Hey hey!
Sorry it's been a bit since my last update. I stepped away from the project briefly so that I could develop a side-gig that helps me generate income while I'm working on the game. Financially I'm in a much better spot now than I was at my last update. I'm excited to get back into working on the project!
That step away also gave me a fresh perspective on some of the issues with the game. Personally, this being my first game I'm quite happy with the overall look and feel of the game. With that said, the gameplay is currently lacking. The main issue is that it just plays like every other survivor-like on the market where you kite enemies and gather XP.
An added problem to that is the current tech tree upgrade system. Balancing is quite difficult and some upgrades are simply better than others. My original attempt to balance this was to have the player gather currency instead and just make the better upgrades more expensive but that still doesn't encourage players to experiment with their builds. I want to really encourage experimentation and replayability so the tech tree upgrade system will be getting scrapped in favor of the typical 3 random upgrades with the opportunity to re-roll.
It's a bit of a boring solution but it does do a much better job of encouraging experimentation and increasing the games replayability.
So you may be confused, I just stated that the problem with the game is that it plays like every other survivors-like and my solution to that was to copy and paste the go-to upgrade solution from those games? Doesn't that make the problem worse?
Well yes it does! But that's not the only change coming. I have a brand new approach I want to take to the upgrades which will make each upgrade choice have a deep meaningful impact on the way you play. It will shape your run and subsequent runs should feel very very different from one another. I don't want to say more yet until I've implemented and tested this idea, but I'm very excited for it and think it will give Neon Blitz it's own unique identity among the survivor-like genre.
That's all for now!
Follow the game here on steam so you get the latest news on the project!
Rob