This week we rolled out two new missions for Siege of Centauri. The goal is to get your feedback on these early missions to determine what balance, content and feature additions should be made as we go on.
If we're going to make the ultimate tower defense game, we will need all the help we can get!
The discussion forums has our April and May mission schedule if you're interested in seeing what's coming.
Nahant introduces shielded swarms.
A given unit can have hitpoints as well as shields. The default defenses like your railgun and particle cannon do normal damage which means they first have to take down the shields. But some weapons, like the ion cannon, can take down shields instantly while other weapons, like the pulse cannon, will bypass shields entirely.
The second new mission this week, Chariah, has a couple of new twists to it.
First, it demonstrates the benefit of in-direct fire weapons like the Corrosion mortar as they can fire over obstacles.
Second, it introduces players to sparrows, which are masses of flying units that help make the case as to why flak cannons are useful.
Feedback
Even though early access just got started, we've already gotten some really good feedback that we hope to start showing off to you in the next week or so.
Here are some highlights:
## Bullet Time ##
You can pause the game any time you want by hitting SPACEBAR. Right now, we're pretty generous with this because we don't have the placement grid in yet (it's not always obvious where you can place a tower).
The problem with unlimited pausing is that it just kills any sense of urgency. Bullet time will change this. You can still pause any time you want but not for as long as you want. Bullet time charges up over time and is consumed during pausing.
This way, we don't have to force players to do all their planning between waves but instead give them the power while still rewarding players for good placement.
## Particle Cannon vs. Rail Gun ##
The particle cannon doesn't do quite enough damage right now while the rail gun probably does a bit too much damage. We'll be taking a close look at this next week.
## General UI ##
It's not obvious enough how much health and metal you have. You will see some UI changes soon in that area.
In addition, we don't currently make it obvious enough where the enemy comes from. We'll either make that obvious on the mini map or in some other way. Right now, you can mouse over a given wave (at the top of the screen) to see where it's coming in but we want to make clear where those entrances are.
## Bigger Missions ##
The first big mission will show up next week. It's called Gallehault and it has over a dozen waves and is a much bigger map than what's come before.
It will, of course, require several balance passes before we nail it down.
## Other Stuff ##
Our first audio pass should show next week. We have a lot of place holder sounds.
Another area we want to work on is providing interesting information to the player so that they can see where a given weapon is in its process of reloading or cooling down or what have you. The important thing will be to communicate to the player what a given weapon is doing when you click on it.
Now, you might ask, why does weapon status matter? The answer is that while the early basic weapons are straight forward, eventually, we will be introducing units and weapons and missions that are pretty sophisticated and you will need to have information communicated to you so that you can decide whether a given weapon is useful on that mission (eventually, you will have an equip screen to pick the 10 defenses you want to use on a given mission).
So that's all for now! Thank you so much for your feedback and support! We're really excited to start getting you guys some meaty stuff.