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[tieTYT]

Chain Of Heroes [Action RPG] [Snake] [Browser Game]













About The Game

Chain of Heroes combines Snake with Action RPG elements!

Play as a group of fugitives trying to find your way off a hostile planet.

Carefully navigate your heroes between enemy hordes to attack but avoid running into them, yourselves or the walls!


At this point, I think I've got the major system features in place, but there are a lot little sub features I still plan to implement. As an example, the foundation around skill gems are in place: You can collect them, equip them, sell them, etc. But, there are many more kinds of skill gems I want to add to the game.

I appreciate any and all feedback. How can I make the game more fun?

Major TODOs

• More skill gems and weapons
• A World Map ala Super Meat Boy
• Better graphics
• Sound and music
• A concept of elements. That is, bad guys who are weak against fire but strong against ice. Then you'll equip skill gems to change the element of your attacks. I've decided against this feature.  I think it would be irritating to have to swap your skill gems to change your elements.
• More effort on game balance

Story

The graphics give no indication of the game's theme (yet), but here's my idea for the story:

You're serving time in a futuristic prison in space. Without warning, a meteorite smashes into the prison's electric grid, allowing you to raid the armory as you escape. The only catch is you're shackled to a bunch of other people so you have to work as a team to survive on the hostile planet.

About Me

I've been working on this game for over a year as a hobby project for at least 30 minutes a day. As you can see, I'm not much of an artist and I haven't added any sound or music yet. I've never finished a game before. This is my second attempt! All the assets are placeholder art and you can find the licenses in the HTML source of the game.

[btmura]

I had fun beating the first level! 

Maybe add support for touch controls so people can play on tablets?

[afilionComposer]

Looks great so far!

Let me know if you need any music!

[tieTYT]

New Feature

I just added a new skill gem named a Leech Gem.  If you equip it, you will gain HP when you kill enemies with your projectile.

I had fun beating the first level!  

Thanks a lot btmura.  If it's not too much prying, what made you stop playing?

Maybe add support for touch controls so people can play on tablets?

Good idea.  It was working at one point and it stopped working a while ago without me noticing.  I'll make sure to fix that as a regression bug.  It's been a while since I've played it on my tablet.  I only hope it still runs fast enough.  It's too slow to play on my android phone  

Looks great so far!

Let me know if you need any music!

Will do!  I'll keep you in mind because I did like the sound of your stuff.  Thanks again.

[btmura]

I just stopped playing, because it was past my bedtime.

[gamerzap]

Wow, this looks great!  There are so many cool ideas on this forum! :D

[tieTYT]

I added a new type of Skill Gem that multiplies your gold.

Wow, this looks great!  There are so many cool ideas on this forum! :D

That's really kind of you to say.  It made my day!

[tieTYT]

Added a new kind of skill gem that multiplies your XP:



BTW, if anyone can think of some cool ideas for skill gems I'm always open to suggestions.

[tieTYT]

I'm thinking of cutting the elemental concept. Visualizing the effect on the player, I think it would just make them have to do a lot of swapping of skill gems between levels. That type of micromanagement just seems tedious to me. Refer to my major todos section at the top if you're not sure what I'm talking about.

[btmura]

I got up to dungeon 5 today. My strategy was to just keep adding more folks to my crew. However, those nukes took a toll on my conga line and hitting the side made me lose a bunch of guys . I enjoyed configuring the weapons and spending the gold. Maybe I should have sold all those duplicate free rays I was getting...

What if you could get power up to change your formation rather than just walking in a line all the time?

Also it might be nice to expand the screen to take the whole browser window.

The game seems very complete already, and it's quite addictive! Good job! 

[tieTYT]

I added a freeze gem and replaced it with the freeze ray weapon.  The reason I did this is freeze rays always have 0 DPS so they would always be sorted to the bottom of the list of weapons.  I suspect nobody would ever think to use it for this reason.  But now you can augment any weapon to give it a freeze effect but you sacrifice its damage.  

I got up to dungeon 5 today. My strategy was to just keep adding more folks to my crew. However, those nukes took a toll on my conga line and hitting the side made me lose a bunch of guys . I enjoyed configuring the weapons and spending the gold. Maybe I should have sold all those duplicate free rays I was getting...

Nice, thanks for trying it.  I appreciate all feedback.  What made you stop at level 5?

What if you could get power up to change your formation rather than just walking in a line all the time?

That's an interesting idea but I can't think of a way to make that work.  I thought about a V formation (like how birds fly when they migrate) but that has two issues:

• How do you decide who goes where?
• How would I design levels around this possibility to make sure you can navigate without bumping into walls?  With a single file line, I can make narrow gaps you can fit in, but if you're a wide V formation, you'd probably hit the sides with some heroes when trying to squeeze through.

I think something I could make work is a double line formation (as opposed to the current single line formation), but I'm not sure if that would be much more fun.  Also it still has to deal with that first issue.

What formation types were you thinking of?  Maybe you're thinking of something I haven't considered yet.

Also it might be nice to expand the screen to take the whole browser window.

Hrm, this comment really concerns me.  The game should be filling most of the browser window.  You might have a white margin on the left/right of the screen, but not much.  Is this what you're experiencing?  Are you saying I should fill up that white margin?

If you're experiencing something else, could you show me a screenshot of what you see?  What browser are you using?  Also, what is your browser URL when you're playing?  It should be something like http://chainofheroes.appspot.com/src/main/generated/chainofheroes.html?20140625_124759  If it's something else, it would indicate to me you're somehow playing on an older version of the game.  

The game seems very complete already, and it's quite addictive! Good job!  

Thanks a lot!  I appreciate the feedback.  Comments like this keep me going.

[tieTYT]

Now hero projectiles are colored blue and bad guy projectiles are colored red.  This way you can tell who shot what (and what you need to avoid)

[tieTYT]

1. I was getting a lot of indirect (and direct) feedback that level 5 was way too difficult, so I've made that easier.  I hope that keeps people playing for longer.

2. I worked very hard on making performance better, especially on Firefox

3. Now the weapon types have more variety.  Tri-shot has shorter range, homing missile tracks better but moves slower, homing nuke has a smaller explosion radius, etc.

4. Now the homing nukes don't explode until after a certain period of time.  Before that, they could explode on contact.  I changed this because I didn't want the Skeletons (aka Nukers) to be able to surprise you with an instant death if you didn't know what's coming.  Now that they don't explode on contact, it gives you time for your party to run away. 

[tieTYT]

Added a new feature: Auto Equip.  Here it is in action:



I guess it's kind of subtle (perhaps I should highlight the changes?).  If you notice, it's equipping the best weapons and skill gems of the type you're already using.  You'll see the weapon damage of each character increases after you confirm that dialog.

To get this working I had to implement the ability to have modal dialogs. This opens the door to a lot of other important features like adding sound.  I want to make sure you can configure sound volume and can mute it before I put it in the game.  That configuration dialog will probably be a modal dialog.

Another small feature is I now show character strength separate from weapon strength on the Heroes tab.  Here's a screenshot of that:

[Munkyman587]

Just finished dungeon 11, very fun game!

Thoughts:

1) It might be easier to have a DPS stat, because I don't fully understand the time/damage ratio.  I am testing different weapons, and a description or stat might make it easier to know which to choose.

2) I am assuming there is no way to save in a game like this, but it would be fun to come back to the dungeon I was on later

3) It would be nice to have item qualities, so you could automatically sell all commons.  That, or an auto-sell duplicates/items of lesser stats.  I just find myself hoarding things :p

4) Maybe you could tune a way to have 360 shooting (or maybe I haven't found a gem/weapon that does?).  Maybe it goes against the idea of the game though, just thought I would toss that out.

5)Do you plan on implementing random names/allow for people to name their heroes?

Overall, it is a lot of fun!  Don't stop working on it, I like the concept.

[danieru]

I hope you don't mind if I post just to subscribe.

[tieTYT]

Just finished dungeon 11, very fun game!

Thank you very much, I appreciate that.  What made you decide to stop playing? What would need to change to keep you playing?

Thoughts:

1) It might be easier to have a DPS stat, because I don't fully understand the time/damage ratio.  I am testing different weapons, and a description or stat might make it easier to know which to choose.

Are you referring to the Equip Weapon screen?  Actually that is showing DPS and sorted by DPS, it's just under a label titled "Damage".  Really, it's a space issue.  I don't know how to fit "Damage Per Second" in there and I think a lot of people won't know what DPS means. 

But I see your point.  "Damage" isn't just misleading, it's kind of a lie.  Let me know if you have any suggestions with that.

2) I am assuming there is no way to save in a game like this, but it would be fun to come back to the dungeon I was on later

This will definitely be possible at some point.  But it's a maintenance nightmare.  Once I start storing the data, then I'll have to migrate it between versions of the game. 

It's a great idea and I'll need to implement it eventually.  But the longer I wait the more productive I'll be 

3) It would be nice to have item qualities, so you could automatically sell all commons.  That, or an auto-sell duplicates/items of lesser stats.  I just find myself hoarding things :p

Good idea.  I'll either do that as a separate button, or a checkbox to "Sell unequipped items" in the Auto Equip dialog.

4) Maybe you could tune a way to have 360 shooting (or maybe I haven't found a gem/weapon that does?).  Maybe it goes against the idea of the game though, just thought I would toss that out.

Great idea.  I can do it as a skill gem, or I can make a type of weapon that works that way. 

5)Do you plan on implementing random names/allow for people to name their heroes?

I hadn't thought of letting you name them, but I've thought about implementing random names.  Lots of people ask for that feature.  I guess I should raise the priority on this feature

Overall, it is a lot of fun!  Don't stop working on it, I like the concept.

Thanks a lot, I really appreciate the feedback.  It keeps me going.

[tieTYT]

I hope you don't mind if I post just to subscribe.

Of course not!  Thanks, I appreciate it

[tieTYT]

1. Added an Auto-Sell button.

2. Total gold is now shown on the heroes dialog and the battle dialog, so you know if you've got enough money to buy upgrades.

3. A big change: There's sound effects and music (only during the battle, for now)! 

4. As I said earlier, I didn't want to add sound/music until I had a way to mute them, so I created a settings dialog where you can control this.  Here's a screenshot:



I think loading that music and playing it significantly slows down the game until it finishes loading it.  I'd like to hear some feedback if that's true.  If so, I'll probably have to add a loading screen.

Oh yeah and one big (small?) thing is missing:  You can't turn off sound while battling.  Tomorrow I'll make it so when you press ESC, it pops up the settings dialog.

[tieTYT]

Now each hero has a unique name:



Now potions heal a specific amount of HP instead of a percentage.  This is a balancing issue.  Using a percentage, I had to start weak and let you upgrade to strong potions.  But starting at a weak percentage meant that the health gain was trivial. 

Now I start at a decent amount of HP gain when you get a potion, but if you don't upgrade your HP gain, the enemies will do more damage and - relative to their damage and your total HP - you'll be getting less health back.