next »

[vfqd]

Hi all, devlog time again.

Over the last little while, I've been hard at work implementing the towers for the new art. So to illustrate, here's a little video of the light and dark towers in action.





The first thing I discovered when I implemented these together is that the light tower adds an awesome twist to the game, it felt really good to play. The positioning element of the game has always been important, but with the light tower it's paramount. It only buffs towers in the 4 adjacent squares, so each of those squares you're not using - where there's only a basic element or something - is wasted. Also, the towers stack with each other, so a single non-light tower can be buffed by a max of 4 light towers, one on each side. I found myself having these grids of light/non-light trying to optimise my build. The second notable thing is that light/dark towers is that they have great synergy, maybe too good, not sure about the balance yet. Dark towers have high range, high damage, and low attack speed. Light towers buff attack speed. Craziness ensues.

Another new feature I needed to build when I built the light tower was a buffs system. Towers can now receive buffs to their attributes, and a buffed tower will have a little chevron next to its bottom left corner like this:



To find out what the buff actually does, you need to hover over the tower and then the buffed attribute will appear in green. I wanted to created the chevrons so that a player could tell at a glance (in the third read) what towers were buffed and didn't have to hover multiple times to learn the rules of a tower. The chevron itself was inspired by Darkest Dungeon's - a game I've really been enjoying recently. I've also modified the level indicator colour to match the chevron, and given it an outline.



Bonus for today:
Some more new art, this time, Ice and Lava elements. I haven't created their corresponding towers yet, but we will be seeing the first slow and splash towers soon ^^



I've been struggling a bit with the cadence of these devlogs. I've been trying to aim for one every week(ish). Is this frequency working? What do you guys think? Would you like (less formatted) smaller updates more often? A picture here, a few lines there? Let me know!

As always, thanks for reading and I look forward to your feedback  

[vfqd]

The new art looks great (it's certainly a lot better than what I can do ) and the idea of the fulcrum tower is very intriguing.

Thanks! That means a lot I'm keen to see what people come up with too

I tried out your game and had some fun. I was a bit surprised when the enemies showed up though. Was there some kind of indicator I was supposed to be watching? 

Hey, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Yeah there are little red arrows on the right that indicate where enemies will come from, and enemies spawn once you run out of swaps. But yeah, the game is really weak on tutorials at the moment. That will change in future, just not the highest priority right now 

[kurtkz]

The new video looks great!

...because you're not busy enough might I suggest that you do a voice over next time? Would be interesting to get a play-by-play as you test a new feature.

[vfqd]

Hey everyone, another round of updates (and no voiceovers, sorry!)

I've got two more new towers for you, with all new synergies.

- The fulcrum tower, which I've mentioned before, but has new art following some feedback from the wonderful people on our Discord server
- And the ice tower, a brand new tower and the first tower in the game to debuff enemies



First off, let's have a little look at the fulcrum tower in action. It will split the shots of any horizontal firing tower behind it. Most notably, this means that fire towers can now hit lanes other than their own as illustrated. In order to keep this balanced, the fulcrum tower will multiply the damage of any shot it splits by a factor. At level 1, this factor is 50% - which means that the shots it splits are half as powerful (however, if all three projectiles hit, it's technically dealing 150% of the base damage). Also, when the fulcrum tower is leveled up, the factor increases, currently by 15%. What this does mean, however is that the progression goes 50%, 65%, 80%, 95%, 110% ... So a level 5 fulcrum tower (and up) increases the damage of the projectiles it splits - just something to keep in mind.



The second new tower is the ice tower, and you can see it in action here. This is less complicated, and behaves exactly like the fire tower (i.e. only shoots horizontally) with some notable differences. The first is that its shots slow enemies, the slowed enemy turns blue and is slowed by a factor for 4 seconds. If the slowed enemy is hit again, the slow is refreshed. At level 1, the slow is 50% and it increases by 10% each level. The slow is capped out at 90% (level 5+) otherwise there would be enemies that didn't move or moved backwards(!). In order to balance this, both the damage and the attack speed of the tower are very low, the lowest in the game. Also, because the firing pattern of the ice tower is identical to the fire tower, its projectiles can also be split by the fulcrum tower.



Finally, I want illustrate that the fulcrum towers stack. Having multiple fulcrum towers in the same row will result in projectiles being split multiple times. It's worth noting that the damage multiplication happens with each additional split, i.e. if there are two level 1 fulcrum towers in a row, the projectiles from the second will only deal 25% of the base projectile damage. This reduction does not affect the slow from the ice towers. Regardless of these factors, I've still found multiple fulcrums to be very strong, and they look awesome. See for yourself:





One last thing this week, would people be interested in a different branch of Element Crush where these new features I'm currently working on are available, but not necessarily stable, and the leaderboard is disabled? Let me know! As always, thanks for your support and I look forward to hearing what you think

[vfqd]

Hi everyone, time for another devlog.

This one's been a bit delayed - real life has gotten the better of me lately, but fear not, work continues in the background. The main thing I want to talk about today is Element Crush's first splash tower - the mortar tower, which is created by combining lava elements together.





The mortar tower fires projectiles in an arc, and when they land, they damage all enemies in their area of effect. You can see from the image below, that the AoE hits adjacent lanes as well, making the splash quite significant. The AoE is a circle, however, meaning that the splash is still most effective in the mortar's own lane, and secondarily in adjacent lanes. In order to balance this advantage, the mortar has below average stats, and can only fire on enemies at least three tiles ahead of it, as illustrated. This means that mortars will be most effective in the back columns.


 


Here's a gif of the towers in action







Over and above this, I've created a new "experimental" page for the game, where I'll be posting builds which aren't 100% polished yet and the leaderboard is disabled. That page can be found here: https://vfqd.itch.io/element-crush-experimental This current build contains all 9 towers that I've built so far and each time you start a round, you'll start with a random selection of 5 of the elements. I'm really keen to see what you guys come up with while messing around with the new towers and would love to hear your thoughts and balance and strategies








As for the plans from now, I'm going to be creating an interface to allow for the picking of elements before the game starts and doing a bunch of playtesting and balancing, and some other small pieces of work. After that's all done, I'll post this new version with the new towers on the main page and reset the leaderboard like before.

As always, thanks for reading, and let me know your thoughts

[kurtkz]

Your pixel art is coming on in leaps and bounds - lots of character in the details now. Are you thinking of "pairing" the randomly selected elements or will it be purely random? Also, is this just for testing purposes or are you planning on introducing a "draft" mode to the game? 

[vfqd]

Your pixel art is coming on in leaps and bounds - lots of character in the details now. Are you thinking of "pairing" the randomly selected elements or will it be purely random? Also, is this just for testing purposes or are you planning on introducing a "draft" mode to the game? 

Thanks! That's really nice to hear. It's just very random at the moment now for testing purposes. I have been toying with the idea of a draft mode but it's not high on the priority list right now 

[vfqd]

Hi everyone,

This is going to be a short one, sorry in advance - I'm moving house at the moment.

I have two interesting things to show today, the first is that I've created the element selection interface, so we're that much closer to the release of the next build see gif below:



As you can see, the selection of elements takes place just before the ability selection stage. I wanted to be able to show both the base element and tower in the same selection area, but I didn't want to have to redraw/reanimate all of the combinations of element/tower. In order to get around this, I made use of some of Unity's interesting UI features. The first thing I did, was I created a 64x64px circle and cut it diagonally.



Then I used the UI mask class https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/user-interface-ui/ui-mask to only show either the bottom/top of the tower/element. Then, I wrote a little script to convert from images from my sprite animator script to something that could be displayed on the UI - so I didn't have to reconfigure the animations. Finally, I messed around with the positioning to make them look good and added a background. I'm not much of a UI person but I'm fairly pleased with how this turned out.



The second thing I wanted to mention is far less concrete. I have been getting the feeling that the current art is not really a consistent style. The ice tower is very different to the fire tower, for instance. For that reason,  I've been experimenting with a new, consistent, art style for the elements/towers. The new style is simpler and cleaner, with far greater focus on depth and less focus on texturing. I also think it's probably more appropriate for a casual game like Element Crush. Below you can see 3 towers with the original, redrawn with outlines, and without outlines. I'm not very happy with the fire tower, if I do go with this new style, I'll redraw that one.



Thanks again for reading, and keen to hear your thoughts

[vfqd]

Hey everyone,

Element Crush v0.11 is now live :D play at https://vfqd.itch.io/elementcrush

The major overhaul in this version is the addition of 5 new elements/towers:
   - Dark towers, with high range and high damage, act as snipers
   - Light towers, make adjacent towers shoot faster
   - Ice towers shoot slowing projectiles
   - Mortar towers have a splash damage effect but also a minimum range
   - Fulcrum towers split the shots of ice and fire towers into three

In addition, we have some fantastic new music and sound fx from the wonderful zircon :D
http://zirconmusic.com/

The leaderboard has been reset and now tracks the elements you choose as well.

Keen to hear what you think, enjoy!

Link to the old highscores:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19GdaYPmaMtQ9t-HtSmLcWSO7jklYijzqB1ZR2yfPNRw/edit#gid=677361999

[NowSayPillow]

This is a REALLY neat idea -- it's just too bad I'm TERRIBLE at match 3 games. I'll play it some more later though.

[vfqd]

This is a REALLY neat idea -- it's just too bad I'm TERRIBLE at match 3 games. I'll play it some more later though.

Thanks best of luck and I hope you enjoy