Making the Game: Beta Release

im 1st w/e idc

 

Really? I thought there were enough people who showed interest in you writing your progress

 

Just tried. It is very hard the first few levels. I think lowering the health of first few levels would make it little easier to set it up.

 

Apologies if this drags on, but I thought you deserved a thorough response. I took a night (while semi-afking a few BGs, oh dear) to properly mess around with your addon.

My thoughts:

- Simply buying numerous rank 1 towers seems to be far more beneficial than investing gold in upgrading your towers. While the math shows that the cost to damage ratio is in favor of higher rank towers, the amount of time 'mob' are under fire seems to lean toward using more cheap towers.  This is defiantly true in early games play, the only way I was able to drop bosses in one pass was to lay down obscene amounts of rank one towers, though perhaps it paid off less as one approaches levels in the upper twenties.

- I am not entirely clear on the uses of all the towers. The cost to damage ratio makes 'elemental' towers more attractive than arrow towers, considering that they too can hit flying mob. And while I see the Shadow towers doing damage, it is not immediately clear if the DoT is working after they leave the tower's range, which strikes me as the point in using them.

- I think the game would benefit greatly from the implementation of some sort of point system. Currently the only form of accomplishment (and thus the only value players can use to compare their success with other players) is the level they reach. You did not brag about what level you reached in Tetris, but what score you got in doing so. The level translates into more of a 'time limit'. For example:

    - Defeating 'mob' x awards y points.
    - Points modified by resources used (thus players try to minimize their gold/essence       /tower/tower rank use to get more points).
    - Points awarded for defeating a level without losing a life.
    - etc.

It adds to the replay value, and encourages people to keep playing in order to beat guildmate's scores, etc. This is completely 'in my opinion' though. And you'll have to excuse me if I'm suggesting something that is nigh impossible to code, I am really a layman in the subject.

- The entire addon worked great in BGs, closing the window to deal with a situation and loading into different BGs did not reset games or cause problems. Awesome.

- I'm almost positive I've seen mob gain invulnerability until they are refreshed by completing and then restarting the path (especially that last damn cat in level 2), but it might be my tired eyes after a night of BGs because I cannot seem to recreate the situation on demand.

More criticism than compliment, but only in an attempt to be constructive. I was quiet impressed. I reached level 32 in a night's playtime, relying heavily on a thorough blanket of ice towers, so the ice immune mob really punished me.

 

Just played it, got to the last level once I got the hang of it (and a few bars in AV).
Thought the last level was kind of lame, it was just a contest of whether you could click fast enough to kill all of them.

Overall I really enjoyed the game though, would appreciate different maps/game options.

Oh and, maybe you should drop the last 'ultimate' upgrade, didn't like that all the towers became the same at that point, I found myself still not upgrading the ice towers due to their slowing effect.

edit: I forgot to mention those upgrades you use essence to buy, maybe you could add more different one of these also.

An idea could be like a tower which you can only use once in a while but deals massive damage (and would be restricted to building only 1 of them, or maybe more damage/towers with higher tiers of the blessing)

 

After a few weeks off from this project, I think I'm going to finally get around to starting my rewrite/cleanup of the game.

The mastery towers do feel like sort of a deus ex machina for the end-game, and I would like to address this sometime down the road.  They will probably stay in the game in some form, but probably won't be able to be massed like they are now.  In addition to this I'd like to also work on some more unique tower types and abilities to add some more flavor and hopefully I can find a balance later on where strategy will outweigh brute force for the later levels of the game.

Thanks for the feedback!