Post by UproarGaming in Tower Survivors comments

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Really nice game!
You did a lot of things really well and the game has a nice cohesive theme and gameplay loop.

I'm sure there are lot a of great things that you have planned for this game but haven't gotten around to yet.

Here are some of the things that felt a bit off for me:
-The precision upgrade mostly just felt like a negative, once you have a lot of arrows nothing is getting through anyways.

- The damage boost rendered most of the elemental upgrades somewhat useless. Not sure about the best way to fix this, I think maybe adding a negative like damage + 1 but firing speed is reduced.

- Speaking of Elemental upgrades they are very different in terms of value:

-- The Acid is S tier, it honestly just makes the game way too easy once the player has upgraded it alongside firing speed and additional arrows. I would consider adding a timer that limits how often the pools can proc on enemies.

-- The Fire is OK, balance wise its pretty strong (A Tier). I personally didn't like using it mostly due for clarity reasons. It can be difficult to tell if an ignited enemy isn't dead or just died, this lead to some frustration.

-- The Ice Upgrade is a straight up downgrade (Garbage Tier). It offers no damage and even worse is blocks your own arrows which lowers your overall dps. I would swap the collision box for a larger slow zone (trigger) that reduces the enemies movement speed by ~50% while they are in the zone.

- I think the end-game would be better if the fight lasted for longer but the portal had a healthbar so it could take a few hits instead of resetting the whole fight because a single enemy slipped through.

- And last but not least the clones are really only useful as a early detection system so you know what direction the portal is going to be attacked from next. They literally do nothing else mid-late game. They would feel much less arbitrary if they were more useful, an easy fix would be to give them roughly 20% of the players upgrades. This would probably also mean that the difficulty would need a slight boost of course.

SlightlyMadman2 years ago

Great points, thank you for the feedback! I personally have found precision to be nice while protecting the portal, but you're right it's at best kind of a "I have nothing else left to choose" option. I'll be adding and expanding more and will flag that one for either rebalance or removal.

I think I'll change Acid pools to get "used up" after a certain number of hits in addition to their time limit (which may need to be reduced).

Good point about fire, I've been burned (haha) before thinking a unit was dead and walking into it. Speeding up the extinguish animation may help here, as well as potentially reducing the size of the sprite overall.

That's a great idea to have ice blocks no longer be impassable but instead slow down movement, I'll definitely try that out! My only concern is that makes its strategy a little too similar to acid, but I'll see how it plays.

I'm rebalancing the end at the moment, one idea I'm playing with is removing a win condition and having a timer that instead ticks up while the game gets progressively harder so you can try for a high score of survival.

I'm currently working on adding two new tower types: knight who attacks close range, but can take many hits, and wizard who gets elemental attacks. They'll either have their own upgrade cards or inherit the player abilities. I'll also be adding coins and some more advanced pathfinding to the mobs so that you can get into some more classic Tower Defense gameplay here.

Thanks again for playing! Let me know if you agree or disagree with any of the above as well. I should have an update by the weekend with some of the above addressed.

UproarGaming2 years ago(+1)

Your fixes for the Acid and Fire sound great to me.

I get what you mean about an Ice zone have mechanical overlap with the acid pool, it would require a little more programming but you could add a "shatter" mechanic to the Ice effect so after a set amount of time a frozen enemy would break into shards that traveled for a set range that did damage to other enemies on contact.
For balance you could make it start with a single shard and every 2-3 levels in Ice would add an additional shard. Also as long as your projectiles and ice effects are on separate physics layers you can just stop them from interacting via Unity project preferences (this way other enemies and the player are still blocked but projectiles pass through).

I'm not sure the Ranger, Knight, Wizard summon idea is super cohesive with the rest of the game/mechanics. It feels like it's being shoehorned without a meaningful reason. (Granted you could have a story element in mind that I know nothing about, this is just my opinion based off the blurb about "Helpers with summoning sickness").

I like the idea of adding towers but I think something like a totem might be more fitting, you could allow the player to choose a element (or maybe a spirit animal) and depending on their choice you could offer totem upgrades like your current system or a even a skill tree.

For example if you used a element system:

Nature (Acid) has the Forest Totem that has skills to confuse the enemy, heal the player, do an AOE slow, etc..

Ice would get a Magic Totem that could shoot piercing Ice projectiles, do weak AOE damage (like a blizzard effect), after a charge it could an add Ice armor to player that could absorb a hit, etc..

Fire would Grant a Lava Totem that could provide an area where the player could move faster, it could randomly fire lava projectiles like a tiny volcano, boost the
players attack speed, etc..

I'll try to hop on at some point this weekend and check out up the update!

itch.io

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