Hello, everyone.
The elementals update has finally arrived, and along with it several fixes and improvements to the game. With this update, the game is getting closer to being completed. I hope it pleases everyone.
Elemental
The elemental was released and that changes the game a lot.
A tutorial was made for it. And, when playing, you will notice that things are much more complex than with the mecha class (at least the APM (actions per minute) is lower hahaha). It needs a lot of information, so it's complicated to learn at first. That's why I tried to spread as much as possible what each tower does, and how you should use each one.
The elemental has 4 types of towers that have their own distinctive characteristics:
Fire - damage over time (DOT) and area damage
Earth - massive single target damage
Water - group control
Air - remove enemy buffs
Notice that this new class introduces a new game mechanic. Taking buffs from enemies was not present in mecha, but it is very important for elemental since turrets can't diversify much.
As for the apm of this class, at first I thought it would be an extremely low APM, but by putting an upgrade system, it ended up raising but still considerably lower than the mecha
In summary, the elemental class has very striking characteristics and high complexity in the beginning for the player to understand.
Mecha
For the mecha, I made some adjustments that people asked over time. I imagine that the class is very unique and striking with its towers. They start weak and mold to the will of the player, becoming true machines of war. Its high APM may be difficult for most, but it is something that makes it very unique, and with an attractive difficulty for those who like to stay focused and attentive the whole game.
Level 1 turret miss chance - the mecha level 1 turret used to have a 70% hit chance and it has been increased to 80%.
This change was made because many runs could be messed up in the beginning by some turret missing. So, to minimize this but without taking away the weak turret characteristic in the beginning, I increased the initial hit chance.
Turret rotation speed level 1 - the mecha level 1 turret used to have a rotation speed of 2.1 and this has been increased to 2.5.
Just like it is frustrating to miss a target in the beginning, the turret not even shooting because it couldn't rotate is also frustrating. For this, I increased the base rotation speed of the turret.
Time to upgrade the turret - the time for the first upgrade was 2 rounds and now it's 3. And all the consectutive ones have been increased by +1. This is a direct nerf to the mecha turrets, but don't worry it will be balanced by the following game changes.
Game Changes
The game was too fast in the beginning. It followed a linear progression of time, starting with 10 seconds for the first waves and going up to 60 seconds (for higher difficulties). Now the game starts with more time using the following logic:
(10 + waveNumber / 2) * timeDifficulty
Where "time difficulty" is a multiplier:
Easy - timeDifficulty = 9/4;
Medium - timeDifficulty = 8 / 4;
Hard - timeDifficulty = 7 / 4;
Insane - timeDifficulty = 6 / 4;
More than Insane - timeDifficulty = 6/4;
This directly influences the balancing of the game. The elemental was made with this time in mind, so only the mecha needed to be rebalanced because it became too strong. To see the mecha's changes, read its section above.
A button was introduced for our discord, please feel free to use, come hang out and give feedback.
The campaign was also rebalanced because it was a bit too difficult in some maps.
Finally, the last mission of each map was removed, the "survive without taking damage" mission, because it was too frustrating to take 1 damage and not be able to complete all 3 missions, so I removed it and added a mission with more waves.
Future Steps
For future steps, I want to implement an information menu where you can see in detail what each tower does, their upgrades, the enemies and bosses. With numeric details about them and the internal mechanics of the game.
And as always the correction of any bugs and eventual unbalances that may exist.