Updated the game to version 1.3! I did a major overhaul using some of the feedback here. Let me know what you think!
3 Likes
It’s all fun and jolly but there was something lacking, I played to wave 24 and there was no camo slimes, 26 to no lead slimes, 40 to no mother of all slimes, 60 to no brutal floating sludge, 80 to no ooze of mighty gargantuaness, 93 to no dark slimy titan, and 100 to no big gelatin of doom, but most importantly, i never got to use auto play, or revcie a 0-0-0 muffin kobold, 9/10 stars.
1 Like
I actually forgot to add auto-play, lol.
If I update the game again before the end of the jam, I’ll add that. I dunno about doing camo or lead slimes, or similar things from Bloons. It might be copying WAY too much for my liking, outside of what’s needed for just the basic game loop.
The actually lack of visible weight gain is kind of a let down. Otherwise it’s a okay tower defense game, I would change the slime damage up slightly and have the blue ones do a bitless than half in the basic game and have the red slimes do half your health in damage, it could help add a bit more strategy to it.
1 Like
Check v1.3, the pounds you collect are separate (used for magic like upping health or starting cash) and can be used to make Azalea fatter in the upgrades screen.
I’ll consider the slime adjustments for a final update!
And now I’m stuck at stage 2 again because I can’t remember the exact pixels I put those kobolds in, argh. Any tips again?
I can’t find the Kobold upgrade screen. Was it removed?
Having played all versions released so far, I will say this one is definitely a step in the right direction, and currently working on reaching the points required to fatten the dragoness which I’m glad has been added (is it only one upgrade?)
Adding the upgrades to the kobolds themselves on the map as money costs is a good thing, and definitely does change some strats (especially the 2nd level).
Only thing I can criticize right now is that as far as the Pounds upgrade go, the money and health one while helpful for maybe the first upgrade…don’t really matter much past that. Currently farming level 3 of NG+ for IBs and I only had to upgrade them each once in order to get here (to be honest I could probably do it with 0 if I optimized the 2nd level more.) Which means for the most part…those 2 upgrades don’t really do much or increase your power past like the first few waves of a map. Some alternatives such as an upgrade to increase the calories of X (muffins, pizza, magic muffins), maybe an upgrade to make killed slimes give some calories? At least something to maybe make the upgrades have value everywhere and into endless mode to make farming IB upgrades faster, instead of how they are currently with having next to 0 value in my opinion.
The first health upgrade, at least, still equates to a single red taking you down.
Ultimately brute forced my way past stage 2 using 3 cash upgrades and a health upgrade (which turned out to be useless for my issue), though even then it took a few tries to get that red.
The in-stage upgrades are nice, though there is a bit of visual clutter for pretty much every unit but the wizards.
1 Like
Oh boo, the weight upgrade is only one time. Fair enough, but still.
I will say the only real useful upgrade on the upgrade screen is the cash upgrade, but since it’s exponential after a point it’s worthless to get for one extra gold at the start, that and Snowbolds are op af once they hit their 3rd upgrade. Mind, they can stunlock one slime with just their first upgrade, but being able to stunlock an entire group of slimes if they’re positioned right is ridiculous.
Ninjabolds still feel a bit… useless? Aside from paring them with the snowbolds.
The Muffinbold’s 3rd upgrade just makes them better and makes up for the fact they’re the middle of the road when it comes to giving calories, since they turn into a muffin shotgun.
Swordbolds just getting faster as they get upgraded is fine, esp for the first couple levels.
Magibold’s upgrades are fine, even if you have to get more of them to fill all the plates and trays compared to having like, 3 max upgraded muffinbolds.
1 Like
As I said in the patch notes on itch, I’ll add more sprites for Azalea getting heavier if I have time, and it will scale.
I’ll try and figure out a better way to make health matter more, probably by lowering the damage slimes do.
2 Likes
I’ve played the game for a while and enjoyed it despite its flaws. It’s an alright pastime, but I feel there are some features missing to make this a game worth to play past all the initially available content. As of writing it’s pretty inconvenient to take on this game casually due to all the trivial manual work needed past the normal rounds, and aside from level 2 the game doesn’t fluctuate much in difficulty either.
I don’t know how worth it my feedback is given at least half of my points have already been highlighted by other people in this thread (in fact 1.3 released as I was preparing this so I had to go back and change a lot of the feedback) but I will do my best to produce useful and in-depth comments nonetheless.
Summary
- In spite of the recent increases in endless mode difficulty, it’s still a bit of a snoozefest right now. Due to the cheap costs for the tower upgrades, you can easily just get your dream defense by round 30 or so and tear through the rest of the game, despite Red slimes becoming more plentiful as the game goes on. I can’t help but think you overhauled the freeplay ramping after the upgrade system and thus we’re left with an endless mode that was designed with the old, weaker towers in mind.
Exacerbating this problem is the fact that you can’t make progress without manual input, making running the game in the background extremely inconvenient without the help of external tools.
These problems could easily be solved with the addition of an autoplay feature and more aggressive health/speed ramping for the enemies (or more of them overall), maybe with a game speed multiplier thrown in as well to make runs even quicker. Note that the calories gained for each plate and/or quantity of plates would also need to ramp up to prevent runs from becoming too short, offsetting the quality of life improvements made elsewhere - I’ve noticed the amount of calories gained per round has decreased since last update and that makes the game even more of a time sink than it already is.
- While the challenge put up by endless mode is rather consistent, the difficulty curve across maps is all over the place. Maps 1 and 3 are easy to get by on your first attempt, while map 2 is extremely hard and requires a high level of optimization just to avoid death on round 3 alone (for those who are familiar with Bloons TD6, I found map 2 harder than your average advanced challenge).
In fact, I believe that this map is so difficult it sort of becomes a beast of its own, flipping the previously established conventions upside-down and answering to nothing else but its very own sort of balance. It’s the only map I found the new health and money upgrades to be both useful in, and probably makes designing features for this game twice as hard just by existing.
Considering the type of game we’re dealing with I think it’s more important to just make sure the fetish content is accessible rather than making sure all content can be experienced at a proper pace, but just removing red slimes from level 2 or delaying them until round 4 or 5 would help wonders. Still, I think a challenging level like this is not a thing to be wasted and it would be cool to have it be an “extra” map.
And now to highlight all the good:
Summary
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It can be difficult to make sure the player is posed with easily graspable yet interesting threats that differ from one another in tower defense games. With that in mind, I found the idea to divide the aforementioned “threats” into two types as done here surprisingly effective, in a way that really only the fetish theming of the game would allow for.
With two types of enemy (yes, including plates) to deal with come two types of tower, which already presents a lot of decisions the player can choose between to ultimately beat the game. I found all towers in this game very useful (including the Chef kobold, which admittedly is pretty underrated - give it a shot if you haven’t), except for the Sword kobold, who kinda becomes useless once you have the Ninja. I’m not sure what I would do to solve that problem - reversing the order of the projectile speed and attack speed upgrades would definitely make it a more appealing choice though, at least for the early game. -
Even though you’re most likely to spend your time in freeplay, there’s still a pretty fun optimization challenge to take on during normal rounds. One thing I love about your games is that trying to play optimally is always fun, and this game is no different; although I generally don’t want anything to do with map 2, I can’t help but be intrigued by the trays on round 3 and I almost always try to at least quickly sell my defense and get some feeder kobolds to fill them up a little, to mixed results. It’s quite enjoyable to try new things, see what works and what doesn’t.
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I don’t expect you to continue developing this game past the deadline for the jam, but if you do, there’s a great deal of potential this concept holds. Just out of the top of my head, here are some features I could see easily working:
- New towers to fill remaining niches; you could have a kobold that can both fill up plates and attack slimes, a kobold that deals a lot of damage in a single shot, perhaps even a kobold that could buff nearby towers by feeding them, the list goes on.
- More variety in rounds and enemy types; you can experiment a great deal with the slimes you already have just like you would with low-tier Bloons, but it would be interesting to bring new ones into the mix. Big, beefy but slow slimes to test out your single target damage potential (so basically like MOABs), slimes that split into multiple when defeated, maybe even slimes that could feed themselves to your towers if left alone for too long, stunning them. Once again, the list goes on.
- More maps; there’s a lot to explore here, not only by messing around with the main path but also simple things like using different tilesets or exclusive features on a map-by-map basis. Maybe you could even include a level editor for good measure!
Overall, this is a pretty solid entry and most of its shortcomings aren’t really your fault and are to be expected from a game jam game. Still, this is probably one of the best tower defense games I have played on this site and to have conjured up something like this at the very beginning of the jam is nothing short of impressive. Wish you luck!
2 Likes
Thank you so much!
Funnily enough, I just released an update (1.4) that just modified endless mode’s scaling, slime damage, and added a buncha new, tougher slimes for the higher rounds (with the hardest one coming up from round 50 onward) - one of which is basically a MOAB, lol. Also I added the auto-play button!
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Step Event0
for object o_level:
Push :: Execution Error - Variable Index [55] out of range [55] - -1.track_obj(100025,55)
at gml_Object_o_level_Step_0
############################################################################################
gml_Object_o_level_Step_0 (line -1)
I got this just now from 1.4 after finishing the first five rounds for level 3.
Shoot, I’m so sorry! I’ll lock down the file real quick until I fix this.
1 Like
Okay, should be back up! Thank you for posting the report, that made things quick.
1 Like
This update is phenomenal, the auto advance button is sooooo nice and makes it easy to rack up the points. The new slimes are a really nice touch with the increasing difficulty and rate that they come in, I was worried that the white one was the last one and that I was fine. Then I saw Them…
Anyways, this game has been great since the first release and now it is down right amazing, your games always have really nice polishing and touches to them and I am glad that this one is no exception.
1 Like
Thank you so much! I really appreciate it!! ;w;
Seconding the clutter comment, those things block your view of everything above the unit.
Could probably be set to only show them on mouseover?
