comments for Outliers: Incrementum
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developer response: In a nutshell: The character in the center of the screen is your companion. He's basically the "tower" you need to defend. You are the cursor. Attacking works by swiping over monsters with your cursor. Collecting the resources of killed monsters let you upgrade your stats and abilities after each run.
Hope that helps! :)
Just remember that thats its potential, its not that good yet.
developer response: Nice one! We'll work towards an S rank. Incrementally of course :D
Anything in particular you disliked or want to see improved?
The tutorial is superfluous and takes as many clicks to get started as some older incrementals.
The balance is very much a "You either can or you can't" system, be it damage or stamina loss on hit. You reach a floor and it's either doable by spinning the mouse around quickly, or you're just dead. The boss especially has this problem where I had to max out my damage, my crit chance, stamina loss on hit, and flow state triggering all the way down to 0%. Which is a bit of a grind with the way resources work...
Resources are split up in a way that mostly just burns time for no good reason. A majority of my time by the end was spent grinding for blue shards because all of the remaining upgrades required them. Of note, I maxed out rare creature chance and extra drop chance immediately and still had to wait the longest on this resource to get to the end of the game. I just wasn't getting enough blue for all the blue upgrades the final boss required, making me grind all the way to the boss something like 10 times with every floor being virtually free otherwise. Just a painful timesink.
Daggers just kind of do nothing, and are even a hinderance since flow state requires enemies to be full health to trigger, and daggers fly around just about everywhere doing barely any damage, just enough to deny your biggest damage multiplier from building up sometimes at random. It's also a beginner trap, because you really want the flow state percentage upgrade and maxing it out takes 5 level ups, but you can't get to that without using a key, of which there are only 2, and you NEED to use the first one on the daggers in order to reach the core damage upgrades behind it. So there's a huge stretch of game where the resource from leveling is basically just useless, but since each level takes more experience, by the time I found the flow state percentage upgrade it took a lot longer to grind for more.
All in all, it felt like my upgrades meant little to nothing for most runs, just being a grinding battle to be allowed to participate on the next floor, but since you have to wade through all the previous floors the end result it just progress taking forever for no good reason. I was also very disappointed when I first unlocked XP gain not knowing what it would do, I assumed it would raise my stats over the course of runs parallel to the upgrade tree, but no, it gave me a new resource I didn't have a use for until just about the end of the game.
Also, small note: The archers are unreasonably difficult compared to the melee enemies. I did just fine by spamming my mouse around even harder and reacting quickly, but realistically they should probably sit there for half a second or so before firing instead of appearing out of nowhere and giving you an instant problem with half a second to see and block.
Of all the nodebuster clones, this sure is one, specifically the type that annihiliates my wrist with all the nonstop circular to back and forth mouse movements. Competent project, but not a very satisfying game as it exists right now.
developer response: Thank you for the detailed feedback! We're doing our best to move from "competent" to "satisfying" with our next few updates :)
Additionally, for a 'fruit ninja' -style game, you should not have the camera follow the mouse. After 20 minutes of power-swiping I was getting seasick because the camera was micro-shifting so much.
developer response: Thanks for your feedback!
Without the camera movement it felt somewhat dead/unresponsive. But it probably makes sense to have an option to disable that in case it makes players feel unwell!
developer response: Definitely needs some improvement. Was it still fun though? :)
developer response: Did you play the embedded or original version (see "open original" button)? There seems to be an issue with games embedded from itch.io in some scenarios, so any insights help :)
developer response: Thank you for your feedback! Did you experience any lags? If so, can you please share your hardware specs? :)
You saying you want to add a tutorial... ick. I think a lot of players hate explicit tutorials. Just make the game organic and natural and unfoldy. No need for a tutorial. Please don't add one. It breaks immersion and flow. Whether it's skippable or not.
developer response: Thanks for clarifying! Would a tutorial where, for instance, another assassin (NPC) shows the basic movements that teaches the player how to "behave" give you the ick, too? It's important for us to create an immersive experience, so I understand your concerns!
developer response: https://youtu.be/j_kY3eL-95g?t=1059
this you?
(We'll ship a gameplay-only mode with our next update so you can dive right into the action without that much reading)
developer response: Thank you for playing the game! We're glad you had fun :)
The aura upgrade will be removed in the next update in favor for other things we have in store! You're one of the unlucky players you pushed that too far and ended up having a hard time. Sorry for that!
Regarding the lags... As we are completely new to this platform could you please share how you played the game exactly? For instance, did you play via the "Open original" button? In full screen?
Also consider heading over to itch and download the Windows build of the game, if possible :)
Me personally, yes. I hate tutorials. I just have so many fond memories of atmospheric games where the game just unfolds around the player. Then any kind of an explicit tutorial whatsoever feels tacked on and garish. That said, making it all organic is really hard - I get that
All you had to do was make the cursor a sword or something. The cursor as it is does not imply that the cursor is a weapon.. seems like a simple fix tbh
I was somewhat expecting some systems from Horde of Distraction, that being some itemization and/or item crafting.
That being said it's clear that:
- This game doesn't try to be another Diablo like game, but to more arcade slashing feel like say Fruit Ninja,
- and implementing it would take too long to implement while also jeopardizing the game's planned design.
It just feels like other than a different attack mechanism, there's nothing to make it actually stand out among Node clones in my opinion.
Also it would be nice if knives can actually kill the enemies too, it might make the game too easy but towards the end with archers in the mix it ends up being panic swiping trying to focus destroying the arrows first while the enemies are coming up to him and end your run prematurely.
Or make your little brother's armor actually upgradeable to allow more hits in, but maybe it's in the full release?
did i really need to read that endless stream of dialog at the start to figure out how to move my fighter guy and fight with him? sorry i really don't read dialog in games until AFTER the game has given me a reason to care about it. i don't read prior to that.. and i don't really think it's reasonable to expect players to do so.
developer response: Thanks for your feedback!
We're adding a simple in-game tutorial soon. This is one of the most requested things and something we should've had from the start. Sorry for the inconvenience! For us it was somewhat important to test whether or not the gameplay is intuitive enough even without guidance :)
Here's a quick start guide:
- "Think Fruit Ninja but with your mouse"
- The goal is to defeat all monsters in the room while defending your brother (the blonde guy in the center of the screen!)
Also consider watching this clip: https://youtu.be/j_kY3eL-95g?t=263
I've reached level 7 rats and I have to ask: what incentive is there for me to bother killing higher level rats? A level 1 and a level 7 rat give the same amount of resources, but the former dies in a single hit and the latter requires some actual effort. Not to mention that the higher level rat has a greater stamina cost, which means I also can't kill as many of them.
Right now I have no real gameplay reason to actually try and go as deep into the dungeon as I can.
developer response: Thank you for your feedback! We'll try to optimize the "lower level monsters per room" upgrade. The basic idea behind that is to push the economy. As more lower level monsters spawn, you can kill more monsters in total without draining stamina (at least if you have the proper agility level!).
Regarding the higher level rats: I mean you have to bother, right? Otherwise you won't be able to progress through the dungeon. This is basically just the difficulty rising per room, visually indicated in an RPG-ish way.
Feel free to elaborate but I think you main point is that it should feel more rewarding being able to kill higher level monsters, right? If so, I like that idea!
developer response: Thanks for your feedback! Did you play the web or desktop build of the game?
Also, I think the term Nodelike would be far more suitable, since coming with incremental ARPG also came with some expectations with the ARPG elements; only to be letdown with Nodebusters loop
developer response: What ARPG elements would you like to see in the future? :)
And right now, up to reaching level 7 rats, I don't feel any progress from going further, only from farming more currency. For all I know it's going to be rats all the way to the last room with nothing in between changing. There could be a new resource around the corner, or there might be nothing.
developer response: Thanks for the clarification! We'll work on that :)
Spoiler: There is more than just rats :)
developer response: Thank you for your feedback! We'll definitely add an in-game tutorial to help with the confusion. With this playtest we also wanted to find out whether or not it is intuitive how to play.
Regarding the lags: Do you also experience them when downloading the (Windows) build or just in browser? Can you share your hardware specs?