Thanks a lot man for your continued effort, well done beating the v1.3! Did you cross paths with the big black dragon yet btw? He's the key to a top secret challenge win ;-)
All your feedback makes my head spin with other ideas too, and plans I have for the future of the game. So even when one of your suggestions doesn't make it in 1:1 it still might be part of a decision that somewhat yield the same result, or is close enough to plans I already had.
All this feedback is super valuable!
No, I didn't meet the big black dragon. I was glad to be able to grab the amulet with the last few HPs.
I tried the v1.4, starting with the archer. Since I was already able to beat the v1.3 with him, it was easy and I won on the first attempt. However, I wasn't able to win with any of the other characters, despite having tried it quite a couple of times (with the slasher and with the spark mage). I got pretty close though.
First off, I like that the projectiles are turn-based as well (btw. also the flying numbers are turn-based now which feels a bit funky but it's nothing serious of course). and I was surprised to sometimes get three things at once when opening a chest. XP numbers are a good addition too.
On the other hand, the difficulty seems to be roughly the same as in v1.3, i. e. it's quite hard. The fact that the monsters can break walls increases the difficulty, although not by much (and I think that if the monsters can do it, the player should be allowed to do it as well — I would like it better if the walls couldn't be breached though). And I don't think I've managed to catch an occurence of heavy figure pushing through lighter figures (but I guess it's hard to see anyway, and at least it looks like I was spending less time inside the flies than before).
Some random observations:
Wow, I can tell you put a lot of effort into this, thanks a lot for the feedback! It looks like 1.5 will be a pretty big update! I have a long list of things to do now.
I think we agree that there needs to be some new abilities, and perhaps some of the current abilities should get some additional functionality, like a stagger on whirlwind and/or slash. E.g. more abilities that affect the movement ability of your enemies, because that is definitely the most important aspect.
It would be nice if melee guys didn't "have" to use magic abilities in order to win, though hybrid builds should still be viable.
Since a lot of the attack abilities are quite random, I've been hesitant to let the player destroy walls, but I'll think about it. There is probably a way to make that work. I like the dynamic of walls being a temporary blocker for enemies, but not a permanent one. It allows you a breather, but it's not going to let you carefully funnel in enemies until you win. I think that together with a lot of the other changes coming into 1.5, wall destruction can still work ;-)
Thanks again man, much appreciated feedback, as always!
Well, I don't really put much effort. I just play the game 1-2 times in a row and then I go about my usual work for several hours or a whole day. And after that, I write up a wall of text (but writing something short would be more complicated! :—))
I absolutely agree that the melee attacks in particular need to get boosted. A knockback or stun effect would be great (as I noted when I was ranting about the hammer :—)).
Anyway, just now I had a particularly fortunate run with the axe slash guy, so I was even able to kill the dragon. But I didn't win! The monsters just stood on the amulet all the time and I couldn't get them to go away from it. I tried to run circles and lure them away but I got killed in the process (essentially if you don't run straight away from them, you get hit, and if each of those hits is for 5 or 10, you can't afford to take many of them).
I think that reinforces my point about the monster speed. The monsters in general should be slower than they are now, and none of them (except bosses) should be allowed to be faster than the player. I suspect that the archer is so much easier to win just because he has the 30% speed boost which is just what is needed to evade the monsters efficiently, have them run circles without being hit etc.
Yes, speed and movement is the most complex thing to get right, because it impacts all things!
I still have a bit of work left on 1.5, but a little sneak peak is that staggering is added, and because of it I'll hold off on changing monster speed a lot, because it will impact movement a lot.
Due to the physics involved, a staggered enemy will also slow down any monsters behind it.
Staggered monsters won't just stop, they will also not attack, which helps a lot for melee builds.
So let us see how this impacts the balance og everything, and readjust the difficulty in 1.6 ;-)
Great! One thing though: I would propose putting a couple of words about controls in the "instructions" screen. I just randomly found out that you could move diagonally, and that's a big game changer. Immediately after that I got a win with the spark mage which was something I wasn't able to do before. Maybe I'm just blind, but I don't think this was explained anywhere.
(Also it looks a bit like when going diagonally, you go √2 times farther than going orthogonally, but I'm not sure about that.)
I tried the v1.5.2 a couple of times and there's a lot to say. I even recorded a video of me playing (I got an easy win with the archer; I killed the big black dragon, and in fact it didn't even touch me). So if you are interested how a "veteran player" (😃) played the game, you can look at it at https://is.muni.cz/de/darek/horde.mp4 (beware though, it has ~200M and since it's on a temporary deposit provided by my university, it will remain there only for 30 days). I will probably refer to it when I write more.
oh wow, that was a powerful build! Even got the winged boots there, paired with freeze control!
I completely agree that the Archer right now is the very definition of "be the bullet hell", and scales up a bit too fast. When you have more kills than turns there's something off! Haha!
Well done though, you made a lot of small tactical choices there that gave you such a dominant powercurve, but the archer is definitely a bit OP right now. And this was even without an artifact bow!
I've got some work to do to rebalanced this for 1.6! But thanks again man, super valuable insight!
Thanks! Some bits I wanted to offer:
I tried the archer again and... wow. I had a very rough time. Here's another video: https://is.muni.cz/de/darek/horde-v16-archer.mp4 (171M, ~26 min).
I wholeheartedly agree with the bow nerf, except for starting with 1 arrow. I would still start with 3. There are two reasons for that: 1) the bow has always been a great weapon against single targets but not really good against large hordes of enemies (until late game if you can upgrade it). So the archer had a problematic start even before the nerf. 2) I would often take the bow with the other classes because it is a good supplementary weapon for clearing the space in front of you. I especially like to get it with the wizards, because their spells hit more or less randomly and they badly need something to clear a path to run through. But if it starts just with 1 arrow, it is useless in this regard. And I think we'd like to encourage various mixed builds at least a bit.
By the way, sometimes if the bow is fired at an enemy which is right in front of you, the arrows fly right through the enemy but they deal no damage. I never noticed this before, so it looks like it's a new bug. See for instance 00:53 or 05:16 in the video.
Finally, thanks for all the little "quality of life" improvements!
By the way, I managed to win with the whirlwind guy, so he's no longer as useless as he was before. I obtained the freezing sword artifact and that essentially decided the battle with the dragon. After some initial wrong moves, I found a cycle of moves in which it was permanently frozen and I could beat the heck out of it.
