Gemcraft Chasing Shadows has been released on Steam

[Mánagarmr]

I glanced at the screenshots the game has on its store page.

They are super-busy with non-essential graphical material, to the point that on one I wasn't sure I was looking at path with monsters on it, or terrain.

It takes a while for the eyes to get used to it, this much I know from the ADG video. But once it is in motion it's actually not that hard to tell what is what. (That being said, I haven't actually played it myself)

[Draco18s]

Oh I'm sure.  It just reinforces my opinion that the older Gemcrafts were better.

[eRe4s3r]

There are options to highlight monsters and paths

Ancient DOS Games made a filler video about it here. This was about the old Flash-based game though.


I'm curious: Have the game moved to a new engine with the Steam release? If so, I'm probably getting it soon. I'm not to fond of flash based games. They tend to be wonky as crap.

It's using Adobe Air for Steam integration and Flash as engine. But the game is pretty solid as long as you don't push too far into the insane end-game where hit points are beyond trillions . At that point you gonna play with all graphics on lowest possible anyway Considering towers get fire rate around gem level 30 that literally fill your entire screen with bullets.

I am Wizard level 460 or something after I actually managed to eek out an endurance run for 11million and the next one for 33 million XP so as you can guess I am probably putting too much effort, thought and time into this as well Have to say though, it's super nice to finish such a run and see your level bar just infinite loop the level up +7's. The level up system is very addicting, the amulet requires a lot of planning and thought too.

If you push the game you also need to combine your gems properly.. basically you need tons of strategy to get beyond wave 300

[Draco18s]

It's using Adobe Air for Steam integration and Flash as engine. But the game is pretty solid as long as you don't push too far into the insane end-game where hit points are beyond trillions .

Trillions, pssh.
Try scientific notation on for size.

Actually that screenshot doesn't show how much health or damage things had.  But I remember that the forward gun* had a per-shot damage listing in the neighborhood of 4×10¹⁸ or so.

I don't hold the highscore any more, as the game updated breaking things into difficulty levels, which reset all the scores.  And I haven't bothered re-achieving it.**  Then again, no one else has either, due to the sheer tedium (I was not the first person to discover this particular cheese, it was/is a long-standing tactic, I was just sadistic about placement in order to maximize the result).

But yeah, same response as to end game Gemcraft: mind-numbingly boring due to the level of perfection required.

*For those not familiar with Onslaught 2, the laser guns would chain.  When a laser gun fired, any laser gun anywhere on the field that had a shot ready and had the firee within its range would fire into the firee and add its damage * 1.25, and then every laser gun within range of those would fire...  So a chain of four would do 576% the damage of 1 tower.  Check the screenshot, look at how long that chain is.  149 turrets, that if the only enemy is at the very start of the path, each tower is capable of being boosted by only 1 other tower.  No splits, maximizing that exponential.   The other towers there are all damage/range exchangers.  +300% damage -66% range.

**The game took over 6 hours, for most of which I was AFK (once I'd pixel-perfect placed all the towers using Windows accessibility options and Flash's zoom feature and got everything upgraded just right I could walk away).

[TheVampire100]

Yeah, Gemcraft gets really hard, especially int he endgame. You will need a lot of manafarms and supergems to deal with most monsters. And don't get me started on marked giants or shadows (god, I HATE sahdows. Why do they have to disobey the pause button?).

[Draco18s]

Why do they have to disobey the pause button?

Ok, that's a dick move and terrible design.

[TheVampire100]

Well, at least they are slowed down to a significant amount but they are a kind of "super boss" that is also a threat when you pause the game (breaking the fourth wall as well).
I don't like it because you will loose time to plan your strategey but at least they appear very rarely in the game.

[Draco18s]

No no, see, it's an enemy that breaks all of the previously established rules.  That's a serious no-no in game design: your rules must have internal consistency.  Every other effect stops when the game is paused, ergo Shadows should stop when the game is paused.  If you don't want that to be true, then you shouldn't add a pause option, but instead a super-slow mode where it's clear that everything is running at 1/10th (or whatever) speed.

[TheVampire100]

For you this might be the case, for thousands of other players (actually I don't know the exact number but since the game is successful it has to be some serious amount of players) this seems to be okay.

[eRe4s3r]

The shadows just punish you for bad tower layouting If you ever encounter a shadow you can't beat then your maze would fall within the next 10 waves anyway. And "normal" speed is already very slow imo.

If you ever encounter "her" or the "leviathans" in an actual round you will know that the game loves pulling this kind of stuff too Ignoring pause button? How about locking your controls and hiding your entire GUI? (for 1 wave only)

And shadows are clearly designed to offer you some real challenge, as even in death they can annoy you greatly (especially when you use walls to guide everyone path your orb in 2 tile distance, as you have to do on some maps...

Ps.: Enemies on wave 300~ have 3x10²⁰ HP's And regenerate 3x10¹⁹ per second. So if you forgot building a proper suppression chain you learn the hard way how losing feels (This largely depends on your battle-traits, so for some on wave 300 it may well be even more insane.

[TheVampire100]

I have still my hand sfull on collecting all the gem skills, so far I've only gotten poison.
I don't feel I make progress but that's just a feeling because the game is so huge. And the Steam version got even bigger with a lot more levels.

At least my skill layout is this time a lot more organized as in the web version because I'm already experienced with it and know what I need and what I don't need.
I've always been a heavy trap user, so traps are very high skilled in my case.

[Mánagarmr]

N-n-n-n-necropost!

In case people are still struggling with understanding the finer mechanics of this game, I've started a Tutorial/Let's play series.

[TheVampire100]

I'm jealous at that talisman.
Watching you play makes me want to play the game myself again. But I know if I do so, I cannot stop for a while.

Also, two of your videos in playlist are marked as private.

[Mánagarmr]

I'm jealous at that talisman.
Watching you play makes me want to play the game myself again. But I know if I do so, I cannot stop for a while.

Also, two of your videos in playlist are marked as private.

It took a while to build that talisman. And yes, the two private videos aren't released yet, so that's correct.

[Misery]

Huh, a TD game that actually looks like it has real depth and strategy.  Here I'd thought that the Creeper World series was the only one.  Not to mention replay value, these often don't have all that much.

The biggest thing I don't like about many TD games is that I often find the strategies involved to be more than a bit obscure.  Like, it's often never clear to me how to deal with different types of waves, or the best uses of different towers.  CW3 being the exception, where I know *exactly* what each tower (or weird flying thing) is good at, or how much stuff it can handle on it's own, and how I can fit it into my tactics.  But I remember playing something like Defense Grid, and mostly just being confused all the time.  Not to mention there's not that much you can DO with the towers in many of these games (CW3 specifically being by far the most "active" of these games).  I'm never too fond of "sit there and watch" moments.

I might go ahead and pick this up.