A little beta testing

Though I’d share what I’ve been working on at the office the last few weeks.

CancerTD

Should be fairly strait forward. The UI is a bit of a mess and ugly, but that’s because I don’t have a UI designer any more (jerk went and quit to go work on a personal project )

I’d like feedback on the game’s difficulty:
What wave number did you get up to before losing lives?
What wave number killed you?
How many lives did you lose on those waves?
Were tower upgrades sufficiently beneficial?
Were costs appropriate
(I believe the values are 25, 60, 99, 142, 187, 235, 285; Pow(UpgradeAmount+1, 1.25) * 25 )
Were you able to perma-stun enemies, if so, how? (This should be impossible)

Known issues:
– Wave counter off by 1.
– Range circles intersect with ground geometry in places (not much I can do to fix it)
– Bullets pass through terrain (although they cannot target enemies that are underground)
– Enemies entering a turret’s range while it has no targets and it recently fired will cause it to fire immediately (got to tweak the no targets → 1 target code to not recalculate firing time if the next firing time is greater than the current time)
– LAN bonuses are always 0 (intentional; there is no code to handle nearby local sessions yet)
– LAN bonus not listed for built towers, only unbuilt squares (need to add this to the UI)

Damn… was like 2 shots aways from having a perfect game; the final boss escaped with barely a couple of hp points:

Tower upgrades were beneficial, yes, except for the laser ones; those would’ve been way more efficient if there was a way to make them target the last enemy instead of the first one.

Costs were fine.

I was able to keep enemies stuned for a long time in the center of the map, but they eventually moved away. That said, I didn’t have my stun towers fully upgraded.

Also, kudos for making an Unity game which runs fine on my computer.

E: It’d be nice to be able to see the cost of an upgrade even when you have enough money to buy it. Maybe show the ones you can afford in green instead of just displaying the “Upgrade” text.

This is just me probably being overly picky, but I don’t like the purchase/upgrade/etc functionality as it is now. The game would feel a lot more polished if you could preview tower stats/ranges/etc by mouseover rather than having to click in order to view the relevant data—both when buying new and upgrading existing. Also, when selecting from the list of new towers, icons representing each tower would look nicer than the plain-text buttons displaying each tower’s name.

Oh, and one of the tiles is off-centered. Pic

That’s all I can see from a glance. I’m horrible at tower defense games, so I can’t accurately assess the gameplay/challenge factor. :(

OK, here are the things I noticed:

1) The poison tower and laser tower look identical. Not a huge deal, but odd, especially considering that all the others are markedly different.
2) The shots aren’t visible (for me) with targetted tower. Again, not a huge deal, but this is the only tower that this occurs with.
3) Shrink anti-creeps and creeps instead of instantly removing (except when anti-creeps are “eating” creeps — then the creep should be “absorbed” into anti-creep before shrinking the anti-creep).
4) Since there are a different number of upgrades possible for each tower/type of upgrade, show what level max is at (hormone therapy tower range maxes at 3, which is barely more than its starting range, but others upgrade quite a bit).
5) Upgrade amounts incorrectly show “+0”.
6) Just from my observation playing once through, the targetted tower seemed like kind of a waste of money: The hormone towers plus immunotherapy towers plus maybe radiation therapy towers seemed like a much better combination. Targetted towers are so ridiculously slow, they need to pack a harder punch to make up for it. But I only bothered to upgrade it a couple times, so YMMV.
7) As Senekis93 said, let us see the cost of the upgrade even when we have enough money. And as an addendum to what Aesica said, being able to preview changes to tower range would be desirable.
8) Add creep information, please (current and next wave).

Lost 5 life at level 11, Boss got through at end (but apart from no “next level” button, there is no indicator that it is over); I think I could have done better if I hadn’t wasted money on targetted and poison towers… but maybe not. I’ll have to play again to see.

Other than that, everything looks/works well, and there’s no lag. Not that they actually do anything at the moment, but I think more than two networks would be desirable if and when LAN play is implemented.

Towers looking identical:
I’m getting someone to model up more appropriate towers. It’s an issue I’m aware of. The other towers only got unique models two days ago (I ran out of free models).

Purchase/upgrade/etc:
Yeah, the UI is very rough at the moment. It needs a complete overhaul.

Tile is off-center:
That’s actually intentional. If you look closely, the six below that aren’t aligned either. The tiles are actually lined up to the texture, that one is just odd because it’s so close to a section of the texture that wasn’t stretched. I may or may not change it.
Here you can see what I mean by not being aligned to a perfect grid.

Targetted tower bullets invisible:
It’s because they move so fast and the bullet trail is deleted when the bullet is removed. I’m looking for a way to mitigate that.

Creep removal:
Yeah, no animations as of yet, beyond rotation and walk-progression.

Max upgrade:
Again, a UI issue. Generally speaking, each tower can be upgraded 17 times. I think there’s one that has 18, not sure if I went back and changed it after making another change to not require it. 5 in most stats, two in the remainder, except Targetted (which doesn’t have a special ability) gets 7 in…range, I think, and Immunotherapy which gets… 4, 4, 4, 5?

Upgrade amounts incorrectly show “+0”:
That’s actually the nearby games bonus, which is always 0. I can subvert the game to give bonuses in order to test them working, but there’s no networking code yet. Known issue. I’ll put up a “fake” networked copy Mondayish (won’t be in the office over the weekend ;) ).

Targetted tower weak:
I agree, it does need some balance tweaking. I’ll look at it’s DPS average again Monday.

Preview/show costs/creep info:
Again, UI issue that needs work

Senekis’s almost-perma-stun setup:
I’ll see if I can tweak the stun-immunity code slightly to make it trigger a little faster. I don’t mind “lots of stun” as that should happen. I just don’t want to see a 7000 hp creep enter, stop, and then die from ONLY stun.
Right now, every time it’s stunned, it adds half the stun duration to a counter, and every quarter second, subtracts 0.125 from that counter (min 0). If the stun amount is 0.75 seconds or more, it adds an additional half-of-value to the counter. Every time it becomes unstunned (and is allowed to move) the counter is reduced by 0.5 (min 0). If the counter is greater than 2, the stun is ignored (and no counter amount is added).

Thanks for the feedback. :)

Updated

NO UI UPDATES YET

Targeted Therapy does more damage and has a slightly increased rate of fire
– 100 damage per 6 seconds, ~17 dps
– Compared to a chemo tower’s 20 damage per shot (if full poison) per 1 second. ~20 DPS
– Compared to a radiation tower’s 2 damage per tick for 2 seconds w/ 2 second cooldown (average 4 DPS in AOE)
– – Radiation towers may need a damage buff
Continuous Stun tweaked slightly
– While stunned, creeps recover from continuous stun more slowly (allowing stun immunity to build up faster)
– When becoming unstunned, creeps no longer recover from continuous stun (allowing stun immunity to last slightly longer)
– Overall, hormone towers should remain approximate as effective as before (due to high stun amounts and low rate of fire)
Faked LAN bonuses. Each tile will have a low chance of starting off with a random set of bonuses.
– Some towers get slightly modified bonus stats (targetted therapy towers benefit from damage more greatly, less from rate of fire and stun towers get lower damage and stun as they hit 4 times a second).
– UI will display the altered bonuses correctly for a built tower, this is the only UI change.
Persistent bullets (i.e. radiation towers) now properly stack. Before it was checking to see if the time-since-last-tick was greater than 0.25 seconds, applying the damage/statuses from ONE tower, then incrementing the last-tick variable, nullifying the additional towers.
– Makes stun from radiation towers more effective now, but will very rapidly cause stun immunity (a single tower can’t cause it, even with max possible stun).
Radiation tower properly has only 5 damage upgrades, rather than 6 (as damage was originally an integer, but due to the tower’s 4 hits per second mechanic, adding 5 damage was significant, so it was reduced to 1 damage every 2 levels—thus needing an even number of upgrades).

The UI is a bit of a mess and ugly, but that’s because I don’t have a UI designer any more

You’re lucky to have had one in the first place :P

Originally posted by truefire:

The UI is a bit of a mess and ugly, but that’s because I don’t have a UI designer any more

You’re lucky to have had one in the first place :P

I was very lucky indeed. He turned this into this

Originally posted by Draco18s:

The UI is a bit of a mess and ugly, but that’s because I don’t have a UI designer any more (jerk went and quit to go work on a personal project )

Seems like a pretty good UI designer. I like that I have the option to go back to a previous page…oh wait!

You can press on the other side of the book to go back.

@Draco18s: looks really impressive, one fairly major bug though, you’re lacking alternative medicine. It should cost a lot and have ~0 DPS. You can figure out the exact numbers for balance. :P

Good on you for making a game for cancer awareness.

Looks to be a fun TD but, I can’t play your framerate is too high for me to run without lag. because my pc sucks lol. but, it looks high quality suggestion resize your game because I have to scroll down just to see the lower half lol

Originally posted by Aesica:

Seems like a pretty good UI designer. I like that I have the option to go back to a previous page…oh wait!

I’m not sure he’s had anything to do with the current site, yet. Looks the same as when he showed it to us several months ago.

Originally posted by JamesObscura:

@Draco18s: looks really impressive, one fairly major bug though, you’re lacking alternative medicine. It should cost a lot and have ~0 DPS. You can figure out the exact numbers for balance. :P

Lol!

Good on you for making a game for cancer awareness.

It’s more a demonstration to our clients (which are companies like Merk and GSK), rather than producing something to make the general public aware of something.

I do plan on trying to make this into a full iPad app, however.