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[quantumpotato]

Hey your youtube video in first-post isn't showing. You need to surround it with [u r l] and always include only the regular youtube, no youtu.be or & options

[tankorsmash]

Thanks, I changed it to include the url tag too. What browser are you on? I'm on desktop chrome and it showed up embedded with mine or yours for me. Either way though, I appreciate you pointing it out, I had no idea.

[quantumpotato]

Firefox. I noticed on another thread that the videos didn't show up for a second while they loaded, maybe that was it? But when I looked at your code it just had "center" and not the u r l tag so I posted. Glad it's working now, good luck with your game!

[tankorsmash]

tl;dr the later unlocks are now way more valuable, instead of 20 or so coins per resource it's in the thousands or higher. It plays well for me, but I'd like to know what you think. I've added a bunch of stuff to the game and I've tried to summarize the bigger stuff below.

For the last year or so I've been working on Build Up The Base for a while now, and something a lot of people have been mentioning is despite a lot of the interesting complexity involved, unlocking a new building (think like a Mine to dig deeper, and an Arena to fight in) doesn't feel like you're achieving much, so I've been focused a lot on trying to make that more feel like you're actually building up the economy of the game.

So where the earlier resource and later resource used to cost only a few coins from each other, it's now scaled up several powers higher. I think that it'll be a lot of fun to try out, but I'm looking for feedback about whether or not it actually ends up being a positive change, so get in on the alpha and let me know.

(60 fps)

Some of the other stuff I've been working on is adding some randomized loot drops in the game. Since a lot of the time the player is tapping away crafting or mining stuff, I wanted to make sure that the game rewards stuff on top of the more standard stuff, so I've introduced the loot box. It'll show up every so often and you can open it to get a few different things, either some resources of the current building, or the ones you haven't unlocked yet, or currency, whether its coins or CI. Don't mind the art though, it's placeholder until I make sure the mechanics even worth keeping.

The idea with the loot boxes is to add some texture to the game, a little flavour in order to change up the game and keep the player on their toes a little bit. I'd be curious to know whether its clear ingame of what it is, or if it's just totally out of place.

Another thing I've done, based on a recent thread, was to split up my simple achievements screen into tabs that unlock as you're playing. It looks like the following image,, where you can only see the first levels of the ones you've unlocked, and then the next ones in their tab, so by the end of the game you'd have 10 tabs with a bunch of achievements in them.

(60 fps)

I was big into the original achievements on the Xbox 360, I think I've gotten like 60k gamerscore even, so I'm looking to get a little bit of that in Build Up The Base. I think it's a fun way to guide the player through some of the games and give them a little something as they're playing. I want to get custom names and icons for each of the achievements eventually too, so that each one is fun to see, but that'll be way down the line. The current achievement popup is nice too, but I hope that I'll be able to juice it up and give it a little oomph.

(60 fps)

Another thing I added, and this one is definitely a little more subtle, is that since you now progress through the game by unlocking buildings and levelling them up, I wanted to help the player understand what they need to do next, so along the right side of the screen I added a progress panel that tracks the current coin cost they need to upgrade, then once the player has enough coins it switched to a button that pulses every so often that they can click on to find the upgrade button.

Here's a gif where I show that off, along with the new popup that shows you what the upgrade is going to get you. Eventually it'll be prettier and have even more information about a lot of the stuff that's going on behind the scenes but for now its something, and that's better than it was a few weeks ago.

(60 fps)

Finally, for a bit of fun, I've added a tiny shatter animation for when you scrap and sell single items (I'll make one for selling all at once, but that got a little tricky). The reasoning here is that when you sell or scrap an item, there's virtually no feedback, and its really important, not even just incrementals but across all games, to show the player immediate feedback.

There's even still more I'll need to improve there, the counter just silently increments, I could add a little floating label that shows you how much you just added, like in the Bank screen. But like all gamedev, you always see stuff you need to improve. It's obvious now, looking at the gif, but the bank screen is actually fairly plain to look at. But when I first implemented it a few months ago I was very happy with it because of all the time I had spent just getting the touch-and-hold going along with the floating labels. Now already I can see a bunch of stuff to improve on again. I think a big part of all this is making sure I focus the time I have on what is important to making the experience better for the players, otherwise they'll lose interest.

In other news, I've managed to get 13,000 registered testers so far, which is amazing to me. It's so cool to have people emailing me and telling me that they've spent hours in the game and they've got so many cool ideas. Having people take the time out of their day to message me and talk about my little game like it's a real thing they've decided to spend their time on is so friggin satisfying, I can't even express it. A few incremental devs even reached out to me, so if you're looking for feedback on your game I'd be more than happy to do it.

Anyway, enough rambling, try out the latest build and let me know that once you're making a ton of money whether or not the game gets trivial. If you're rolling in cash a lot of the fun gets lost, since you're not working towards anything.

[tankorsmash]

Just a quick update to let everyone know that the hotfix for the crash that was affecting almost everyone has been pushed and should be live any minute. The crash was a silly mistake on my part where I had not properly edited one of the core datafiles. Took several people reporting it and a few hours of testing for what ended up being a trivial fix.

This hotfix also adds more information to the modal for boosting the touch output at The Marketplace, and the touch boost now boosts all buildings instead of only The Marketplace

It'll be version 0.51.2 (up from 0.51.1). Thanks for all the reports guys!

[PsycheMac]

Looks good! I like the idea of a clicker that lets you upgrade a town and fight monsters. Sort of gives a Darkest Dungeon clicker feeling. I'd try out testing it but I don't have an android phone

[tankorsmash]

Looks good! I like the idea of a clicker RPG that lets you also upgrade the town as well. I'd try out testing it but I don't have an android phone

Thank you! Part of what motivated me in the first place was a game called android game called ShopHeroes (steam link since you're on PC http://store.steampowered.com/app/506140/Shop_Heroes/) where you run a store, and you can upgrade that little store into a huge one. I still gotta get that visual component going though!

I don't have anything other than an Android build going, but I'm seeing how feasible it would be to get in on Windows. edit: Nope, no Windows build yet. Bummer.

[tankorsmash]

It's going to be a total rework of the progression. Instead of being level 4 to unlock and level 15 max, the building levels will max out at 50 and need to be level 15 to advance.

There's going to be a new feature, Alchemy, that'll take resources each second and generate CI for you to spend on time-reducing boosts for building upgrades, since there's so many more upgrades to go through now. Along with the upgrade level count, there's going to be a huge shift in how storage works, where you'll have much more limited space at first, but you'll be spending more time manually selling. Storage space goes up will level and you'll get salesmen boosts with each level too.

I've added a compact popup for selling all of a given resources quickly. This way you're not losing your focus when you're selling stuff.



Anyway there's a ton of small changes coming alongside this, just wanted to give a quick update.

[ardydo]

Hey, have you considered making a desktop release? I guess it would add some (a lot?) more work and you might not want that but I think there is still audience on PC and you may get more people to playtest your game if it's available in another platform. My brother, for instance, is a hardcore (does that even exist?) clicker player and he plays it mostly on PC.

Take a look at Zombidle for instance. I think it's doing quite well for a f2p clicker game. I think it may have some keyboard shortcuts for stuff but you won't necessarily need them for a simple PC version and may implement it later.

[tankorsmash]

Hey, have you considered making a desktop release? I guess it would add some (a lot?) more work and you might not want that but I think there is still audience on PC and you may get more people to playtest your game if it's available in another platform. My brother, for instance, is a hardcore (does that even exist?) clicker player and he plays it mostly on PC.

Take a look at Zombidle for instance. I think it's doing quite well for a f2p clicker game. I think it may have some keyboard shortcuts for stuff but you won't necessarily need them for a simple PC version and may implement it later.

I was actually thinking about it and got accepted as a Steam partner last week. It would be a lot of work but you're right I think, there's a huge audience for incrementals on desktop moreso than on mobile.

I just checked out Zombidle for a few minutes and man is that a well polished game. It's neat that it swapped out multi touch for pressing keyboard keys instead, that's a very elegant solution I think. I'd love to be able to make a game that polished.

I'd love to get some feedback from a more serious incremental player so if your brother ever ends up trying Build Up, I'd love to hear what he thought about how the new progression works out once it's live.

[ardydo]

I see! Yeah, zombidle is a really well polished game but that's really nice because you can have something to look up to!

I'll try to get my brother to play some of your game but he's and edgy teenager so it may be hard to get anything out of him. Hahahaha

[tankorsmash]

Haha great. The new update will be out later this week so hopefully he doesn't try it until then.

[agersant]

Hey, can I ask you where you got the tree that is in the older screenshots of your game? I made that tree when writing a pixel-art tutorial years ago (originally published at http://www.lesforges.org/article/cours-pixel-art-tiles, translated at https://opengameart.org/content/chapter-8-a-world-of-tiles).



If you took it from my tutorials as a placeholder, that's fine (although I would recommend indicating borrowed-temp-art when posting screenshots of your game). If you got it some other way, I would be interested in knowing where.

Thanks and best of luck with the game, it looks promising!

[tankorsmash]

Thanks for posting that tutorial! I'm no good at pixel art (as you can tell by all the blueish pixel art in my game that I did myself) but I had that placeholder in there to show people what a real artist could do, and it really put my my own art to shame haha. It's like straight out of ChronoTrigger or something, it's great.

Towards the end of this gif you can see what it's been replaced with https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/WholeHighlevelGilamonster but thanks again for writing up that tutorial.

[tankorsmash]

I've been busy working on the new huge update still, but I've been working on some new animations, check them out:

This one is when you're at The Dump harvesting flies while you're scavenging for items. You'll barely see it but there's an item box floating into the 'BASE' button.

(60 fps)

The old Arena combat animation was just the sword rotating, but I added a couple of things, the floating numbers, the white flash and the red streaks which all come together and add, I think, a good tactile sense when you're whacking away at the monsters. Zombidle, linked in this thread, did that very well and I'm trying to see if I can do something similar.

(60 fps)

For this last one, I added the grain flying away, sort of like when you're slashing at tall grass with a scythe. Tried to give it a sense of cutting down the chaff.

(60 fps)

The new update should hopefully be done in a few weeks as its been quite a while since the last version, but here's hoping it'll make a solid splash. Let me know what you guys think!

[tankorsmash]

I’ve been working an update so big I’m calling it the Total Overhaul update. It’s been brewing for about six weeks now and I’m very proud of how it turned out.

This new update overhauls literally every part of the game. Up to now, I’ve been working on getting all the systems up and running, like a leaderboard, synergies, achievements, branching paths, and way more) so it was finally time to carve out a more satisfying game. I’ve reset the leaderboards and savefiles for everyone, so it’s a clean start.

Anyway, here’s a breakdown of some of 100+ changes big and small that made it into this update:

Progression Rework

First and foremost, what I want to absolutely nail in Build Up The Base, is the fun of unlocking and discovering new things you can do. This is key in other incrementals, like Cookie Clicker and Trimps, that I wanted to make sure that that was done exceptionally well in Build Up. Before this update, everything unlocked too quickly, or started out already unlocked, meaning within a few minutes of playing, you had already run out of new things to do or fresh systems to play with. Now, buildings are unlocked at a more reasonable pace, in order to let them breathe, and to make sure you can learn the ins and outs of the buildings before you move on and build yourself into a corner.

Of course, with more time between unlocking new buildings, I had the chance to add way more features to each of them without a player blowing past them and missing out. That brings me to the first new feature, Alchemy:

New Feature: Alchemy

Previously, you were only able to generate a resource, called City Investment (which you can spend on various parts of your base, whether it’s raising the storage size, speeding up production, or a few other important but secret things), by scrapping and breaking down the items you found at The Dump.

But with the Total Overhaul update, you’re able to generate way more resources, and now you can use Alchemy to convert the excess Flesh or Souls, or whatever you’ve got laying around, into CI to spend at your leisure. There’s a number of related upgrades to be found within as you progress through it, so it’s constantly evolving throughout the game, alongside your base.

New Feature: Bakers

As you may or may not know, you can a variety of upgrades with coins earned from selling resouces, but once unlocked, you can use The Workshop to craft new technology directly with resources, like weakening the enemies at The Arena, or feeding your salesmen so that they work harder for you.

A lot of the constructive feedback I’ve gotten was about the amount of steps required in crafting all technology, so I’ve added Bakers to the game, who take Grain and create Bread for you, a common ingredient required in a lot of the recipes. On top of that, I made the prompts that show up when you’re crafting Bread and other technologies stick around, saving you the trouble of reopening them over and over.

New Feature: Arena Graduation

When you’re fighting in The Arena, against the hordes of strange-looking humanoids, you’re capturing their Souls, upgrading your sword or equipping new ones you’ve found, but part of the struggle was that at a certain point, the cost for upgrading became prohibitively high, leading into you to run into a brickwall unless you spec’ed your build properly.

Now, granted you’ve killed enough enemies, you’re able to graduate, reducing the costs for the upgrades and boosting the amount of Souls you collect per kill. This means the more you fight, the faster and faster it’ll be. I’ve also added more visuals, like floating numbers, red streaks and a flash to help visualize the damage you’re doing.

New graphics

Something I think is very important to a good game, let alone an incremental game, is making sure that each action you take, the game reacts in a fun way. Think of the quiet pop in Cookie Clicker, or the intensity of anything in Zombidle, or the hundreds of little particle effects whenever anything happens in Hearthstone.

Seeing as I’m just one dude, I have to make due with what I’ve got so I’ve added a number of effects for tapping the menu buttons, or little flies coming out of The Dump, a little screenshake when you’re laying rails through the mines, tiny pieces of wheat going flying through the air as you harvest at The Farm

Tons of small features and quality of life changes

So many little changes (over a hundred changes and tweaks across 300 commits) that I can’t possibly list them all here, but you can lower prices of harvesters, you can raise prices of certain resources via blood contracts and blood diamonds. You don’t need a username to show up in the leaderboards. I’ve added highlighted text to the tutorial and other places, to make reading them quicker and easier. You can now see levels of your upgrades, so you’re not guessing how many times you’ve upgraded. Tweaked text in a bunch of places to show you exactly what it does instead of approximating it. I’ve optimized the game so even a potato could run it at 60fps (but if its not smooth for you, please message me and I’ll debug it), you can pause salesmen, stopping them from selling temporarily. I’ve added a smaller more compact ‘sell all’ menu to make it easier to sell resources quickly. The list goes on. I wrote out a bigger list on the game’s subreddit, /r/BuildUpTheBase.

What’s next?

Ongoing support for bug fixing, but more importantly, I want to get some actual art in the game. Most icons and art are handmade by me, but I know having quality art would go a long way. I also need to round out the end game, I plan on making it so you can have multiple bases and have them interact with each other, but we’ll see how that goes. Either way I’m excited to see where it will go!

tl;dr I’ve just uploaded the lastest and greatest version of Build Up The Base yet to the Play Store and would love to hear what you think. Get in on the action here, and tell me what you think I could make better. I’m specifically interested in whether you feel like you’re advancing too quickly or not.