Starting Note

This dev log certainly came around later than I wanted it to, guess I must've gotten distracted again. Or time simply flies, that could also work.

Dev logs should be far more frequent now, as I've gotten a ton of work done on the game since the last dev log, and I'm slowly wrapping up development. Might just be a week or so away, I hope.

This dev log is a little interesting, as I've thought about some of the changes I'll be covering for a while now. I've just always debated on if I should actually make some of them. So, let's see what I've been brewing, shall we?

Experience Gain

Experience gain is something that was always weird with the original. It starts off low but quickly gets out of hand. At first it starts with 20 XP on Round 1, then 40 XP on Round 2, then ramped up every 10 rounds, quickly reaching numbers like 11,000 XP on Round 90 or 15,000 XP on Round 100. This was also why level requirements were so high in the original, since the XP ramping was absurd.

However, in the remake, XP gain has been dropped heavily after Round 20. The amount of XP you'll gain per round later on is still high, as it should be, but nowhere near the amount gained in the original.

Also, as a small note, XP gain is now going to be boosted by the difficulty of the map you're playing on. XP gain is boosted by 10% per map difficulty, so 1.1x on Intermediate, 1.2x on Advanced, 1.3x on Expert, and 1.4x on Extreme. Note that this only applies to Player XP and won't be applying to Hero XP. Due to the only map being Plains, you'll only be getting the 1.1x XP boost in v0.1.

Level Up Requirements

Getting to Level 150, the maximum level, in the original is beyond painful. It's an absolute slog to get to mainly due to the ridiculously high XP requirements per level up. The early levels also required a ton of XP to reach as well, making it difficult to make any progress for player levels whatsoever.

In the remake however, alongside the XP gain reduction, XP requirements for player levels has been greatly decreased, even more so than the XP gain itself. In the original, you needed 1,000 XP to reach Level 1, 1,500 XP to reach Level 2, 2,500 XP for Level 3, and increased rapidly from there. However, in the remake, you now only need 300 XP for Level 2, 600 XP for Level 3, 900 XP for Level 4, and so on and so forth.

I should probably mention that you now start on Level 1 instead of Level 0 in the remake. The greatest decreased XP requirement ramping makes it that you need to complete about 1/3 the amount of Round 1-100 games to reach Level 150, which is really good. You'll also be able to skyrocket through early levels instead of having to wait far too long for just 1 level up.

Level Up Progression

The major thing I'll be covering now is the new "Level Up Progression". Unlike the original, you'll no longer have all towers and upgrades available to you off bat, instead you'll get them through player levels. When you first boot up a save file, your tower bar will look like this in v0.1:

You'll notice that only Crossbow is available. This shouldn't be much of a problem whatsoever as you'll get the other towers very, very quickly. Whenever you level up, you'll get a significantly better level up menu compared to the original:

It's even animated a bit now, so that's cool. The stone rewards remain the same, for now at least, so you'll get tons of those just off your first game of Easy Mode. Anyways, that "New Tower" reward is important, as it allows you to choose a tower of your choice to unlock. This reward will appear every 2nd level (Levels 2, 4, and 6 for Version 0.1). It'll greet you with a rather menacing menu at first:

There's a lot to unpack here, but it should be manageable. On the top you'll be able to choose which tower you want to unlock. Once the tower is chosen, the bottom section will give you information on the upgrades and abilities that tower has. Additionally, there's a little note under the upgrade tree that tells you when you'll unlock that tower's Tier 3 and Ultimate upgrades. Tier 3 upgrades are unlocked 5 levels after unlocking the tower, and Ultimate upgrades are another 5 levels afterwards.

It's important to note that the price mentioned in the upgrade info is the Medium Mode price, not the price of whatever difficulty you're currently playing.

Unlocking the tower will remove the lock on the tower bar, letting you freely use the tower from that point onwards. After reaching the level up requirement for the upgrades, the game will let you now, such as:

If you ever forget what level you need to be to unlock the Tier 3 or Ultimate upgrades, hovering over the upgrades in the tower's upgrade menu will tell you what Player level you need to be to unlock them. For this version, the highest level that will grant you anything other than stones will be Level 16, which will give the final batch of Ultimate Upgrades.

One last thing to note, if you close the game while the level up menu is open, the game will make sure to remember that, and won't apply any of the level up effects until you level up again, and you'll see this on your level bar:

All you'll have to do is go back into a game and complete a single round to trigger the level up sequence again. And yes, the game is equip to handle multiple level ups at once.

Ending Note

As I said back at the start of this dev log, things are beginning to wrap up on my end. There are still quite a few major things I need to get around to doing, but it shouldn't take very long.

There are 2 polls I plan on doing soon, probably tomorrow. One of them will get into the game for v0.1 and the other may have to wait until v0.2 or a patch to v0.1, we'll see.

Changes such as this progression change are ones I'm more experimenting with for now. There are more progression-related changes I have in mind, but those will have to wait for later versions as the game currently doesn't have enough to warrant adding them.

I do plan on getting more dev logs out soon as development wraps up. I might cover each tower individually, but we'll have to see. For now however, that's all I have to say. As it's very late for me, I'll be heading to sleep. Have a good day, everyone.