Post by andymakespasta in Hexa Towers comments

Viewing post in Hexa Towers comments

Great implementation of classic TD!

Really enjoyed the tower upgrade system and design. They're quite thematic and interesting, especially how they change quite drastically depending on upgrade path. The flavor text is also pretty good.

I would play the s*it out of this if the planned meta upgrades were just as interesting as the tower designs.

My main gripe with this game is the lack of info: how big is the kobold bonus? Which towers are buffed by the kobold ability? How much burn does the first flame effect upgrade give vs skipping to the second one? How much health does the spider web have? etc

Also, it really should be mentioned somewhere that lava turns into walkable but un-buildable tile when the wyrm dies.

Finally, a "bug" with the spider (ba-dum-tsss). The web doesn't become larger after range upgrade until the previous web is destroyed.

Great game, can't wait for updates!

Catagami1 year ago

Thanks for playing, and thank you a lot for the feedback!

I'm glad you enjoyed it :)

The lack of info was originally intentional, I thought the since the game is quite stat heavy it would be more accessible if I didn't show those too prominently, but I got this feedback back from a friend I ~~forced~~ convinced to playtest for me as well, so I am now thinking of how to make it more clear.

Right now I'm thinking to start with adding additional upgrade text that explains directly what everything does, numbers and all, and add a option to show either Direct, Flavor, or Both.

Later I might add something to show all current stats for a tower, but that is slightly more work, so on the back burner for now xD.

The Wyrm was a rather dumb oversight yeah, added a quick sentence about it on dev build. Gonna take a look at the spider web as well.

As for the meta upgrades, I hope they'll work out well, as of now my ideas are still rather uninspired.

Seriously thank you so much for taking the time to give feedback! It's super valuable since I don't really have any playtesters, and my own experience turns out to be a bit skewed.

andymakespasta1 year ago(+1)

Happy to play test, and thanks for making the game.

I think the stats thing is a question of audience match. There's a specific type of player who likes convoluted TD games with minimal graphics, and I think those players are also the same ones who are not afraid of number crunching.

Also, another feedback.

I like the idea that barriers can be bought for cheap in bulk, but because you can easily buy / sell barriers for free, on many maps, playing harder difficulties, the only way to win was to create two long paths, and buy/sell barriers alternating which one led to the exit. This strategy can basically beat any enemy in the game, but is super tedious, essentially "optimizing the fun away". I think a potential way to fix this is to make selling the free barriers return negative money. (Free to buy, but pay to demolish)

The problem will probably be better, once meta upgrades make it unnecessary to do this on harder difficulties.

Catagami1 year ago

You raise a good point there.

I might expand on your idea a bit and add a global flat sell transaction cost, that way the same issue won't arise if you get other towers very cheap via buffs or later via meta upgrades. But I wonder if that is the best solution, juggling is a valid/preferred tactic for some type of players, so I don't really want to erase it entirely, but it should definitely not be the immediate goto, or only way to deal with the game, especially before hitting freeplay.

Another thing that is currently partly in the game is a rage mechanic, if a hero is alive for more than 100 seconds, it start to apply a 10% movement force buff every 10 seconds, this somewhat counteracts infinite cc setups. I could add some speed buff to that as well, that should at least stop players from being able to juggle indefinitely.

Can I ask from what point on this felt like the only real way to play? My intention was that at least Simple and Average maps, on Easy and Normal are playable in a ... normal way.

andymakespasta1 year ago(+1)

I felt this was necessary with hard difficulty.

I didn't notice the rage mechanic. I did notice that the berserkers were going at pretty crazy speeds, and juggling them required a snaking path, where they would constantly hit the snags.

Easy / Normal was doable without juggling. I needed to juggle at the start for Hard on maps where there wasn't a built in maze.

Catagami1 year ago

I can imagine not experiencing the global rage mechanic, since heroes being alive for more than 100 seconds is kind of an edge case, and even after that it takes a while before the buff stacking makes it noticable.

The berserkers have their own rage mechanic on top of that, going up to a 4x speed once their hp reaches 25%, at that point they are really running mindlessly into walls a lot. (I initially had them scale up to 10x speed at 10% hp, it was crazy).

I have noticed that the berserkers tend to be a bit of a jump in difficulty. For now I think it's fine, but depending on how things go I might give them a small nerf.

itch.io

Viewing post in Hexa Towers comments