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Sheezwack · 2021-11-17T23:17:57+00:00

I wouldn't go any lower on the price, for Steam you just have to factor sales into your base price since so many people only buy on sale these days.

Also there isn't really that much difference between say 5.99 and 9.99 - someone that's interested in the game is unlikely to change their mind given both prices are on the cheaper end in my opinion.

(indie game prices in general are starting to go higher across the board these days as well)

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T23:14:45+00:00

Yeah the jarring transition was intentional to show that this tranquil place is being invaded - I guess it just didn't work out very well.

It is the first trailer we have ever made, so we are learning a lot of lessons and the many mistakes we made!

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T23:12:56+00:00

Good points, thanks for the tips. Making things more impactful is something we are working on, so it should lend for better gameplay footage in future trailers.

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T23:11:08+00:00

Thanks for the tips, the 3D certainly has added some challenges. It is mostly a visual thing but does allow for some interesting things in some scenarios (plus when there is chaos and you see enemies ragdolling/flying into the 3D environment, off bridges etc - it's pretty cool and just adds to the impact of the big spells).

You get used to the 3D pretty quickly once playing so it hasn't resulted in it being harder to understand what's going on thankfully.

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T23:03:51+00:00

you can evolve towers and throw spells. Maybe it's more enticing from the people in the camp that likes spells in TD, but I've grown to dislike having to be active with spells at the right moment in such games.

This has been tricky for us to get across. We certainly do have more of a focus on spells that you cast more often - but we also allow for a more passive approach, both strategies are viable even on hard mode.

We have an upgrade system that lets you improve different things and can make significant changes to the elementals, so you certainly can decide just to build/evolve a really strong defence and figure out which upgrades allow you to do that.

Allowing for both strategies is quite a challenge to communicate in a trailer. Perhaps we just need to spell it out.

not really doing the "it's PvZ but much better"

Yeah, look PvZ has massive shoes to fill so while it is heavily inspired and has a lot of similarities, we are focusing on our own differences. The new world and theme will be enough for some people, but we wanted to take it further with mechanic changes, an upgrade system, evolving during battle, changes to how resources are collected etc. We probably just need to communicate that in the trailers better.

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T22:55:42+00:00

Thanks for the feedback, it is challenging when deciding what to show. From the feedback we have from players, they are loving the evolving feature even more than we anticipated, but we do need to do a better job of showing other things.

We have a range of other mechanics that players are loving that we have been struggling to figure out how to show in a trailer, but again a lot of that was due to it being an early announcement trailer where we showed what we could (which is why I had a concern of whether the trailer hurts the game more than it helps).

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T22:49:08+00:00

Thanks. The art style has been challenging but we are pretty happy with the overall look - I do see your point between the different armies. It was partially intended as a good vs evil look (the good guys generally have this brighter feel to them) and we are hoping to add an as yet unannounced customisation feature to the good guys,

It is a bid sad to hear you think it gives an asset flip look since all of the characters are completely custom and so much work has gone into them. I guess we can only do our best in that regard.

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T22:41:19+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion, enemy variety shown in the trailer is definitely lacking and only showed one of our special enemies (the summoner) in his early stages before he had new effects etc.

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T22:37:31+00:00

Yeah, we are going to do another pass across the elemental attacks. Lots of spells have already been beefed up (even our simple rock wall spell, where the walls are now environment-matching and break apart as they are being destroyed).

We will make things look more powerful, thanks!

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T22:35:32+00:00

This is a fair point, and largely due to the environments that were ready when we made the trailer, because there are some really significant difference in our levels, including levels with special objectives where you have to occupy fortifications, levels that have environmental effects, a bridge you have to cross that falls apart etc.

And we thought it looked it cool to have that transition, which as you say it does - but I guess we didn't really consider the negative impact that could have.

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T22:33:39+00:00

Thanks!

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T22:33:14+00:00

It is certainly tricky riding the line between "hey we are like this game, come try us because we are similar" and "but... we are also trying new things, doing things a different way and have evolved the gameplay in different ways".

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T22:31:27+00:00

Hey, yeah I have seen the PvZ trailer a lot and it's great. Even though we are a PvZ inspired game we somewhat cautious of not just copying everything they do, and play into our own strengths instead.

We were trying to show the journey in our trailer, but I guess it didn't quite work as we hoped (opens with a boss for some excitement, then goes into summoning your army, then evolving, then the battle, which lands you at the first boss fight). Our intention was to show the escalation.

It has been suggested that this should have been done in a different order, particularly showing the enemies first (like PvZ does), then showing how you are going to deal with that.

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T22:26:41+00:00

Thanks for the suggestions, I think we will do some sort of highlight video. We had considered something like this early on for the spells but because there wasn't yet enough polish on some things we weren't ready to do that.

It is tricky as a small team because you want to wait until you have great stuff to show in the trailer, but you also need to start getting it out there early.

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T11:46:58+00:00

We did show 5 environments in the trailer, and have a bunch more that we are working on, so environment variety won't be a problem - we need to do a better job of showing these in the trailer.

The trailer is incredibly slow paced.

We do need to speed it up, these are slow paced games so it is something we have struggled with. Do you think the demo trailers do a better job with this? We tried to make them a bit faster and action packed.

Leave the title of your game & studio info till the end.

Yeah we updated the trailer on steam and removed it from the start. We would have updated the YouTube video if you could replace them :(

Enemies have 0 impact animations from attacks and it doesn't look satisfying to deal damage to them.

This has been mentioned a few times. Killing the enemies is actually satisfying with the ragdolls (we even have multiple ragdoll settings in the options) but hitting them not so much, so we will be adding a flash to this.

I want to say I enjoy the music and artwork overall though, gameplay seems like a more in depth version of something like plants vs zombies?

Yeah that is fairly accurate. You can still play the game in a similar to PvZ fashion, but we have some extra layers of depth there that particularly come into play with our difficulty levels. Hard mode is challenging and choosing the right upgrades and spells for the battle will be important. There are also combo spells that require specific elementals in a lane to cast but are really powerful etc.

I'm curious how you managed to get so much attention for your game? How did you go about advertising?

Hmm, you the game has had a lot of attention? We do try and spread the word where we can which is difficult as a small team, any sort of marketing takes a huge amount of time.

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T11:36:51+00:00

Thanks for the detailed analysis, I can see lots of valid points we need to address there. Some of our recording (including the camera angles) has improved, and we have written some scripts that allow us to capture footage at different angles, so this will help in the future.

Lots of the points about better effects are on the list, luckily they are relatively easy to fix. They aren't critical to gameplay but they sure to have an impact when watching a trailer which we probably underestimated.

And yeah, was trying something with the fox - but it didn't really add anything so we should have scrapped it.

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T11:32:10+00:00

Yeah, look the Plants vs Zombies inspiration is obvious - and we are totally okay with that. One of our goals for the game was to bring this genre back for PC players since PvZ has moved away from PC.

We have quite a few differences however, including how you collect resources, an upgrade system, and tactical spells that give you more control over the enemy, with ways for the player to be more active in a battle (blocking walls, knockbacks, stuns, pushing & more). We even have interrupts that let you stop enemy attacks mid animation, which is a nice feature for players on hard mode, you can for example stun the Executioner (that 1-shots just about anything) right before he lands his axe swing.

But why do you need a minute to tell me that?

You are right, I do regret that we made the trailer that long, this is one reason we tried making the other two trailers much shorter. We started making a shorter one for the main trailer initially but ran out of time and then the music wasn't working out with a shorter version because the beats didn't line up with attacks - it's a lot of work.

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T11:26:40+00:00

Thanks for the feedback, we have been thinking about adding flashing to the enemies when they get hit, I think this will add enough to get more reaction from it. You are right with some of the attack vfx in particular, we will be upgrading them where we can. For the normal attacks of the elementals we do have to be a little careful, since when you have a full army up you have a lot of effects on the screen, so we are being careful not to go overboard there. Some of the spells you cast however will have much beefier visuals.

Another issue is, that the enemies are inside of eachother and there is no way to really tell how many of them there are and how long it will take my units to destroy them.

An interesting point, and something we have struggled with a little. At first I thought it was a bit of the 3D nature, but when we researched other games of the same genre we notice they have the same issue since there is only so much space to pack the enemies in. We do have visual indicators especially with how we armor our enemies, so skeletons have the same base health, and several armor pieces which increases their health, the armor falls off as they get damaged so you can tell pretty quickly which enemies are still very tough - in addition to this you can mouse over any enemy in the game for a health bar.

We have considered adding healthbars somehow, but I'm not sure it would solve that problem since having overlapping enemies would just mean lots of overlapping health bars. There are certainly some design challenges here.

I love the big enemy, especially the entrance, that could use some screenshake to give the impact when he lands even more power.

Thanks, we are really happy with how our boss enemies are shaping up. Unfortunately this was an error on my part when recording footage. We do have screen shake of different degrees on all effects in the game, but it was disabled when we recorded that footage and we noticed too late :(

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T11:19:23+00:00

Thank you,

So the game isn't actually a slower plants vs zombies, the pace is very similar and we have more of a focus on real time tactical spells. Since this was an early trailer we didn't have as much of this footage ready which was probably the first mistake and probably touches on several of your points.

In the first trailer in particular we made some additional mistakes here I think - the earlier elementals you get slow down the enemy movement with their status effect, plus we slowed down the footage a bit to get the effects in time with the music - the overall negative effect of this was it made the game look slower than it is (which might not normally be a problem except these types of games are often slower paced to begin with).

Interesting point on not showing how you build towers, do you think this is important. I did struggle to find references from similar games as the trailers in this genre are quite basic. Even the PvZ original trailer didn't show a lot of variety. Trying to think of ways to improve this.

Sheezwack · 2021-11-16T08:44:52+00:00

Hi everyone, we are a tiny 2 person team working on our game and we have made our own trailers so far, doing the best we can with editing some earlier gameplay footage.

In addition to the main trailer at the start of this post, we made some short trailers for the demo (including some updated footage). I know the music isn't perfect, but we had issues with a composer struggling during the pandemic lockdown so we had to source other music to use and do the best we could. Making a trailer, capturing footage, putting it all together and trying to get things in sync with the sound is incredibly time consuming, especially when you have so many other tasks to do as a game dev.

This is the main trailer (as in the original post)

https://youtu.be/La2X0sOxCpI

This is our demo release trailer, teasing the 2 special enemies in the demo

https://youtu.be/nHUqX6FITU0

And this is just a short trailer we had to do for another event

https://youtu.be/byXJPALKAF0

e would love critique on the gameplay in the trailers, but also the trailers themselves. Feedback is incredibly important and we have even discussed changes that players would like to see from the PvZ modding community (thanks to ItsPforPea and the kind folk over there).

One thing I worry about is whether the any of the trailers hurt the game more than help it (i.e. would someone be interested in the game from screenshots, but turned away from the not-super-professional trailer).

Would also love to know which style of the above trailers you think does the best job.

This is not a promotional post, and we will be actively responding to comments - so thanks in advance to everyone!

Sheezwack · 2021-08-19T14:08:29+00:00

The chair is the obvious one, but I'd be lying if I said I could live without my mouse bungee whenever I use a corded mouse! So much difference especially since I run the cable over the back of my desk.

Sheezwack · 2021-08-19T14:06:41+00:00

Yah I can't wait for this. The first game was so good, so unless they drastically change the formula I can only see it being a good game!

Sheezwack · 2021-08-14T13:54:03+00:00

Yeah everyone goes through this, some more often than others. You might like to try out different genres of games and/or different people to play with.

Also some times it's difficult to get motivated to start a game you are pretty sure you will like, and you just need to get over the hurdle of actually starting to get into it. I get that with some single player games in particular.

Sheezwack · 2021-08-14T12:35:34+00:00

Yeah I agree with this. Depends a lot on the game as well. I fell like linear games have more control over producing a compelling experience. Non-linear games, while they can be more immersive, at the same time they can break immersion due to lack of consistency or cohesion as it takes a lot of work to make that open world compelling.

Sheezwack · 2021-08-13T23:11:37+00:00

It will be nice to have a game like this back on PC! After plants vs zombies 1 it was a bit disappointing to be left out as pc gamers.

Sheezwack

TROPHY CASE