Review date: Aug 03, 2024. Build: 1.0
Personal thoughts are towards the bottom of the review, the top end is a detailed overview.
[b]How the game works[/b]
The game is a Tower Defense based on a hex grid with random seeded generation for location unlocks and spawning. You may place towers on any non road hex and upgrade them as you see fit. There are no waves or rounds; the enemy is constantly spawning as soon as you click start game; you may place towers before hitting this button. Killing of enemies will occasionally drop an item that may be used in a tower's equipment slot to upgrade that tower with additional effects. Enemies have health, shield, and armor. Shields must be destroyed first, then armor, then health. New lanes will eventually open up and you will have to defend from the new points. Overtime more and more hexes will be revealed allowing you to defend closer to the enemy spawner. Overtime the waves will get heavier and heavier, more density, new types, etc. Each biome has its own enemy types.
[b]Tower Upgrades[/b]
Tower upgrades are based on items dropped during the run, they have 3 levels of efficacy. It is one item per tower, but multiple items of the same type can drop. There is also tower stats that are available to upgrade for the currency cost (I will just call them coins from here on). For example: Arc Thrower has a Targets, Damage, and Range modifier that you can upgrade with coins. Each upgrade has several pips for it to level through. You have to complete "quests" in order to be able to unlock the upgrade option for the pips; this is sort of your meta-progression alongside the item unlocks. I believe the item unlocks are tied to the achievements. Kill the 666 flyers and you can get feather items from that run on-wards. You can also adjust the towers preferred target. They are split in to two categories: most/least and progress/health/shield/armor.
[b]Sound Design[/b]
Every tower has a distinct sound attached to it, so you know what is being used more often based on the audio and can upgrade appropriately based on that (or i'm just a weirdo that does it based on it hoho). The music has a few different soundtracks of different types, seemingly sticking to either metal or folk. On this topic, and this is irrelevant to 99% of people, but it would be nice if in the options menu it displayed if the music was CC0 licensing or what copywrite it fell under (For the sake of people making review videos, streaming, etc - completely over the top, but would be cool!) Some sounds are a bit repetitive and need to be tuned down, but I will cover that in the personal thoughts section. Overall a massive improvement from the very first build I saw!
[b]Enemy Design[/b]
This is one of the strengths of the game, Each biome has its own enemy typings and as the timer progresses stronger versions, and boss monsters, will start spawning from their respective territories. With how it adds new bases/spawnpoints(?) to fight it can add new biomes to your current map which just adds more flavor to the game. A big plus!
[b]Personal Thoughts[/b]
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[*] I gotta say, the game build is in a much better state than the original early access release and now to people who enjoy tower defense horde mode games I would recommend this product. While it currently doesn't have as much polish as say, Rogue Tower, the progress the developer has made since the early access release shows the dev is capable of polishing up the game and adding new content to it.
[*] The sound design aspect I touched on is: the beam towers need their sound localization turned down a bit(I believe you're using location based audio depending on where the camera is according to the tower?), their noise overpowers all the other tower audio and seems like its closer to the camera or just plain louder volume wise. Its not a deal breaker(this point or the next point in the list) by any means, just something to be aware of.
[*] on the topic of tower audio, lets say the Gatling Gun has a ton of fire rate, it can become grating to the player. The way to fix this is do modulate the audio's pitch slightly. Depending on what Engine you're using it can happen differently. I'll use Godot as an example: It uses an AudioStreamPlayer (of whatever type you want) and you can reference this via code or animationplayer, you can then do audioplayer.set_pitch_scale(randf_range(0.9, 1.05)). Fiddle with the numbers to what works best of course. This allows you to use the same audio file with very slight tweaking that the player will actually notice, albeit slightly! You can choose to do this every x number of shots, or even every single shot.
[*] I do miss the descriptions of the towers from the initial build, if you moved tower descriptions to the Log option, that would be perfect! Its something small, but I do enjoy reading what a tower does implicitly. Could be as simple as the picture of the item with a small description "it shoots piercing bullets rapidly" and then you hover over it and it plays a lil video doing just that.
[*] I like the strength the tower upgrade pips bring. Really makes the towers feel strong and worthwhile to invest in. Definitely one of the strengths of this game. I've played a lot of tower defense games where upgrading the tower just didn't feel like it did enough, but here it does.
[*] The biomes having their own enemy types is a huge plus. Prevents the game from getting stale and you get to see a fairly good number of variety from each biome as well.
[*] One big gripe I do have: I have extreme dislike to moving my mouse over the towers and it shuffling the side-bar multiple times to display each new tower I mouse over. This is just personal preference, but I would like to see an option in the menu (two specifically). One option disables the mouse-over that brings up the side-bar change and instead you have to click on it manually to check the tower. The other is a tool-tip mouse-over timer from 0.0 seconds to 1 full second adjustable slider. With these two options you can maintain the current 0 second hover tool tip on the side-bar, or force it to have a delay or even no mouse over and be forced to click the tower to check its items/upgrades.
[*] Aside from the above gripe about the mouse-over, I do enjoy the way you displayed the side-bar! Its very snappy and responsive. The animation transition it does is one of the nicer ones I've seen in regards to hiding/showing info.
[*] small gripe: the middle mouse click for the camera movement is far below the speed of the WASD camera movement, and it also feels like you did a lerp on its movement, but the WASD lacks the lerp. If it is using lerp, and you are using deltatime, then this formula is a wee bit better at adjusting it (change the final number to adjust its strength): camera_position = camera_position.lerp(target_position, 1.0 - exp(-delta * 20))
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All in all, I think you've done an amazing job with the improvements from the original build of the game and its in a very solid state. Keep up the good work.
