Demo Feedback
Thank you to all those who played the Demo during next-fest, we have received some great feedback that helps shape Axom: Conquest into the best game it can possibly be.
One of the biggest things changed this month is an overhaul of the entire upgrade system. Originally all upgrades were part of the same pool. However a lot of these upgrades were deemed boring or there was no thinking involved in the choice you have.
In order to address this, upgrades are now split into four categories.
Basic
Basic upgrades are you run of the mill stat upgrades, however they now appear at the end of every wave and give a guaranteed way to progress over the course of the game while still giving choice of which stats you want.
Nexus
Nexus upgrades are now where the real hard choices are. These are the upgrades that you can choose from every few waves and have a lot of impact. New buildings and build defining upgrades are found here.
Trader
Trader upgrades contain the bulk of the upgrades now, these are ones that you buy using the currency gained from slaying bugs! All of these upgrades have been rethought over and made a lot more interesting with pros and cons and make you think about what you're buying.
Alien
Alien upgrades are found from bosses and from exploring the map. These upgrades tend to be wildcards, very rarely giving raw power and instead giving weird effects and harnessing the alien nature of the planet.
Instant Building
Another thing mentioned in feedback was how building feels a bit sluggish, while the initial intent was to provide a meaningful risk/reward in having to plan ahead and build your base carefully, overall it felt a bit too punishing. After playtesting the removal of construction time, the game now feels a lot snappier and more engaging to play.
One of the best parts of this is that as soon as you unlock a new building you can build it immediately and utilize it straight away!
Better Tooltips
Tooltips are now a lot more legible, all relevant information is now colour coded and text is more concise
Worm spawners
Another balance change is the introduction of worm spawners. These are spawn points for enemies that appear in random locations at the start of the wave. Originally enemies would spawn from the edges of the map in static locations, while this provided good gameplay for the initial waves it eventually led to a point in the game where enemies would be coming from only certain locations and it let to stale runs where nothing happened.
With the worm spawners this means now that after a certain time in a run, enemies can potentially come from any direction. This means you will always need to be protecting different parts of your base from attack.
Enemy giblets!
Enemies now explode into meaty chunks to make it even more satisfying
- The maximum zoom distance has been increased, this gives you a better overall view of the battlefield, while still allowing you to get up close and personal to the action.
- Enemy pathing is now more accurate, enemies are less likely to path in weird directions but they will still sometimes take a different path so watch out for stray enemies!
- Maps are now more randomised! During the demo the maps, while random were all generated using the same generation math, this meant they all looked quite similar. Now there is many more factors that go into the randomisation, including the amount of canyons, the size of canyons, the general scale of the hills and cliffs (Meaning it can be more smooth or rough)