Yeah, I would agree with most of the feedback here.  Additionally, you can't really keep track of or interact with how your defenses are holding up during a wave. For single player at least, there should be a pause or dramatic slowdown while interacting with consoles/merchants, and looking at the tactical map.  Additionally, you should be able to order heroes around from the tactical map--"go here" "repair this" "use skill", that kind of stuff.

I feel like I'd like to have some control over where the enemies are coming from.  That was a key element of DotE strategy. One idea I had would be to increase the number of spawners, but allow dust shards to be used to destroy them.

I agree with some (most?) of your remarks. Here's what I don't agree with:

- Fixed spawning points can also be a good thing because you know where the waves are coming from and you can organize your defences accordingly. But I agree that it might be better if they could be destroyed (with dust?) or if they expired after a certain number of waves.

- Placing generators was always risky, even in DotE. I think it's just part of the challenge of the game. Don't build it if you can't defend it :-P
- Same remark for mining with the Crystal Bot. It's a good thing that the game rewards you with rare ressources if you show some skills. However, I agree that there should be another way to get dust shards.

- Random spawns need a bit of balancing but I still think it's a good addition to the game. It's keeping up the tension.
- Hero skills were good. They're not super powerful but you get them pretty often so that's a nice way to take care of huge groups of enemies in a wave.

- I actually didn't have much problems with healing. Full auto-heal might be a feature in easier game modes.

- Again, I liked the challenge of defending your research instead of waiting a few turns like in DotE. I might actually nice to leave the choice to the player: a slow research with no additional wave, or an immediate one but with an extra big wave.

- Defending the bot was really fun. And it really gave me the feeling of defending the crystal against those hordes of enemies. In DotE, I just pick it up and ran straight to the elevator before any monster could reach it, which was less interesting.

- My laptop isn't that great but I had not major performance issues. A few lags on the first run, but it seems to be doing perfectly fine now. I did got the crashes during the loading screens though...!

I agree that when you reach a new stage you should get like 5 FIDS, a heal on the crystal, and a med kit. It would suck to "make it" but not even be able to put down an industry generator and one turret.

Research is very strong, even with the game being as short as it is. The electric turrets are a little weak, but all of the others are definitely worth researching.

I agree there should be better control systems, although how you might send them around the map remotely would be difficult to implement such that it could be done in the 15 seconds before a wave with a controller. You pretty much have to leave heroes where they will need to be, and only explore with one.

I do think that more of the difficulty is coming from RNG than from consistent challenges. You can adapt to one or two challenges, but when too many different bad types of RNG hit you in one run, it can be oppressive. Hopefully small tweaks to many of the systems you named will help even that out.

I 100% agree with OP.

I don't think the problem is "it's too hard", and I'm not really concerned about how hard/easy it is, because that can obviously be balanced up fairly late in the piece or given difficulty levels. I'm more concerned about is the core gameplay loop compelling. Compared to DotE, a lot of the really interesting decisions have been taken away; as SpikedWallMan says, there is a lack of control here.

I think the two biggest problems, almost deal-breakers for my enjoyment of the game, are:

1. Waves spawn at random times or on some kind of hidden timer, rather than when you open a door. That means I don't have control over the pacing of the game. I can't relax and think about upgrades, turret placement, etc. It's always go go go.
2. Replacing the "dark rooms spawn monsters" mechanic with fixed spawn locations. That means I don't have (limited) control over where enemies spawn, which removes a meaningful decision about how I want to set up my defenses.

IMO, these two mechanics (waves spawn on door open, dark rooms spawn monsters) were the two pillars on which the entire of DotE was built, and removing them makes for a significantly less interesting game.

ThePeacefulGeek wrote:
Fixed spawning points can also be a good thing because you know where the waves are coming from and you can organize your defences accordingly.

But DotE already handled this in a much more graceful and player-driven way: you control the spawn points based on which rooms you light up. I cannot overstate how brilliant the dust / room lighting mechanic was. You don't have full control because there's only so much dust. Early on in a level, you can likely light up all the rooms, so you'll only have to deal with spawns in the room where you open the door. But as things get more hectic you will inevitably have to make difficult decisions about which rooms to leave unpowered. You can't choose how many unpowered rooms there will be (but you can improve it with good economic management), but you get to choose where those rooms are, so you can prepare your defences.

ED just removes that whole mechanic and makes it essentially random (fixed, but out of your control). I don't even know what the point of spending dust to light up a room is any more: is it just to access the building slots? Seems like something you'd only do if desperate, because dust is also used for presumably vital crystal upgrades.

Hola!
Agree that there are some tweaks to make it more balance (like the 3 resources) but I think the long you play, you know how the "meta" works so it get quite easy (personal experience here), like arriving to Procedural Factory with +50 industry, and I saw a screenshot of +100 science (super crazy).
There need to be adjust as well on the waves, but, peronally,I like the tension that created the not knowing when will happens, but perhaps there couldbe hints (?) like, bugs is approaching...
It will be an screen for the characters, in which you will get the details, so no worries on that side.
Note to make, this is not like a Dungeon of the Endless 2, so there are connections or inspiration point, yes, but it is not a 2nd part and therefore the mechanics are different, because I have the impression that you are looking more for a successor (please do not take it as an attack to you).
Sorry I couldn´t cover all the topics, but do not worry as I will transmit it to the team.

Daarkarrow wrote:

Note to make, this is not like a Dungeon of the Endless 2, so there are connections or inspiration point, yes, but it is not a 2nd part and therefore the mechanics are different, because I have the impression that you are looking more for a successor (please do not take it as an attack to you).

Thanks for the response here.  No offense taken.  I'm not really expecting this to be a sequel to DotE.  In fact, I'm genuinely surprised you brought forward so many DotE strategy elements.  But as I mentioned in my first feedback post, my issue is that it's clinging too tightly to DotE's strategy concepts while also trying to be an action game.  If you don't want it to be exactly like DotE, then that's fine.  But if you want it to compete with the likes of the other action roguelites that I mentioned above, then my opinion is that you're going to have to scale back some of the "slow" strategy elements of ED in order to make more room for "fast" elements like combat and exploration.  I'm thinking of things like reducing the amount of required backtracking (in order to defend the Crystal or deal with a spawn point that the turrets cannot handle on their own), making heroes more mobile (by relaxing the requirement to leave a hero in the same room for the entire floor because a full room of turrets is too weak to handle a spawn point on their own), and not distracting the player (with things like having to rush backwards through the dungeon to a spawn point because a wave suddenly started).  And most importantly, as I said before, the enemies in an action roguelite typically appear in front of you and not many rooms behind you.

Thanks for passing my feedback on to the team.  Hope it is helpful.

Yep getting a balance between strategy and more "action" is quite tricky, 1 small change can be like, okay turrets is like 90% and heroes 10% and other change can do the exact opposite ^-^´

Daarkarrow wrote:
Note to make, this is not like a Dungeon of the Endless 2

I actually was expecting DotE 2 so maybe those expectations do need to be reset a bit. It makes sense that this is trying to be a different game in terms of how the action plays out (twin-stick shooter instead of RTS controls), but the change to a fully real-time game (basically due to waves spawning at random times) doesn't make sense to me, given that you're keeping so many of the slow-paced planning aspects of DotE, but not giving us time to really think through them.

If we remove the preconceptions of this being related to DotE, and just look at it as a fresh game, I still don't think it really works. By making things spawn at random times, you're basically asking players to play as fast as possible all the time. There isn't time to think or plan, you just need to smash down as many turrets and open as many doors as you can before the next wave arrives. Your survey suggests that you want to get the balance right between strategy (high-level planning) and action (moment-to-moment gunplay), but I don't think that balance really even exists right now, because you're asking us to play so quickly.

I think SpikedWallMan is right: if you really want to make this game have spawns at random times, then you need to rethink everything, and remove most of the strategic elements to pare it back to a basic action game. But I would very much prefer that you don't remove those elements, and instead give us time to plan in between waves (by letting us trigger the wave by opening doors).

I also think it's a misconception to think "we're making an action game, therefore we can't have boring parts where you're just building and planning and nothing is happening." Virtually all games have downtime where the player has unlimited time to trigger the next bout of action. In another thread, I compared this to Diablo but if the town got randomly attacked by monsters every few minutes, so you never had time to slow down and do any thinking about your build. There's a reason basically every RPG has a town where no enemies can attack. FPS games have quiet moments where you can collect yourself before continuing on to the next action segment. The only genre I can think of that doesn't really give you a moment of downtime is RTS, where similar to ED, you get harrassed constantly and have to make decisions on the fly. But RTS games don't include random elements that require careful consideration; typically you can go into, say, a StarCraft mission with a plan of what to do, so you don't really need time to pause and decide. (e.g. in StarCraft I have the same research options in every game, whereas in ED I get presented with 3 random options and need to think which best applies to my situation.)

Daarkarrow wrote:
There need to be adjust as well on the waves, but, peronally,I like the tension that created the not knowing when will happens

I personally didn't feel any tension (unlike in DotE where there's a definite moment of tension before opening each door). In my first run, I was playing very slowly like I would play DotE, taking time to think over all the decisions presented, and then when a wave happened (often while I was browsing the merchant or pondering a research choice), I was just frustrated that my planning phase was interrupted. In my second run, I tried doing everything as quickly as possible to try and reduce the number of waves, and then there was no tension, just a feeling of being completely overwhelmed.

Apologies if I sound overly negative. I appreciate the opportunity to test an early build of the game and give feedback. I'm just a bit frustrated with essentially a single design decision that appears to have sucked all the enjoyment out of one of my favourite game design systems of all time.

mgiuca wrote:

Daarkarrow wrote:
Note to make, this is not like a Dungeon of the Endless 2

I actually was expecting DotE 2 so maybe those expectations do need to be reset a bit. It makes sense that this is trying to be a different game in terms of how the action plays out (twin-stick shooter instead of RTS controls), but the change to a fully real-time game (basically due to waves spawning at random times) doesn't make sense to me, given that you're keeping so many of the slow-paced planning aspects of DotE, but not giving us time to really think through them.

If we remove the preconceptions of this being related to DotE, and just look at it as a fresh game, I still don't think it really works. By making things spawn at random times, you're basically asking players to play as fast as possible all the time. There isn't time to think or plan, you just need to smash down as many turrets and open as many doors as you can before the next wave arrives. Your survey suggests that you want to get the balance right between strategy (high-level planning) and action (moment-to-moment gunplay), but I don't think that balance really even exists right now, because you're asking us to play so quickly.

I think SpikedWallMan is right: if you really want to make this game have spawns at random times, then you need to rethink everything, and remove most of the strategic elements to pare it back to a basic action game. But I would very much prefer that you don't remove those elements, and instead give us time to plan in between waves (by letting us trigger the wave by opening doors).

I also think it's a misconception to think "we're making an action game, therefore we can't have boring parts where you're just building and planning and nothing is happening." Virtually all games have downtime where the player has unlimited time to trigger the next bout of action. In another thread, I compared this to Diablo but if the town got randomly attacked by monsters every few minutes, so you never had time to slow down and do any thinking about your build. There's a reason basically every RPG has a town where no enemies can attack. FPS games have quiet moments where you can collect yourself before continuing on to the next action segment. The only genre I can think of that doesn't really give you a moment of downtime is RTS, where similar to ED, you get harrassed constantly and have to make decisions on the fly. But RTS games don't include random elements that require careful consideration; typically you can go into, say, a StarCraft mission with a plan of what to do, so you don't really need time to pause and decide. (e.g. in StarCraft I have the same research options in every game, whereas in ED I get presented with 3 random options and need to think which best applies to my situation.)

Daarkarrow wrote:
There need to be adjust as well on the waves, but, peronally,I like the tension that created the not knowing when will happens

I personally didn't feel any tension (unlike in DotE where there's a definite moment of tension before opening each door). In my first run, I was playing very slowly like I would play DotE, taking time to think over all the decisions presented, and then when a wave happened (often while I was browsing the merchant or pondering a research choice), I was just frustrated that my planning phase was interrupted. In my second run, I tried doing everything as quickly as possible to try and reduce the number of waves, and then there was no tension, just a feeling of being completely overwhelmed.

Apologies if I sound overly negative. I appreciate the opportunity to test an early build of the game and give feedback. I'm just a bit frustrated with essentially a single design decision that appears to have sucked all the enjoyment out of one of my favourite game design systems of all time.

No worries, all feedback is nice and you didn't sound, to me, super negative, just constructive criticism which is nice. From the different feedback I saw, its like you like it or hate it (wave system). So perhaps there should be some moments of not counting to waves (like merchant, hero upgrade machine), like safe spaces? But we will need to see with the team.