Hey guys, I finished up my first full game since the release last night. First off I want to say congrats on releasing the game, and sorry the sales aren't what you hoped. Hopefully it will get some good word of mouth and reviews and be a slow burner. On to the game. The balance is way improved, especially the late game. I wasn't running around one-shotting everything, and the last part seemed properly challenging. I think you nailed the balance on the deep gates. They still feel scary and fun, but not unfair. I liked the ending cut scene, and I won't say anything else about it so as not to spoil the ending for others. I won on skilled/queen by the way, and the game took about 7 hours.
All the big bugs I ran into have already been mentioned elsewhere so I'll give you a few trivial ones:
- When a henchmen dies on an incline, the coins sometimes all land in a pile so it looks like only 1 dropped
- One of the coin achievements still references the 99 coin limit, even though that's not in place any more
- One of the achievements still references skelebots
Not sure if Steam lets you change achievement text after the fact, but I figured I'd mention them
Possible feature requests:
Strategy mode - Ability to play the game without the platforming parts. It's not that I don't like the platforming, but I think the strategy game has a longer shelf life. I'd probably play another 10ish hours if I could just mess with the strategy game. I realize the cheats are there, but they're... well ... cheating.
Possibly adding a difficulty above Overlord. I'm not sure if this is needed, since I haven't played overlord, but I won on Queen fairly easily after making a couple of pretty bad strategic blunders. You can call the new difficulty "Keith" mode.
Not sure if you'll have time to implement any new features, but I figure it can't hurt to ask
Mouse aiming - My first reaction was "OMG I can't believe Chris caved on that". Then after seeing the almost universal approval both here and on the Steam forums, I realized it was the right move. Some people want to experience the game the way it was designed, and some people just want to run around blasting things, and there's nothing wrong with that. The "right way" is what's more fun for the individual. I may even enable mouse aiming for a bit just to mess around with it.
As for this weird discussion about what's "Indie" - To me indie means developers making the kinds of games that they want to make. In that respect, I think that the second game is more indie than the first one. But I guess it means different things to different people.