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Jaco van Hemert346 days ago(+1)

I liked this game to start with, but no matter what I try, it always eventually ends up as me running in circles waiting for mushrooms to spawn while a million melee guys swarm behind me and more and more fireball dudes appear.

The mechanic of the player dealing damage damaging themselves is a hard one to pull off nicely, and I don't know if this was it. But it would have been okay if it hadn't been for the fireball casters. I hate those guys -- they run away (and scatter in different directions in a group), run pretty quickly, can run off the side of the map, do a lot of damage, and have weirdly high HP pools . It essentially always ends up with me not being able to handle them fast enough.

One of the comments below seems to suggest that jumping is an attack of some kind? I think I got a 10 damage thing once, but I could never recreate it, even when landing in a swarm of enemies, which I would expect would remove any positioning problems I could have had. Maybe if I had figured out how to do the jump attack, things would have gone better for me.

Anyway, this was a nice game with a dash of humour; I just couldn't avoid getting to a frustrating portion eventually.

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jeronkey343 days ago (1 edit) (+2)

Thank you so much for the feedback! It's honestly all pretty on point. I think one of the big mistakes I made is that I simply did not budget enough time for playtesting. All of my balance calculations were done fairly hastily and last minute, and it shows! But, I do think I'm going to continue to polish this a bit more in the coming weeks as a personal project so hopefully I can get that a bit more under control. 

Re: the fireball casters, there's a part of me that's glad that you hated them. I wanted them to be a nuisance, but not quiiiite as much as they ended up being, so I think a reduction to their health and speed would be quite good. Their ability to run off screen is entirely unintentional, too! I did a last minute change to the collisions because the melee guys would get stuck on them when they stood still, but I forgot to make sure they could still collide with the invisible boundries I had established after my changes. xD Aaah... what's that expression? 99 bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code. Take one down, patch it around, 137 bugs in the code... ? xD

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Jaco van Hemert343 days ago(+1)

You might not even need to make them slower; if there was just some way to round them up, that would solve a lot of the issues. After giving it some further thought, I think part of the reason why they're so frustrating is because you end up having to hunt them down one by one, even if you have enough speed upgrades to catch up to them easily. And the fun in this game feels like it's when you're trampling a bunch of enemies at once -- it feels perhaps a bit tedious to have to do this little chore of killing each one individually. 

Maybe having a little stun if they get trampled on so you can capitalise and kill the one guy without him running away? Or some kind of herd script that keeps close-by fireball casters together when they flee so you can squash them all at the same time?

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jeronkey339 days ago

This is some excellent feedback. Thank you, Jaco!

I like your assessment. It is contrary to the fun of trampling large groups of enemies to find yourself chasing a singular mage down all of the time, especially since their danger is supposed to make you prioritize them, but in the current state that simply results in you continually chasing one guy across a field while the situation escalates furthers.

The idea of a either a stun or a herd script would work wonders. I'd especially like to try and figure out how to get them to herd together as there's some room for experimentation there too to perhaps have some kind of effect on the projectiles or spell used depending on how many of them have banded together to cast while also keeping them together for the player. Could be neat!

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