Starting Note

There are only going to be a few more dev logs before v0.1's release, as all of the planned content for v0.1 has been finished!

While not important for this dev log, there have been a bunch of changes to content covered in previous dev logs, such as:

• Map & Difficulty select menu now has player level on the top left

• Half Cash, Last Stand, and Ramped Up have been re-implemented, however some adjustments had to be made

• Player levels no longer unlock Tier 3 and Ultimate upgrades for towers

• Round previews on the main game UI now shows the amount of cash you'll get from the round

Now, without further ado, let's talk about the starting tower, Crossbow:

Base, Up To Tier 2 Upgrades And The Ability

Crossbow remains almost identical to the original before the Tier 3 upgrades. It still remains a cheap, semi-fast starting tower that can hold up relatively well throughout the early game. The main changes come from the middle and bottom path upgrades, which each got slight adjustments

• x/1/x - Faster Firing

  • Attack cooldown increased from 0.6s to 0.675s

• x/2/x - Faster Arrows

  • Renamed to "Faster Launches"

  • Attack cooldown increased from 0.45s to 0.54s

• x/x/1 - Bonus Range

  • Price reduced from $150 to $100

  • Range reduced from 225 to 200

• x/x/2 - Hollow Detection

  • Grants Hollow Priority Targeting

  • Range reduced from 270 to 250

The speed nerfs here are reverting the nerf revert that the last balance patch for the original did. Main reason is to slow it down slightly, however the ability speed is still really strong, especially for a 33% uptime quadruple speed ability. The range nerf doesn't achieve too much, however it was more to spread out the range bonuses across the two upgrades.

The speed nerf specifically is also warranted due to tier 3 upgrades, making the towers more powerful while taking up less space.

The ability, Rapid Fire, has no changes as of right now. I considered reducing its duration or increase the cooldown, however I decided not to touch it yet, as I realistically should wait until the rest of the towers are ported before making changes like that.

Top Path - The Charged Shot

The top path has been kept really similar to the original's gimmick, with powerful charged shots every few attacks.

The upgrades are:

• 3/x/x - Increases damage and pierce of arrows. Additionally, shoots a high damage charged arrow once every few attacks.

• 4/x/x - Increases damage and charge rate. Additionally, arrows can pierce through Metal enemies.

The Charged Fire ability from the original Ballista is only available for 4/2/2. It remains mostly the same, however the speed boost no longer stacks with Rapid Fire.

Middle Path - Sporadic Speed

The middle path has had a few changes, mainly due to the introduction of Tier 3 upgrades. Determining what to do for this path and bottom path was a little challenging, especially since one is speed and the other is projectile count. So I decided, screw it, just merge the two.

The upgrades are:

• x/3/x - Shoots 3 arrows at once.

• x/4/x - Permanently gains Rapid Fire ability speed.

As Triple Shot was moved to x/3/x, its ability was also carried over. However, as Triple Shot is now a Tier 3 instead of an Ultimate upgrade, the ability's duration was reduced from 15 seconds to 10 seconds.

Also, the speed stacking on all of Crossbow's abilities have been reduced rather heavily. As mentioned with top path, the speed stacking with top path no longer exists. This lowers the bonus from the original from 11x to 9x. However, the bonuses now stack in a slightly different way that makes them worse.

Stacking is no longer just adding the "All Crossbow" bonuses together (aka (2 + 3 + 4)x, or 9x), it now starts at 1x and adds their bonuses - 1 together (aka (1 + 1 + 2 + 3)x, or 7x).

So the maximum stacking is now +1 damage and 7x attack speed. Still really powerful, however the speed is no longer as high, resulting in roughly 36% less DPS compared to before.

Now if Triple Shot is part of middle path instead of bottom path, what did I do with bottom path? Why don't we find out.

Bottom Path - The Storm

This upgrade path was one that went through quite a few iterations before reaching the final version you'll see in v0.1. There was general idea in mind when I first started to make the adjustments for Tier 3s, however it took a while to figure out how to implement it. While the other two paths do things on their own, this path is more reliant on its ability, as the ability is completely reworked into something else.

• x/x/3 - Increased arrow speed and travel distance.

• x/x/4 - Literally nothing without the ability.

The new ability, Arrow Storm, allows you to choose a location on the map. Once the location is chosen, the Crossbow will stop its normal attack and begin rapidly firing arrows in the direction of the location, however there's a slight spread. This ability has 10x the attack rate of the Crossbow's normal attack and, yes, benefits from ability stacking. The duration is dropped from 10 seconds to only a short 3 seconds, so use it wisely.

With 2/2/4, Arrow Storm gains an additional 2 arrows at the cost of a wider spread, however it does also last for 2 extra seconds.

Ending Note

Overall, Crossbow is still a powerful early game tower while also being an extremely powerful and cheap late game spam tower. It can work well as a burst clean up or a high low-density damage if paired with ability stacking as well as Arrow Storm.

Also, you may notice with the new game screenshots that the tower selectors have a "Rank" displayed on the top of them. As I mentioned at the start of this dev log, player leveling no longer matters for tower upgrade unlocks. Now, while you're using a tower, the tower will gain XP per round. The amount of XP the tower gains is split amongst different tower types based on how many of that tower is on the field. So, for example, if there's 1 Crossbow and 2 Oceanic Ships on the field and you beat Round 9, Crossbow gets 60 XP and Oceanic Ship gets 120 XP, regardless of their upgrades or contributions.

Towers start at Rank 1, where they'll only have Tier 1 upgrades available. Every rank up, until Rank 4, the current maximum, will unlock the next tier of upgrades. Note that, unlike player level, the XP requirement on Ranks ramp up extremely fast. Rank 1 -> 2 will take 1,000 XP, Rank 2 -> 3 will take 10,000 XP, and Rank 3 -> 4 will take 100,000 XP. You'll likely need to do multiple runs to max out each tower due to the XP requirements on Rank 4.

There are plans to increase the Rank cap in the future for other content relating to the tower, and I may adjust XP requirements per Rank if necessary.

Anyways, that's all for this dev log. Next dev log, I'll go over Oceanic Ship and the variety of adjustments done to it.