage them from afar. seems like an opportunity to create different snake builds with some going into enemies with melee characters.
-Shop page screen is godawful. the style, being too small and inconsistent between different objects
-On the settings changing the volume bars causes the UI elements to shrink or extend in size.
Agree that the early levels are too long. It seems like the pace can definitely be sped up both in terms of movement and round length.
Yeah I need to scrap that whole UI if I move forwards with this game. Believe it or not it used to be even worse before a couple more iterations. Need to swap the font.