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.