Two weeks ago was published "Humans Must Prevail" on Kongregate. The average rating has been around a steady 2.5 stars for these two weeks and some of the most common complaints have been:
- Difficult control scheme.
- High cost of the skills.
- It is missing a little extra "something", a "je ne sais quoi" that makes the game more fun.
So, in order to fullfill these three points i've been plugging at the game code and have come up with some ideas.
Police Cars
The idea is to add extra depth by adding more diversity to the enemies, police cars will be the first enemies attacking the monsters until military force reaches the city. Around 30 seconds after beginning will start to appear tanks.
In my next post i'll talk about the swat vans and APCs.
Control Scheme
Someone suggested on Reddit to include a WASD control scheme, and indeed it works out perfectly now, however, one mechanic of the game is that if you collide with a building you haven't clicked on you get some "dizzy" time where you can't move until you've rested some seconds. This behavior makes confusing using the WASD controls because you'll usually bump against buildings without clicking on them. I'm going to ditch the dizziness to solve this issue (most probably).
Cost of skills
Someone mentioned on the Kongregate comment system that the game has too high costs for the skills, and indeed it has been a continous issue with it. I'm solving this with a multi pronged approach:
- Initially there won't be so much spawns. The game will slowly ramp up the spawn rate and difficulty of the enemies.
- Some buildings drop large amounts of energy, this happens with a good frequency that results surprising but isn't too scarce either.
- There's now a customize screen where you can change your monster's attributes and model (different heads, bodies, feet, skin, etc.). This benefits your gameplay reducing costs of skills of certain type of energy, making you tougher or weaker and faster or slower.
The scantily populated customization screen.
The new usual amount of energy drops.
