(Tusike: response in second part, below)
Lachie Dazdarian wrote:I think the competition was advertised enough. Who ever wanted to vote probably voted. I just thought one more reminder was in order. I'm not saying that those 13 votes represent all who were interested in the competition...but I don't think it's far from the truth. I won't spam people to play FB games. Their choice. But that fact is...a FB game developer can't find fullfilment only in the FB community, which...I remember, was possible for a QB game developer in the dead QB community some 10 years ago. But, those times are gone.
Well, I guess it is somewhat difficult to generate viewing interest-- especially when the games have no screenshots until several days till the end of the competition!
And... I'd say QB game developers had more eyeballs looking at their games than these 13 votes.. AOL had a board listing of QBASIC games in the early 90s, and that is partially how I found the QB development scene, as an example... not saying you need to be AOL, but just that Freebasic needs a different kind of effort to find programmers and "hangers-on" than Qbasic. Qbasic did it by being linked to Microsoft and as a relic of ancient, un-updated programming courses. Freebasic doesn't have that.
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Tusike wrote:There's a reason it's called impossible level. If you were able to beat it, you could easily beat the other levels and the whole game would become too easy. I made the beginner and the impossible map to make sure I had one that was beatable, and another that wasn't...
But, unless you were writing an academic thesis, having a level that is truly impossible is just aggravating. :-(
I like your idea about having the supply increased! I think I will keep the powerhouse's upgrade though, and probably have a "mining speed" upgrade instead of the "increase tube traveling speed" thing you can buy in the improvement house.
Well, I like the increased traveling speed upgrade... anyway, if you remove this, you'll make energy gathering slower and make the Impossible level even more impossible!
Still what my main problem is that the RTS part isn't very challenging... For example, right in the beginning you can build a steel as many steel mines as you want with as many outputs, if you're fast enough, before the first wave comes. It's just a matter of your speed.
I think it's fine the way it is. Fast building skills = you are rewarded.
Here's another strategy problem: by the time you can't defeat the plixoids on your own only with your shooter, the tier 1 & 2 towers are pretty much useless as well. However, if I increased their strength, then they could easily be used in the beginning and so the shooter would become useless! How can I solve this?
Not true. The tier 1 green tower is very good value until one level after the orange health blobs hit. I used 8, plus my un-upgraded shooter, and only bought a tier 3 wave tower for those brown spinner things.
I really think you should make Impossible actually possible. To do that, I'd recommend a few things:
* Maybe the best option is to simply modify the Impossible level to make it slightly less difficult (ie: a longer path for enemies to follow) and more in line with the others.
* Really reduce the enemy HP gain per level to 20% (or so) instead of the current ~25%.
To make it more strategic to use the other towers, what I would do is lower the strength of the green tier 1 tower and increase the strength (and reduce cost) of the other towers.
There's a price-performance gap here. The tier-1 tower is very efficient, and all the rest really aren't, for their price. The wave towers are all decent, but the tier-3 is the most efficient by far. The upgrades for all but the wave towers are really horrible -- I would never upgrade the others.
All three laser towers are totally useless-- perhaps (besides just generally improving them) you can make them stronger against the tougher monsters, such as the fast <<< monster, the blob, the healer, and/or the spinner one.
The damage & range bonus are cumulative. What I'm thinking about is making the poison tower's poison cumulative as well! (so far, it isn't; there's a maximum poison drain) Only I'm afraid that if I do this, the best strategy will be to simply buy a lot of poison towers & they'll take care of everything.
Poison towers need time, and there's no space in Impossible. :-(
The damage / range bonus being cumulative (additive?) means the interest rate option is still viable -- a 2x50% (100%) damage bonus is less effective than a 6% interest rate bonus to 1.09%, but it's an instant bonus, so strategically the damage/range bonus would be very useful in the last few rounds.
The core of the game is decent, but there's a lot of tweaking that should be done. Perhaps if you had a separate site for this game you could get tons of input on it, etc..