Now for the bad: You are on the third game in the series and still haven't fixed some of the most annoying things. Picking up gold and items in dungeons creates a delay the moment before you pick the item up. In a dungeon with a large number of items/monsters this delay is terrible. I have not gotten to this huge dungeon issue in Explorer yet but it's there in Revenant and Explorer is still getting delays even in minor dungeons so I can't see it not being horrid in big dungeons. Next, bags still do not work in a sane manner. When you have large bags you need to make them fill left to right, top to bottom, not the crazy pattern they currently fill in. I understand that they fill in the order that the new slots are added as you upgrade bags but even knowing that it's still confusing as to what direction they'll move when you sell an item.
I totally agree regarding the bags issue, unfortunately it's a big rewrite to a lot of individual systems for something which is mostly a bit of cosmetic silliness, at this point I don't have the time to commit to changing it, but it's going on the list of high priorities for any future chapters.
Regarding the dungeon delay, this bugs me a little too, I'll commit a little more time optimizing it before public release.
Well, so far things are looking better on the new game. Combat works a lot smoother and the auto-fight abilites are certainly nice. Moving around on the map also happens to be much smoother. However, the game now actually runs worse than Revenant for me. Revenant ran slower in actions but maintained it's frame rate the whole time. Explorer starts out fine but then starts to hit bursts of slowdown that last for a few seconds. I'm using Flash version 11.4.402.287 in Chrome (turned off the pepperflash version). I haven't tried other browsers as of yet.
Quick feedback: Bouncing seems a bit crazy as you can chain bounce off the sides of platforms. Apples can spawn just off the right edge of the screen, where you can't possibly get. Does that pause button actually work?
Oh, Apparently the higher ranks of buildings come from finishing floors. Unlike the first Rank they do not seem to have a set floor, besides the Hero Monument.
If you use Rally to help hurry up the crafting of equipment there is a chance you will get a "Refined" gear instead that comes with better stats. Those two minute villager actions are actually useful for this.
Ha, I did Engineers but I did it as an Output/Accept where what got sent out at the end had to equal what was sent in, if and only if it was a symmetrical string. Tomorrow I'll have to replace it with the stripped down model that eats the string as it goes along.
This is because Is Empty? is fairly inefficient since it loops through all the characters each time. One way to build a faster Is Empty? would be to store a *, then store and delete the first character. Do a load and if the first character is now a *, the string was empty so delete the *, otherwise it wasn't empty and you've loaded back the original character.
Tips for getting started:
1) The Berzerker's special ability makes him burst into flames and makes him and any nearby friends invulnerable. This is very important as it means you want to be near your friends when you use it. It also means if you see a team mate use it get over by him so you can get the bonus as well. 2) The damage you take and and the health enemies have both increase whenever someone else joins the world. If you are having trouble with certain levels try checking "Friends only" and play through it solo. Some levels that are extremely hard with four people are dead simple with one.
Congratulations JuicyBeast, you guys really outdid yourself on this one. I'm very saddened by the fact that Bloons TD 5 came out this month as you guys deserve to be the monthly contest winners for this one.
Was the game supposed to pass the story screen without you pressing "Skip Intro"? If not you might want to make it change to say "Continue" after the intro is done.
I love the idea and had a lot of fun playing the missions. Can we get the ability to save the solution when we finish the level so when we go back in the saved solution is already there? That way we can remember how we did it and tweak.
Cute game and might be worth sponsorship except for two things. 1.) Normally you get sponsored before releasing your game to the internet. Check out fgl.com for more information about that. 2.) If you want the game to get Kong sponsored having the API would help. As far as I can tell your game does not have that.
We realize we are going about this in an unconventional way, we're ok with that. We just integrated the Kongregate api and leaderboard with our latest update! Check it out!
Um CG, I started with 500 books last night then this morning did not. I see you posted about a debug mode. Doesn't that mean you updated your game on the site after the deadline?
Yes, I fixed a minor bug. The 8,247 players here are more important than the GITD comp. But I did have a non-debug version of the game up here at some point before the deadline, so it's probably ok
Aw, I was all excited until I played it and I realized these are all levels I've played when helping you test the game. It's still kind of neat, though.
http://bit.ly/NxNTnB - This is a Kongregate forum post that provides a cheat sheet of the things to make for each upgrade. It should make it a lot less annoying to do the upgrades.
Ok, please tell me this game won game of the month last month. I can't find the records anywhere on the site anymore like they used to be.
This game is expertly done.
I'm bothered by the fact that there is no way to replay the opening video so you can see the whole story not to mention how you get the artifacts in a semi-random order which makes it tougher to follow the story. So in return I give you this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXIVctPkz5U&list=PL71F763F695E4915D&feature=view_all
Spoiler: This contains the ending video as well.
That being said you guys really need to put some thought into the resources streaming system. Sitting at the opening story with nothing but black backgrounds, no music, and just a bit of text while things stream in is trouble by itself. Then you click and it has to load the next picture and so on.
If you guys really wanted to reduce the amount of stuff needed to download you should only have one copy of a resource that gets cropped/shrunk client side instead of multiple copies.
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 "Clicking Spree"){kind=icon}
 "Unnatural Selection GitD 26"){kind=icon}
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 "Glean"){kind=icon}
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I totally agree regarding the bags issue, unfortunately it's a big rewrite to a lot of individual systems for something which is mostly a bit of cosmetic silliness, at this point I don't have the time to commit to changing it, but it's going on the list of high priorities for any future chapters. Regarding the dungeon delay, this bugs me a little too, I'll commit a little more time optimizing it before public release.