solifuge
2015-08-26 07:08
Pretty solid strategy gameplay. The music got a little repetitive, but it's not bad at all. Very Evil Disco; the Necrodancer would be proud.
There were a lot of clicks happening, and many of them missed; hitboxes for the UI seem kinda off. It'd really help to have visual feedback for if you've rolled over a button, and for what action is currently selected; I kept re-clicking the Attack/Defense Buff buttons every time, because I didn't figure out it stayed selected. Similarly, when the UI for doing things is visible all the time (and not greyed out) it's telling me as a player that I can do things; the game equivalent of confusing mixed signals. An improved UI design would make this a lot more fun.
It was a little frustrating how many actions I needed to take per turn, and how they were broken up into phases. I couldn't relocate my defenders during the preparation phase, when I badly needed to. Sometimes I couldn't explore either, because I had rooms full of 3 skeletons in the way, and no way to move them until the combat phase (I got into the habit of only putting 2 units in a room too, since you couldn't swap-move units between rooms that were full). It was almost easier to explore during combat too, since you could move once per turn instead of a limited number of times (I also managed to "explore" my necromancer into some grey territory during combat).
You might have been able to design this with a single phase, or no phases at all; just actions each unit could take in a turn, and a few turns down-time between waves. the player could choose whether to find new rooms, or summon, or buff, etc. It'd help the game-flow a lot, and would be quicker to learn/pick up.
I had fun making super-powered archers that could chew apart invaders, while tanky constructs blocked the way. Honestly, I think buffed archers with at least 7 attack were game-breaking, since invaders only moved one tile; if you knew where they were going, you could put them just out of reach, and kill every invader... unless you misclicked and sent them into the room to die. (Did that a few times, whoops!) If invaders automatically moved until the first room with a defender, or even had random attack/defense, it'd keep players from cheesing the game.
All that said, a pretty fun strategy game, and impressive work in 48 hours! Thanks for putting this together, and keep at it!
Very nice! My biggest problem was probably how ridiculously OP archers are, and if balance issues were the main thing I have to critique, that's because everythign else was so solid.
Really nice. Got to wave 10. Unfortunately, it ends up being better to not use tanks at all and just use tons of the melee minions as cannon fodder, with a few high attack archers for all the killing. This is because you need lots (and I mean lots!) of enemies to take hits for you, and the melee ones are a lot cheaper than the tanks. The enemies end up 'overhitting' a lot of the time, so it doesn't make much difference how much hp your units have. Perhaps tanks should have some damage reduction or other additional way of absorbing damage. But overall, really nicely done!