Shapebuster
This is Shapebuster. A simple Nodebuster clone I made for educational purposes; to get back to game development and learn some incremental games design. Additionally I wanted to challenge myself to spend no more than 40 hours of development on this. I finished development after 38 hours.
The gameplay loop is simple:
- click on squares to kill them
- collect resources
- buy upgrades
- kill the boss to win
Although simple, I felt that the core gameplay is done and while there's not much content, the main systems (attacking, spawning various enemies, upgrades) are done. You can beat the game (kill the boss) in about 18 minutes.
It was very cool to come up with formulas for different systems and create spreadsheets for them. Incremental games are cool and balancing them is a big part of how the game feels. I'm also satisfied with how the game looks. Even though it's just a bunch of squares, to me, they look nice. :)
I posted a bunch of videos from various stages of development on my YouTube channel in this playlist. Come check it out if you'd like to see how the game came along.
I hope you enjoy the game. Feel free to leave any feedback. Thank you!
PS I highly recommend you check out Nodebuster if you haven't already. It's a pretty neat game!
Comments
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I know it's "just a small project" but it looks really good! It's pretty much Nodebuster but without the glow lol.
About that "hitting multiple enemies at the same time" thing. I noticed that when you shoot 2 enemies at once, you take the damage of both of them. This mechanic, paired with the increase-area-of-damage upgrade, doesn't really make sense to me.
Is the intention to encourage the player to aim only single-target at early game and transition later to area damage once they have enough health to tank it?
The player is really only rewarded once enemies are actually dead and drop the currency. But if the player is only dealing 1x attack damage while taking 3-6x the amount of health loss, it's more likely that they'll just die before getting rewarded, so there's no incentive to do area attacks in the first place. I don't understand why a player would move towards the area-increase upgrade, since you get nothing in return. If indeed there is going to be a late-game damage bonus for area attacks, it should outmatch that multiplication of health loss per click.
In this way, I think Nodebuster feels like it explores area-attacking more smoothly by having one of its first upgrades create a benefit, before doing anything like expanding the damage radius (something that is initially detrimental).
The intention with increasing area of damage was to speed up killing squares, since you could attack more of them with a single attack.
I haven't considered this perspective before but you're right, it actually discourages players from attacking multiple squares at the same time because they might die before getting resources from them.
Initially I wanted to add an upgrade that would increase damage based on the number of squares attacked at the same time, so that the more squares you'd attack the more damage you'd be dealing but I haven't implemented it.
This is great feedback, thank you :)
"spam the left click non stop" please fuck off with this kind of shit.
Right before releasing the game I lowered the cost of "auto attack" upgrade significantly but it might not be enough.
I designed the game specifically with "clicking first, then getting an auto attack upgrade" in mind. Now that I think about it, it might be better to design it without clicking at all in mind and optionally leave clicking for players that like it (like me). That would give all players a better experience and could allow me to balance the game better. Especially early game feels sluggish a bit and you only start feeling powerful when you get to Auto Attack upgrade level 10 or so when Auto Attack interval drops to 0.52s. It becomes REALLY fun when you get to 0.2s. Yeah, the more I think about it the more I should design the game with increasing Auto Attack speed first.
Thanks for playing!
Like the simplicity and devlog.. not to be persciptive but like how action games need pause, all incrementals want to have saving/idle and repetitive strain injury measures. Not sure if it means anything to you but would be good
Hey, thanks for playing! When it comes to the idle aspect, do you think auto attacking is enough or did you have something else in mind? For example closing the game and coming back to automatically generated resources?
I wanted the game to be played actively as I enjoy such games the most, that's why there are no "idle" elements. The only "idle" element I implemented is the auto attack functionality. Do you think it's enough? I think auto attacking upgrade doesn't progress fast enough though. It should give better results faster. What would you say if I designed the game around auto clicking instead of clicking manually? Or if there were more upgrades in the future that would automatically attack shapes?
As for saving - yeah, it's a basic functionality that should be there. I didn't add it because the game is so short but it's definitely something that should be added to the game.
Not having saving is quirky and okay if it's not intended to be idle, it's funny to consider a 'save' system that does a forced prestige currency reset on closing the game (not a suggestion just for fun..). Idle is a whole thing that involves optimization/simplification in order to multitask. It's difficult to involve in a game like this without meta upgrades, but with long rounds there can be different strategies that may not be fully idle and require types of check-back/micro management. Clicker wise, you may assume auto clicker will be abused if click isn't given any kind of cooldown, so click and autoclick isn't a real dichotomy as it exists here now. Noticed though you take less damage for clicking on multiple nodes at the same time, so if there was prestige you could limit the number of rounds available to cause optimization, and like decision making reason to pick between types of run.... Anyway there u go, btw this was picked up on Incrementaldb's radar but not added for being too simple, but it's good so yea
Yeah, the idea was that later in the game you could also increase area of damage (there's an upgrade for that) which would promote hitting multiple enemies at the same time and there could be upgrades that gave additional damage for each attacked square, for example +5% or so.
I'm glad you liked it and again thanks for playing. It was intended as a small project but hopefully next time I'll make something bigger and better and I'll take your feedback into consideration. :) thanks!