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(+1)

Wow, this is a really fun game! Played it and beat Bert!

Here are my thoughts:

I start this saying I'm a great fan of tower defense genre: PvZ, Bloons Tower Defense, and those alike.

I liked the towers, the graphics, the ambience, and the 2x speed feature is always very welcome in any tower defense!

Tho, I have some critiques about the gameplay, that I hope will be useful in balancing and making the game better if you want to expand on this:

Mainly, I noticed the "interest" mechanic works not to make the player decide how to spend their money wisely, but moreso to never spend the last 1000 (because the max is 10). So, after the first 5 or 6 waves where you regain 1000, it's like it's not even there.

Also, the meta of the game is very spam-centered, as the basic towers are absolutely busted and will do the same DPS (and more) than more costly ones. Bomb towers are also absolutely useless, both in the earlygame and in the endgame, due to not having a great range or damage, and being very slow and costly. Fire towers are nice (I love flame ring tac spam in Bloons) but basic towers just outclass them in every stat. Electric towers are very strong, but do a lot of overkill damage (so reducing their overall DpS), and the presence of not very high HP enemies makes it essentially outclassed by everything that is crowd control (even the big enemies get destroyed by groups of basic towers).

I would've also liked to be able to change the targeting options during a wave for more tight situations (yes, I micromanage a lot in Bloons) as there is not much else to do after the planning phase, other than holding space.

Then, I also noticed some strange stuff going on with projectiles that seem to not have hit but actually have, but I guess that's just how the game is coded.


But overall, great game using the Tower Defense formula! I would've liked to try endless mode if I had more time! Best of luck! :D

(+1)

First of all thanks a lot for playing my game! This is the longest feedback I've received since the start of the jam so I'll try my best to respond to everything in the best way I can.

The "interest" mechanic was something I came up with early on in development (like the first hour of the first day basically) so until I implemented it I kind of didn't put any more thought into it. When the time came to implement it and my friends playtested the game I noticed it had some issues and mainly what you described. The game is just too easy after the first few waves if you know how to use the mechanic properly. But I think I might be able to fix this by 1: lowering the cap to +5 for example or 2: just making the game harder. Although the latter would maybe make it too hard for people who are new and/or don't understand the mechanic too well.

Tower balancing (and mainly bombs) had been something I'd been tinkering with the last few days but because of lots of bugs being found and needing to be fixed and some feature requests from the people playtesting I decided to do those first and in the end just didn't have too much time to actually take an in-depth look at balancing. I remember during the playtests spear towers had a pierce of 10 unupgraded and 15 upgraded and cost like.. nothing (unupgraded pierce is now 4). The meta then was just.. place spears everywhere. So I'm glad I avoided that.

I get your complaints about not being able to do anything during the storm. I'm also the type to micromanage everything when I'm playing Bloons so it does feel kind of counterintuitive. I'm also a big fan of as little downtime as possible in games, but here I deliberately went for it this way because of the jam theme and I felt like if I let you do something during the storm I'd have abandoned my original idea.

Lastly the targeting. It's the most broken thing about the game and I've had quite a few comments pointing it out. (It also contributes to why the bomb is so shit). Spear and Bomb towers throw their projectiles towards a marker with a position on the enemy, but if the enemy goes too fast it just misses or is too far away it just misses. I know how I could fix this but it would take quite a bit of work (and math) to make this work properly because it would generally be a system overhaul. That's why I decided not to.

I'm really glad you enjoyed it and I was able to give you some more insight into why things are the way they are! I wanted to meet your comment's effort with effort back after all :)