Howdy! I've recently been working on a tower defense game, nothing fancy! In fact "A simple militant styled, tower defense game," is my opening line on the description :P. Anyway I would say I am new to this despite 'learning' for a while. I've definitely got a long way to go before anything 'amazing' is born but I wanted to post the game somewhere and try to get some feedback. https://gamejolt.com/games/3ndl3zz-basedefense/325756 if anyone wanted to try it out please do so! I fully intend to make updates in the coming weeks to improve upon the current application. 

I started making this using 'Kenney' assets, I met someone through this forum that is interested in getting invovled in stuff like improving the graphics so that alone will make the game better but since i'm not great with designs and creativity I'm looking at this from the technical side and was wondering if anyone would give some feedback about my game/tower defense games in general. Best methods to increase difficulty without ultimately making it crazy impossible. 

If you try it out and try the endless mode, you'll see what happens as of today... Enemies end up with crazy speed so i'm thinking of trying to cap a max speed in there and just focusing on increasing health or something... 

Anyway I'll leave this post here.. Apologies if this isn't the correct place to post looking for feedback  I don't really use forums often so I don't know my way around all that well just yet! Like everything else I am Working on it though!

Many Thanks! 

Edit: Updated to Version 0.1.4 With notes.Thank you for the current feedback! I appreciate it a lot!

In my list for the morning.

Awesome! Thank you very much!

Okay, starts off really slow, got to wave 16 with only  6 turrets, then somewhere around 20 it just started going crazy.   So, a little progression bumpiness. 

A few notes...

Things I would like to see in this game/ I generally expect from the genre:

• Countdown timer for waves.  Click or space-bar to accelerate is fine.
• Enemies getting TOUGHER over time, and sometimes even slower but smarter, unless you are going for the current Arcade style feel it has, which is fine.
• Enemies that shoot back, and turrets that take damage.  As it stands it's just an arcade style high score type game, which is good too, but I'm not sure that's what you are going after, if it is then I can provide a completely different set of suggestions.
• Being able to upgrade/replace turrets would be nice.
• More maps!!   I really like these games when they come with a progression of maps that you can successively defeat until you have pushed back the hoard and won the day.
• Music becomes VERY repetitive and has a few hitches here or there when it repeats it seems.  Personally, I would rather have a bunch of ballistic sound effects and explosions instead of music.

Like I said, just notes, and if you are actually going for the current arcade/high score feel it has, I could take another moment and see what feedback I could give you with that camera angle.

Over all, nice Beta/Prototype/etc..

My Last Life!!

The only bug, when clicking End Game.  Running on Windows 7.

Thank you so much for taking the time!

A countdown bar of course!! Definitely something overlooked there. It works via timer just forgot to visibly represent it (You can click spacebar to hurry to wave currently but nobody will know D:) so nice one for that one! oops lol

For Enemies getting tougher, this is supposed to happen so I suppose its not working. Or isn't progressing enough. Would you think a speed limit would be good? At wave 61 (GG!) they're kinda really quickly, Would you say they're 'too quick' ? I'm in half minds about lowering the speed cap. 

I was trying to go for the high score highest wave kinda vibe on this one. So my main concern is really enemy speed and enemy health (its 'basic' I suppose) I like the idea of them fighting back though, so I'm thinking about that. Would you say anything different knowing its meant to be arcadey high score style?

I plan on adding in upgrade system and removing towers. I wanted to get feedback regarding that because the inital idea was to make it so you can't remove towers so you gotta be strategic but I think perhaps that doesn't really work here and more people would be annoyed when they can't swap a mistaken tower or simple change it cuz of choice. So going to definitely add these in!

Possibly different map themes are being considered later but the one map with endless waves was the goal with this one, perhaps map progression would give it more longevity? 

I'll look into the music and sound effects stuff, would you suggest taking away music entirely and just having sound effects or perhaps sourcing 'better' background track and giving them a music on/off and sound on/off buttons perhaps?

Will also look into that windows 7 crashing when exiting thing  If possible would you try it a couple of times and see if it keeps happening? definitely NOT something I want to happen lol

Thank you again for your feedback! It is most appreciated!

Yeah, the crash happens every time I clicked end game even if I didn't play.  So for more of a high score game:

1) A very visible "score" , and a leader board of some kind.  You could even snap in a simple online leader board service to make it feel more competitive.

2) I like some indication where the score came from, like point numbers rising from the smoke cloud kinda thing.

3) A good way to make it seem like it has more progression without having more levels might be to zoom in the view to just outside the base at first and then every 10 or so waves zoom out one ring, maybe add a few rings even. 

4) Especially for arcade/high score go with sfx over music, imho..  A little jingle or warning tune/sfx right befor or right after a wave would be nice though.

5) I would prefer if the enemies had set speeds so you can base your strategy on something.  That being said, for high score games they should get a little faster over time, to a point anyhow.  Because once they move faster than any one of your turrets can aim and fire, the game is completely out of strategy. 

6) You could do upgrades as easily as giving the turrets a level number that modifies their targeting and firing speed/etc.  That way even if the enemies get a lot faster, you can get through a few more waves by using all the extra cash you made in the first 50.

Hope it helps!

Again with the dope feedback! Very much appreciated! You've given me a lot to think about.

I like the leaderboard idea, I mean in theory it could give people more incentive to go again, beat their own score/others.. I like it! Do you know any decent leaderboard services? I'll give it a proper research session tomorrow/through weekend. 

"INCOMINGGG!!!" is definitely what i'm doing for #4 Nah I like that idea though, I suppose mixing up sounds would be better than the same beat over and over for sure! Unless its elevator music though.. kidding.

With the speed for enemies, I'm currently working on upgrades and then I'm going to test out speeds and try to find a 'decent' balance as I don't want enemies going super super quick but I also don't want towers being OP like crazy... Would you suggest having towers that could be upgraded indefinitely? Or maybe like just 5 tiers till you hit a 'max' ? --- I think my main mathy problem with this game so far is eventually I'm unable to count/control 'indefinite' stuff I don't really know to maintain the balance 50 levels from now lol. But i'm going to keep working on it. Or googling it till I find a crazy Professor to tell me some numbers! lol

Your advise definitely helps! Thanks again

Glad to be of help.   I wouldn't suggest that anything has an Infinity, like you've already discovered, it's too hard to figure out the math that far in the future and have the balance stay in tact.  But for a high-score game, the balance shouldn't be maintained forever, everybody has to lose eventually.  So, you could have it maintain a balanced approach until the player exceeds the current high score, that might be an easy trick to implement.  Once the high score is gone, so are speed limits and etc..   Unfortunately I'm not up on the current leaderboard offerings, but there are a LOT of them out there.  Many of them are harder to implement than they are worth, so shop around.

Btw, forgot to mention it but extra points for the functional installer, an often overlooked item in the world of early prototypes.

8 hours ago, Septopus said:

maintain a balanced approach until the player exceeds the current high score

I like it!! That's a real cool idea.. Kinda making it 'easier-ish' to get to current score and then release the chaos! or throw out the rule book whichever suits it better

I'll have a look at leaderboards, No idea really how they work but I don't think I need anything too complicated.. I just don't know what 'complicated' vs 'not complicated' is in leaderboard world at the moment. But that's definitely a feature I wanna add! 

Wicked cool!