Hey great video man and I'm glad you enjoy the game! I'm sad that the sfx bugged out because everything does have sfx, but hey that's game dev for ya haha. (Sometimes it defaults to 0 until you adjust the sfx volume in game then it works fine). Also thanks for the feedback on everything! I will certainly take it all into account. The meta progression is something currently being balanced but I will say that it is being balanced around double defense when maxed out, triple is left as a challenge to avoid the very fear you brought up :)

Reto, you might have more success with the towers if you paid attention to the targeting a bit more. Your ballistas are fine, you just refused to have *enough* of them.

The backseating here is nuts

That double bass drum combat track is such a weird, bold choice. I'd be paying more attention to this if they'd managed to spread that chaotic energy into the visual design.

It seems like more towers are better than just upgrading 1 or 2, they upgrade on their own anyways

This looks like it has a lot of potential!

After playing an insane amount of BTD6, and the previous games... I can say, this game seems like it has some amazing potential and a lot of micro tuning. Lots of focus on target priority. I'd always go for slowing towers towards the front of the map and use an AOE tower when the targets get grouped together via the slowed effect. The UI zoom is a bit rough. I do like the effect that the towers upgrade themselves over time on top of your ability to manually upgrade. The meta progression system is a unique feature. (I'm only about a 3rd of the way through the video so far)

I want to see some more of this, I looked and you are literally (not figuratively) the only KZfaqr to play this game so far.

I really like the expand system in this. The enemies are really fast so expanding strategically becomes really important to not get overwhelmed on one lane. Even the "Get to the tower!" buff rewards defending further away from your tower as well as punishing clumping up towers around the main tower. Really cool game!

PLAY MORE OF IT! 😃

I enjoy watching the gameplay through your first look, I love hearing your ideas on the game. Would love to see more of this game in the future. Great work, you keep introducing me to more games that peak my interest.

Could you maybe play more of this? I really enjoyed watching this.

I think that double pick card meta upgrade seems crazy

I'll be sure to check the game out. I like the metaprogression, it adds a sense of accomplishment next to the high score. Keep me engaged longer.

Lol totally living for the lowkey haunted mansion piano soundtrack that abruptely escalates into a silly hectic metal blend whenever the wave starts. Going to put this one on the wish list! Thanks!

This looks like a great tower defense game, I hope you do some more videos on it as the game develops further. It has a real charming style and what a great idea mashing up these two genres.

Can't wait for this... Hope that are plans for some deep progression.

This looks awesome, It was the good kind of frustrating to watch because I wanted to do it differently. Not that I think my approach would be better just different which to me is the sign of a good roguelite, nothing worse than a roguelite that really only has one way to play. Very excited to pick this up, thanks reto!

Alright. I think one thing you were overlooking when it came to the meta progression was the fact that you hd to buy a certain amount of cards before certain permanent upgrades were even available to buy. In my opinion, I think it might work, only if it was spaced out a bit more so tower unlocks were a little more of a forced option between permanent unlocks, and that might actually help it work better and make the game a lot less boring in my opinion. Also, This game does show a hell of a lot of potential, especially with how it all seems to be going.

The “ohh nooo” moment when they all jumped out of that wooden thing haha

Seems like there's a lot of balancing issues that need to be addressed, like gold gained per kill, enemy move speed, tower cost, and a few other little things. Has great potential though!

Really interesting game! I like tower defenses but I never thought about a roguelite tower defense

What I've noticed about different mechanics: towers gain exp and this exp grants multipliers to damage. each damage type also gains exp for damage dealt to a specific target. to increase this you can also pay for the remaining amount. elevation adds a flat +0.5 range to a tower per step.

This game seems really good if they fix the ui stuff and add a proper tutorial/explanation for everything! Edit: Also the meta progression needs some work :/

I'm with you in hoping for a strong contender for a rougelike TD game. Also the music is an absolute bop!

Someone mentioned this in a different comment and I thought I'd expand upon it. Having the Meta Upgrades prevent professional players from enjoying some of the gameplay as they can beat it much sooner earlier on. Your concerns you mentioned near the end about the meta progression making it too easy are definitely valid, but the game designers might be balancing rounds with that in mind so there is an eventual point where all the meta points are required, but difficulty still expands beyond that. A comparison I could make is to BTD6. In that game, you don't have all of the towers unlocked and it's very difficult to defeat hard mode for your first game, and basically impossible to play alternate bloons rounds as your second game. But when you have all of the towers, going to round 100 on alternate bloons and even impoppable is easy. Having all of the tower upgrades is essential to getting to late-game and harder gamemodes, but they also aren't the peak. You can play CHIMPS on BTD6 with every upgrade unlocked and you'd still have a good chance of dying without enough skill or strategy, and don't get me started on the basically-infinite freeplay after you defeat the actual challenge or gamemode. The meta progression here might be (this is all basically a heavily-overanalyzed prediction) built in a similar way. Where you aren't gonna beat the actual 'game' without all of the meta upgrades, but getting all the meta upgrades and beating the 'game' is not the end, and the challenge increases from there.

I don't know if it was higher level or high ground, but the archer at +3 had more range than the one at +1. Also, TD meta early game usually consists of placing many weak towers just to try to see what you have to deal with later and make a plan to do that. The variable map kinda screws with that a little though.

YOOO my friend made this game!!! You should also check out Dice Knight: Mystery of the Moirai. Its another game he made & I've dumped a good amount of time into it.

Something I noticed for seeing other people play the game is that amount of towers seems to be better than heavily upgraded towers, unlike a lot of other TDs. The fact that they automatically upgrade over time means it feels like kind of a waste to spend gold upgrading them.

This game looks promising!

I wish I could play this game right now thank you for showing this

Would love for you to do a series on it

When this does come out, will you do a series on it? Or like, follow it as updates/fixes come out? I'd watch the hell outta that.

The tower xp gain takes me back to one of my first TD games. Looks interesting.

I am excited by the fact that this genre combination is getting explored. I definitely think this has potential and looks pretty cool so far

Love the combat music! Really gives the game some atmosphere.

Game looks awesome

Liked the video, interesting game concept. Keep it up!

I really like the impressive amount of upgrades!! I've already added it on my wishlist, i love me a good roguelike and a good tower defense :D I agree with the UI for the upgrade menu with you, it's awesome but the scrolling around makes it a bit tedious. I think they could fix it with dropdown menus or something, where we can specialize a certain thing that interests me the most first but still have the option to look at the whole menu from a single page

Looks like the towers follow the BTD6 hero logic of upgrades, they upgrade overtime, but you can spend money to speed it along, it's really cool

I love this! And 100% agreement on "lose the blue meta progress or make it part of the in game yellow stuff" but with the huge yellow "tree" I don't think anyone would miss the blue one if just removed. After that, balancing the game will probably be easier and updates can focus on adding new towers and more interesting tower upgrades. Really looks like a game with huge potential and I'll go wish list it right away. Cheers and thanks for great content.

I can't wait for this game to come out I love TD games.

This is my type of game

Oof. That UI definitely needs some work. It kind of feels like the early game is designed to require turret spam over upgrades - a commonality I've seen in a lot of TD games. For someone who admits up front you don't do TDs a lot, you're doing pretty well.

I think paying attention to the different TYPES of damage a bit more would make things easier. I'd experiment more with playing around with some towers that hit armor and health more. Eg. Armor and shields damage closer to start, and health damaging towers closer to the end to finish off enemies.

I feel like the game makes two assumptions: 1. You're probably supposed to get more towers and upgrade them rarely as they just upgrade on their own so having more means increasing your power faster (more surface area kind of thing) 2. You're also probably supposed to sell ballistas as soon as you get good alternatives because of how much weaker they are compared to other towers

This game looks really cool. I think the towers leveling on their own is really cool (If that is what they were doing) and the upgrades do seem really cool to play with. Love me some permanent upgrades too

tip for the devs: visually distinguish the upgrade cards from the tower cards plz. maybe color code or make tower cards look like rooks or round the upgrade cards a bit more or something.

I definitely want to play this myself!

this is a cool game. You did pretty good.

Looks cool. Definitely the upgrades on the right side are more exciting than the left.

This Game Already Seems Fine

Also, I love the intense drumming! Is it situational, depending on certain type of enemies on the map? Not sure if I noticed

About the visual style of the upgrade tree, at least for the towers a simple fix would just to throw every towers upgrades in its own tab.

Damn, i wanna play this RIGHT NOW !

This game looks great, but the one problem I have is that the UI is very cluttered and not incredibly clear. If the game was a bit more beginner friendly and the UI was cleaner I feel like the core gameplay could really work!

It looks like the cost of upgrades goes down based on the tower's own leveling process not time.

The combination of zoom and wonky UI legit gave me motion sickness, wow The game itself looks hella fun though!

this looks like such an interesting game! I wonder if it would be better to spam out a bunch of low level towers would be better then upgrading them.

25 minutes in, it seems like progression is based around your meta progression, seeing that one of the meta-upgrades gave you more money and the other towers are all so expensive.

Pretty much everything on the map is something. The houses give gold if you build next to them for example.

Interesting game concept. Yes, the UI is a big basic clump but if the game is released to EA on february 2nd then there is a lot which can improve.

Love to see more

If you tried this tower defense, maybe you can try the Kingdom Rush series or Iron Marines by Ironhide, an indie games company. That would be great, thanks anyway for your videos

More of this pleeeaaassseee

Think small thing would be nice for this game as, seeing how much money you get back when you demolish a tower, seeing how long range the tower has when you click on them. And i dont know how the balancing of the tower is later on, but seems like the tesla-coil tower drained a lot more mana than the fire tower But the game seems promising, just a few fixes and it would be awesome

Another tower defense game that has an insane amount of customization would be Infinitode 2, though I don't think it can be counted as a roguelite

I can't remember if you did play ratropolis but I enjoyed that tower defence game. I think wonder did a series on it

Yea targeting seems to play a huge role here.

Ah darmn, I was like after 10 seconds.. Gonna go buy it meanwhile.. It's not out yet. :( Oh well, wishlisted! :D EDIT: After watching, I so wanna play this. :D

The developer should trying tabbing the upgrades to make it a little easier

Insta wishlist

I love your vids

this game is very cool, I believe you need to find some kind of shot per second or something, the towers shoot soo slow

Great content, understand irs a mew game and all but you should really pick the “towers deal more damage” etc over mew towers early on...

I assume the maps get huge later, hence the scroll

the way the mortar is shooting is kinda ineffectual

I'm getting mad Dungeon of the Endless vibes from this. Choose your pathing carefully so as to not overwhelm yourself later...

Ahh, it’s alright

KEEP. PLAYING.

how you get access to these before us ?

yo the music didn’t have to go that hard.

I just wish they showed the range

Try "Infinitode 2" But beware, the music is copyrighted!

The music reminds of Hollow Knight.

The UI needs better information. You dont know if selling a tower gives you money, you don't know the range of a tower... that should be displayed when you put it down or click them. It's interesting but it seems like a super grind. Like the point is to loose over and over and over until you buy enough upgrades to be able to play the game. Also it seems like you waisted a lot of money on fire towers without ever being able to put them down. So it seems to make sense to only put money in the base towers at the start.

this game makes me want to play 40% for the ui and 60% to problem solve and suffer

you should make better use of the priorities

This doesn't look fun. I hope it gets markedly better before release.

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😃😃😃😃👍👍👍👍❤❤

Regardless of whether or not you had 'optimal play' or whatever uppity phrase people might use, it seems like the experience upgrades would be healthy for a longer-term game, but the level you start at is so abysmally low that they're absolutely necessary. If you can't get past wave 10 from the start, then the default level needs to be stronger and the early upgrades less of a requirement. As an example, instead of having a level 1 tower do 50 damage and a meta-upgrade boosts that to 150, have a level 1 tower do 80 damage and a meta-upgrade boost it to 120. Or 100 -> 120. You should be able to experience some of the game without having to play the first few level 15 times just to see more than basic enemies. So much of what happens comes down to simply not having the tools necessary to deal with massive power creep rather than poor decision-making. Could Reto have done better early? Sure, it was his first hour playing the game. Should you be able to surpass wave 10 after an hour? Certainly, and Ballistas and Mana Siphons won't do that.

First