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Xentios1 year ago (2 edits) (+1)

Overall enjoyed the game and printer boss was funny. UI was slick and I like the fonts.

While music was good too but sound balance was off. I could not hear the  sound effects over the music and shooting.

I think level design did not match the  current game play mechanics.  What do I mean? AI would not react if the distance is big until they got shoot and the open areas were a lot. On the contrary AI from upper levels rush down when I walk under of them.  When  robots died their gears would fall down to lower levels. Because I could not hear robots walking sound they could also come behind me sneakily. I could just find a part on the level where robots could not walk and pick them slowly.  

A  long corridor type  level  with corners would hide the current weaknesses of the game.  Also you could implement a laser wall coming from behind to force the player move forward in time. Like resident evil  movie you are in a corridor  but the laser is coming from behind and very very slow.

Gun mechanics were great but I would change 2 things.
When shooting and/or missing I would use the the gears we collected slightly  so if player does not want to use a weapon they could not just stop and empty the clip.
I would make upgrade part faster.

More enemy types clearly would be better but I guess time was not enough. I would at least expected that big enemy would explode and kill the small ones near them.

I enjoyed the game and even expecting more levels to fully upgrade my weapons.

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Lanyard1 year ago

Thanks for the insightful comment. I think you've got a really good point about the level design. I kind of put myself in a bind because besides the weapon scaling, I wanted one of my uses of the theme to be "Scale"ing a tower, which meant upward movement in every level. I thought it'd be cute because Towers are such a game design staple, but it proved to have more thorny entanglements than I expected. Here's some.

  • The fact that you're always going up, and need to feel like you're always going up, does lead to a sense of sameyness. Unless you fall, most players will head downwards exactly twice in this whole game. Options become limited.
  • I felt that for the difficulty I wanted (welcoming), the exit or way forward should be in view, generally speaking. This dictated a certain openness, which of course opened up a lot of sightlines. This would have been way less of a problem if the exit was on the same level or lower than the entrance, but I couldn't give up that aspect of the theme.
  • Placing enemies at the tops of ramps proved a bit awkward because the player wouldn't be able to see them while heading up, so that limited my placement options
  • And importantly, while optimizing for WebGL, I found that if I had too many Agents active on the NavMesh at once, this throttled the FPS badly. I ended up deleting a good number of enemies and lowering their detection range in general, just so jammers could get to playing with ease on the Web. This did hurt the "horde" feeling I had earlier on in development, but without doing so, I think all these comments would probably read: "bad framerate makes this game unplayable."

I had a similar idea about a rising red forcefield to force the player to hurry on upwards, but I discarded it as potentially overdesigning. Like, is it really a problem that a player can take their time, as in a great many single-player games? That being said, I do like the idea of more robots being added to the room as time ticks on, maybe even increasingly difficult ones (offering increased rewards) but that's a significant change and would probably necessitate scrapping Web support. We'll have to see about that.

Thanks for the feedback, Xentios. Glad you found the game enjoyable.

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