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 Since I had no idea whether this topic would last longer than a page or two back when I created it, I didn't reserve the second post for resources, so now I guess I just have to dump them right here instead. Useful links:
 What's all this then? Tactical Nexus is a game about trying to climb to the top of a tower (well, several towers) by fighting a multitude of birds and cat people who are blocking the way. You accomplish this through a series of simple, automated JRPG-like battles, where the protagonist and the enemy trade blows until one of them runs out of HP. The challenge isn't in the fights themselves, but rather in what order you initiate the battles. Climbing the tower, you'll find you have access to only a limited number of powerups. Enemies have different stats and drop different items upon defeat. You need to plan your pathing very carefully so that you gather items and EXP in the appropriate order and don't lose too much HP on individual fights, or else you're going to wipe out before reaching the top of the tower. The end result may feel more like a resource management game or a puzzle game than an RPG. This sounds like another game I've played before... As I suggested in the thread title, the premise behind this game is similar to Desktop Dungeons. However, it's more directly inspired by a Japanese game called Tower of the Sorcerer, and the tower layout is static rather than randomized. You might also draw a connection between this and DROD RPG: Tendry's Tale, which was also partly inspired by Tower of the Sorcerer. Tactical Nexus is entirely its own beast. Although I tried both Desktop Dungeons and Tendry's Tale, neither game clicked with me in the way that Tactical Nexus has. While I have only a few hours invested in the other games, I have over 400 hours invested in Tactical Nexus. 400 hours!? AND I've barely scratched the surface of it. Although Tactical Nexus can be billed as one game, it can also be billed as sixty separate full-length games, since it can take several hours to figure out how to complete any given tower. But on top of that, the sixty towers in question are interconnected in such a way that you have an incentive to play through each one multiple times. This is thanks to the Nexus system.  If you somehow manage to survive to the finish line of one of the towers, you will be given a score. This score is calculated based on five basic things--your experience level, ATK, DEF, HP, and basically how far you actually made it into the full tower (there can be up to three "goal spots"). If your score is high enough, you will be awarded a medal for that tower. You can earn only one medal per tower, but you can upgrade that medal at any time by getting a new high score in the tower--ranks can include  bronze,  silver,  gold,  platinum,  diamond, and  moon. Once you get a medal, you can spend it in the Nexus. Every tower has its own Nexus, a place full of additional powerup items. But the powerups aren't free--to reach them, you have to open some doors that can only be unlocked by using the medals you've earned from completing the towers. The especially powerful items tend to require that you spend several medals of higher ranks, but you can also choose to spread your medals across several individual powerups if you prefer. Once you've unlocked a door with a medal, you can't reuse that medal for the rest of the tower, but your collection of earned medals is always resupplied with every new start. In addition to medals, there are also  Sun Stones, a kind of "currency" that you can earn by completing towers without using any medals--so there's still an incentive to do more minimalist runs. However, you can also earn Sun Stones by making your score go way over what's necessary to reach the top rank, even if you do use medals.In short, the idea behind the game is that you don't start off with all the resources you need to get the highest score in each tower. Instead, you start off by getting a series of bronzes, silvers, and golds, and then once you've collected enough medals, you return to previously-completed towers and use Nexus powerups to boost your score even higher. This will earn you better medals, which you can use to improve your scores in other towers, and so on and so forth. Each tower has a pre-determined layout, takes several hours to complete, AND you have to replay each tower multiple times? Isn't that extremely tedious? Honestly, no, it doesn't feel that way to me. I feel there's a couple of reasons for this. First, I compare the game to Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy in the sense that, although you end up failing and starting over a lot, you pick up some new skills with each attempt, and you start getting through the tower faster with each new attempt. In Getting Over It, it can take you several hours to learn the mechanics and beat the game for the first time, but the entire game CAN be completed from start to finish in just a couple of minutes if you practice enough. Tactical Nexus isn't quite that quick a play, but it does get a lot faster over time. The only thing you're ever actually doing is just walking into enemies, after all. Second, the towers tend to be designed in such a way that there's a specific solution you have to implement in order to boost your rank from one medal to another, and often the solution requires that you approach the entire tower in a completely different way from earlier medals. For example, when you're low on medals, you might have to use your keys to unlock doors early on in the tower in order to get the powerups you need to survive until the end. If you can afford powerups from the Nexus, though, then you can hold onto those keys and use them much later in the tower, on much better powerups, but you still have to take a different track from before in order to survive that long. Keep in mind that this is just one simple example--in practice, every tower is completely different in what it's asking from you. So even though I've retread the same ground multiple times, it rarely feels like padding to me--I'm always gaining a better appreciation of the game's mechanics, I'm always looking for ways to optimize my pathing, I'm always on the lookout for new clever tricks I can pull off with the items as they're provided. I'm often thinking about these things even when I'm not playing the game. The fact that I still feel this way even hundreds of hours into the game is honestly astounding to me. There are so many different layers folded into the game design, and I have no idea how they pulled it off so well. I'm curious, but I'm not quite sold on this yet. What's the price of it? Before I get into the pricing, I should note that there's a free demo of it that includes the first few towers of the game. By all means, try it out and see what you think of it before you purchase. The game's a huge investment in terms of time and, eventually, money. With that out of the way, I won't mince words--the pricing is both steep and controversial. The game debuted at 60 dollars, despite looking (and, really, playing) like an indie game from the '90s. It's only $15 USD now, but this price is only temporary. The developers increase the price of the game with each new expansion added to it, and the plan is to bring it back to the full $60 price tag eventually. And this is NOT because the expansions are included in the game--they're not. The expansions are sold separately, and their individual price tags also increase with every new expansion that comes out. The expansions are expensive, too, with the later ones being even more expensive than the base game. If your plan is to get all of the expansions as soon as they come out, even with the release discounts, you will be spending about $305 total. If you wait to get all of them until after the discount period is over, you could be spending $705 in total. 700 dollars!? It's not Train Simulator levels, but yeah, it's still extremely high. When I said the game is more like sixty full-length games, part of the reason I put it that way is because the developer uses the same rationale for why Tactical Nexus is priced the way it is. If you consider each tower to be a separate game, then when you've gotten all 60 towers through getting all the expansions, the average price comes out to be about $12 per "game". It's a bit of a harder sell when the only way to purchase the "games" is bundled together like this, though (especially since bundles are usually cheaper than buying games individually). Still, I think the expansions are priced with the idea that you shouldn't buy them until you've played the base game for a few hundred hours and are already positive that you're going to continue playing for thousands of hours into the future. In that sense, I think the pricing scheme makes sense, and is actually maybe the only viable scheme they could've gone with. That said, if the pricing is a deal-breaker for you, I totally understand. But there's still a ton of good content to be had from the base game alone. Try the demo. If you like the game enough and you think $15 is fair for a few weeks' worth of entertainment, go ahead and get it while it's still "cheap". It's still possible to get top ranks in every tower in the base game even if you don't have access to the towers from the expansions, or at least, that's what the developers claim. I'm an imaginary person who wasn't turned off by the $700 thing and I think I'll try it out. Is there anything else I should know about it? Don't ever make any hard assumptions about what score is possible in any given tower--if you feel like you're close to a score but just can't figure out how to get the extra points you need, it may literally be impossible, so consider moving to other towers for a while. Just be patient, take your time, do the best you can, and play the towers in the order you feel like playing them. For your first goal, I would suggest either: 1. Try to get bronze medals in the first eight towers, or 2. Try to get gold medals in the first three towers (yes, this particular goal is possible at the offset, though tower 3 is especially tricky, and you might prefer tower 5 instead). Either accomplishment puts you in a good spot to get better ranks in the towers that are still giving you trouble, but don't neglect getting more Sun Stones where you're able, they're more valuable than you might think at first. If you'd like any hints or advice about anything, I can provide it--I've gotten diamonds in a couple towers already. If you haven't played yet and have any other questions about how the game works, feel free to ask me those, as well. Also, if you've already played the game some and find you're having trouble with it, I put together a huge guuide with general advice for survival/improving your scores. Oh yeah, and the game's translation is great and I won't hear any arguments to the contrary:      EDIT: Incidentally, the developers seem to be monitoring this thread and responding to various comments on their Twitter account: 
Wanton Spoon fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Jun 17, 2020 |
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Apr 18, 2020 21:05
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actually....pretty fun for some reason
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Apr 18, 2020 21:40
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Oh sweet, someone else is finally iterating on the Tower of the Sorcerer/DROD RPG formula. Extremely my jam, awful translation and pricing scheme hangups aside. Looks like there are 6 more expansions coming over the course of about a year or so. That's... a lot of towers.
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Apr 19, 2020 22:06
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GetDunked posted:Oh sweet, someone else is finally iterating on the Tower of the Sorcerer/DROD RPG formula. Extremely my jam, awful translation and pricing scheme hangups aside. GetDunked posted:Looks like there are 6 more expansions coming over the course of about a year or so. That's... a lot of towers. Not every expansion contains the same number of towers, but also, some towers are longer or shorter than others, anyway. There's only five towers in chapter 3, for example, but they're much longer than the towers in chapters 1 and 2 on average (and the focus on equipment arguably makes them more complex, as well). Towers can also be measured in terms of how much replayability they introduce to earlier towers once you've played them. In news updates and forums posts, the developers often reference a "Legacy" system that will be introduced in chapter 6, and from what I can gather, this chapter will start providing access to one-time rewards that let you unlock new difficulty settings for earlier towers, giving you a score multiplier for those towers. It also sounds like it will unlock new types of upgrades, allowing you to destroy walls, which would completely change the optimal strategy in some towers. I think this is the other reason for the prices being so high... Due to the nature of the Nexus system, the amount of content added with each new expansion isn't so much "+n", but more like "^n". I doubt most people would ever want anything more than the base game, since it's worth hundreds of hours on its own, but personally, I'm in it for the long haul just to see if the full game fulfills its promised potential.
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Apr 20, 2020 00:44
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I'm actually a bit intrigued by this. I've never heard of it or any of its precursors but I've heard of Desktop Dungeons.
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Apr 20, 2020 05:09
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This game seems really interesting -- just bought the normal copy and I've been having a lot of fun with it. Definitely not a looker, though
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Apr 21, 2020 20:54
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Lead By Example posted:This game seems really interesting -- just bought the normal copy and I've been having a lot of fun with it.
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Apr 21, 2020 23:12
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I'm glad some people are already enjoying the game. To be honest, I wasn't sure if this thread was going to go anywhere, since this game doesn't exactly fit the type of thing that usually takes off on these forums. If even a few people get to try it, though, I'm happy.Elephant Parade posted:Yeah. The enemy sprites look good, IMO, but the rest of the graphics are XP-freeware-esque and none of it is put together in an aesthetically pleasing way. Personally I like the aesthetic, but it might be just nostalgia. It reminds me of when I was young in the '90s, the Internet was still a novelty, and I had a lot of fun exploring all the different freeware demos out there. I do think it can be hard on the eyes at times, though. Since they use the same bright, contrasting color palettes for absolutely everything, there's no real visual cues to help you distinguish different types of objects from each other. Usually the floor layouts have intentionally cute designs with an obvious path to the staircase, so it's not always an issue, but then sometimes they decide to put together something that looks like this:  I'm pretty sure the visual theme of this tower is "garbage". Thanks for making the floors nigh-indistinguishable from the impenetrable walls, guys. Makes it easier to decide how to spend my finite resources clearing a path. Then there's the towers with "underground" segments where you have to unlock pathways to powerups, and since all the powerups look kinda the same when put side-by-side like this, trying to find the powerups you actually want is a bit like playing Where's Waldo:  Can you find the Platinum Key in this image? More importantly, would you have been aware there was a Platinum Key in this image if I didn't point it out?
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Apr 22, 2020 00:35
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Yeah game's definitely rough on the eyes -- but the gameplay is pretty captivating. It took about 30 minutes for everything to click, and after that I was really impressed with the design of the game. Looks awful though 
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Apr 22, 2020 04:15
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I don't even know where to start with the Dojo tower. Adding limited moves to everything else going on makes my brain explode, especially given that said moves are defined by weird-rear end pathing rules.
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Apr 22, 2020 06:03
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Elephant Parade posted:I don't even know where to start with the Dojo tower. Adding limited moves to everything else going on makes my brain explode, especially given that said moves are defined by weird-rear end pathing rules. Hitofude Dojo is less bad than it looks at first. It helps if you look at each floor as a self-contained puzzle where the goal is to leave the floor with more Anchor Hooks than you started with. This is impossible for the first few floors, but around the fourth floor, it starts picking up. It helped me to write down exactly what I did on each floor once I found the optimal "solution". Regarding pathing, you will always prioritize moving all the way up or all the way down (north/south) before ever moving left or right (east/west).
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Apr 22, 2020 12:28
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Yeah when I realized the gimmick behind Dojo I could feel my brain melting
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Apr 22, 2020 17:52
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What the hell is this game and how did I just spend two hours on a tutorial level
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Apr 23, 2020 01:08
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Char posted:What the hell is this game and how did I just spend two hours on a tutorial level If it's any consolation, after 400+ hours of gameplay I still haven't fully completed that tutorial.
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Apr 23, 2020 02:21
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Hey everyone, senpai noticed us: https://twitter.com/TeamNexus12/status/1253103199810015232
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Apr 23, 2020 03:35
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I went further down in that Twitter feed, and: Nice Imagine, giving another goon friend your secret pro strats, or helping somebody out by giving them your step-by-step strategy to getting a Pure Gold, or letting them fill in the blanks themselves by giving them a note set that's just "1," "2," "3," etc., written on some key items.
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Apr 23, 2020 04:13
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Oh man, being able to save memos will cut down on busywork so much. It'll be nice to be able to record e.g. what I did with a key on the key tile itself
Elephant Parade fucked around with this message at 04:29 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 04:15
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It's crazy that there's literally no English press for this game at all -- we're already on the first page for Google. I was looking around for advice and guides for this game and there literally just aren't any. Sounds like we should make a Discord?
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Apr 23, 2020 05:30
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Game looks cool and all, but that pricing strategy is honestly insane. They're aiming at a final price, just for the base game, to be the equivalent of idk, XCOM2? Right now it's in a good place, just keep the price at this level instead of sabotaging yourselves for no reason. No one is going to buy it full price.
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Apr 23, 2020 10:35
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Although they don't say so specifically, it feels like the Team Nexus twitter account is now being used to respond directly to a lot of the comments made in this thread. If you'd like to see the developers' response to something, make a comment on it and see what happens. Also, they've released more details on how chapter 6 is going to retroactively expand the content of earlier chapters: https://twitter.com/TeamNexus12/status/1253243422367866880 It's kind of difficult to understand the descriptions as translated, but what I think they're saying is this: "Mythical Trail" describes a specific single Nexus-like area that can eventually be accessed by ALL towers from chapter 6 onwards. The Mythical Trail contains especially powerful upgrades, for example providing passive bonuses to levels you gain or items you pick up, but you need to spend tons of Sun Stones to activate these upgrades (some of them costing literally hundreds). Also, the Mythical Trail doesn't initially contain any of these upgrades. To unlock any given upgrade, you first have to retrieve that upgrade's associated "Legacy" item within one of the towers, and Legacy items will generally be extremely hard to reach. Once you reach one, though, that upgrade will then permanently be accessible for purchase in any tower that allows you to access the Mythical Trail. It sounds like Mythical Trail might not ever be made accessible in chapters 1-5, but an alternative will be provided in the form of "Mystic Gates". Mystic Gates will be hidden in towers from chapter 6 onwards similar to Legacy items. Each Mystic Gate corresponds to a specific tower--chapter 6-1 will contain the Mystic Gate for chapter 1-1, Tactical Tutorial. Once you've unlocked the Mystic Gate for a tower, you can use that gate to apply a multiplier to the enemy stats, which means the enemies give you more EXP, which means you have the opportunity to greatly increase your score for that tower. Also, beating the tower with the Mystic Gate activated will then unlock new powerups for use in future runs of that tower, presumably similar to the powerups found in the Mythical Trail. This is the kinda stuff that makes me really excited for the future of this game. The gameplay itself is engaging enough, but I wish more games made use of a Nexus system like this, too. I love games with built-in challenge runs, and I love games where mastering one stage will give you new bonuses in others. Lead By Example posted:It's crazy that there's literally no English press for this game at all -- we're already on the first page for Google. I try to limit my online presence, so I wouldn't set up or manage a Discord myself, but from time to time I might pop in to one that someone else makes. If you're looking for guides for your own sake, though, just ask me! I have enough experience that I can provide anything from hints to a full-on walkthrough to get at least a gold medal in any of the first twelve towers. grate deceiver posted:Game looks cool and all, but that pricing strategy is honestly insane. They're aiming at a final price, just for the base game, to be the equivalent of idk, XCOM2? I agree that they'd probably be more successful overall if they put at least the base game on discount from time to time. That said, I'm more defensive of the pricing than I imagine most people would be, due to a variety of factors including perceived longevity, quality, nicheness, and cultural differences, but I also don't want to be a huge pain in the rear end about it  I brought up the pricing in the OP because it's dramatic enough that I thought people deserved a warning up front about it, but outside of that it's not a discussion I want dragging down what I think is a quality game, so I'm going to try not to comment on it too much myself. I'm willing to wait and see just how much the pricing impacts the success of the game. Wanton Spoon fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 13:57
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I'll have to see how I feel after working through the base content but you sold me on this game nearly sight unseen and three hours later I'm through the first two tutorial towers. I'm not quite sure on how to use the medals in the nexus yet. It's already pretty compelling, though. I had a bit of a chuckle when I went nearly all-in on boosting my attack value on leveling and I STILL couldn't beat the final shield-types' defense rating on Tutorial 2.
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Apr 23, 2020 14:18
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I can't decide whether this game's UI is brilliant or terrible. In the levels themselves you have all of these neat quality of life things like infinite undo/redo, autosave slots, hitting space to see how you match up against the floor's enemies, all the (admittedly unlabeled) attack/defense math you could want, and that new memo feature they were just advertising. However, there still doesn't appear to be a way to, say, turn the music down or change the resolution for windowed mode. I'm also a bit bewildered by the level naming convention. I get that "Tactical Tutorial 1" is probably a good place to start, but what exactly can I expect from "Tactical Tower G"? Or "D"? Gripes aside it's a really fun resource puzzler and I'm glad I stumbled into it here 
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Apr 23, 2020 15:00
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So I'm going through the demo (very robust, by the way, four towers is actually a lot of content for this game) and I'm mostly just trying to understand the scoring mechanics. I'm pretty sure I almost totally cleared the second tower top to bottom and I still only managed to barely clear the requirements for the silver medal. Is it just the case where you NEED to grind out each tower to get upgrade items to get better scores or am I just misunderstanding something? Overall I'm enjoying this enough I'll probably at least get the base game when I'm done with the four demo towers, but man that pricing strategy is pretty insane. Edit: Also, yes, this game really needs a way to turn off the music. Please. Unless that's a feature in the main game that's not included in the demo? Infinity Gaia fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 15:06
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Hogama posted:I'll have to see how I feel after working through the base content but you sold me on this game nearly sight unseen and three hours later I'm through the first two tutorial towers. I'm not quite sure on how to use the medals in the nexus yet. Medals are used in the same way keys are used, by walking into a door with the associated medal shown on top of it. That said, a door can be unlocked by any medal of equal or higher rank; for example, a silver door can be opened with a silver medal or a gold medal, but it can't be opened with a copper medal. ...Unless you mean you're not sure which powerups to purchase, in which case, I get you. Once you learn more through regular gameplay about how different powerups are useful in different towers, you'll start figuring out which ones you want to focus on. That said, I wouldn't try to start using medals until you've gotten more used to Pure Nexus runs. Although using medals will disqualify you from a Pure Nexus run, using Sun Stones actually doesn't disqualify you, so you can use your Sun Stones to help you earn more Sun Stones, and then you can use those to help you earn better medals. Plus, I find that working with limited resources helps me gain a better appreciation for how to play more effectively. This game is extremely good about teaching concepts through gameplay; in most of the towers, there's usually a specific hurdle that's impossible to overcome unless you figure out how to utilize a certain gameplay mechanic properly. Hogama posted:It's already pretty compelling, though. I had a bit of a chuckle when I went nearly all-in on boosting my attack value on leveling and I STILL couldn't beat the final shield-types' defense rating on Tutorial 2. GetDunked posted:I'm also a bit bewildered by the level naming convention. I get that "Tactical Tutorial 1" is probably a good place to start, but what exactly can I expect from "Tactical Tower G"? Or "D"? Some of the translation is awkward because they're using machine translation, but based on some of the comments I've seen from the developers, and what I've seen in the game itself, I think some of it also comes down to them trolling players on purpose. They do list the difficulty rating for each tower, but I find these are hit-or-miss estimates, especially when you get into the matter of how hard it is to achieve a particular rank in a tower, rather than just reach the end. I definitely had an easier time getting platinums and diamonds in some later towers than in some earlier ones. I think it's just part of the conceit of the game that you're meant to be dropped into the middle of everything, and slowly explore and figure it all out for yourself. The towers themselves work the same way, since it's hard to know how to play optimally until you've seen the later floors, know what enemies to prepare for and how many keys to hold onto. Also, because each tower is so different, you can't really compare the difficulty of the towers to each other, anyway. There's important lessons to learn from each one that aren't found in the others. On top of Tactical Tutorial, though, my suggestion for your other first tower is Tactical Trip Mini. It's harder to finish than the tutorial, but it's also the shortest tower, so it's the easiest to replay until you get it right, and you learn a lot of fundamental concepts very quickly. Infinity Gaia posted:So I'm going through the demo (very robust, by the way, four towers is actually a lot of content for this game) and I'm mostly just trying to understand the scoring mechanics. I'm pretty sure I almost totally cleared the second tower top to bottom and I still only managed to barely clear the requirements for the silver medal. Is it just the case where you NEED to grind out each tower to get upgrade items to get better scores or am I just misunderstanding something? I have gotten a gold medal in Tactical Tower NEW without using any Sun Stones or Medals (though I'd have to replay it to remember exactly how I did it). But yes, in most towers it's literally impossible to get medals of the highest ranks without spending some medals of your own. It should eventually become clear why this is the case once you start paying closer attention to the Nexus, but I won't spoil it yet. Incidentally, though, clearing an entire tower isn't necessarily the best way to get the highest score possible, and from what I remember, this is also true of Tactical Tower NEW specifically. Infinity Gaia posted:Edit: Also, yes, this game really needs a way to turn off the music. Please. Unless that's a feature in the main game that's not included in the demo? It's not, but behold, the developers are indeed paying attention to the thread: https://twitter.com/TeamNexus12/status/1253329472452886530 #tacticaldebug
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Apr 23, 2020 15:41
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A big part of the confusion regarding using your Nexus Medals is for some reason you can click doors that require keys to open them, but you seem to have to use the keyboard to open a nexus medal block. I was very confused about it as well since I've been using the mouse for everything.
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Apr 23, 2020 16:43
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Oh my lord, this game was made for me. I got very close to getting silver in my first run of the tutorial tower, and got to floor 9 of the defence tower before I had to give up and restart. This rules, and I hope they wise up on the insane DLC scheme.
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Apr 23, 2020 17:18
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Just imagine when the paywall goes up, he's gonna be really confused. Actually, if the Tactical Nexus developer is reading this thread, I have a message for them, in kinda weird language that I hope makes it through the machine translation: Your plan for price is a bad one that is costing you a lot of money Traditionally, Japanese PC games have high prices compared to Western ones, because the market is much smaller and usually more devoted. It took a long time to get Japanese developers to start translating and selling visual novels over here, because the perception was "Western fans don't buy them," but Western fans weren't buying them because they were like $70 plus international shipping. Now, games of the same quality can cost $30 or $40, and they're still translating and selling them because they're making more money! When your game is on Steam, you have a market many times bigger than "every PC gamer in Japan." The market is global, and Steam will do a lot of advertisement for you, showing your game to other people who have a history of purchasing puzzle games! Steam wants your game to sell, because they get money, too. Tactical Nexus is $15 right now, which is honestly about the right amount. Maybe the game could cost 20, or even 25 if you build up a lot of hardcore fans. But your current plan to increase the price as time goes on is the exact opposite of what you should be doing. When a big AAA game releases on Steam, watch what they do: for example, Doom Eternal and Red Dead Redemption 2 just released. As the months progress, they'll occasionally go on sale, and as time passes, the sale will be for bigger and bigger amounts. One might say "But if people know the game is going to be on sale later, won't they just wait until then to buy it? That's less money!" But that's wrong! Tons of market research has been done on this. There are two kinds of people who will buy your game for full price: people who really like and want your game, and rich people. By allowing your game to go on sale every so often, you're opening up the market to a bunch of people who would otherwise have never bought your game at all. Some people might but unsure for $20, but will buy for $15. And some people are poor, but still like cool games! Some people only have $10 to spare, some people only want to spend $5, and you can have money from all those people! I bought your game (or, more accurately, will within the week, when I have money) because I really like it. But I get by on a bit over $700 USD a month, and if Tactical Nexus cost $40, I wouldn't have been able to buy it, because sometimes I like to eat food after I pay rent. Raising the price higher will limit the number of people who buy your game only the hardest of hardcore fans, and you're going to run out of those quickly. Starting moderate, and occasionally lowering the cost, will allow you to hit the ENTIRE market - I'd think, as a person who makes a game about efficient action, you'd understand that 10,000 $5 purchases are better than 1000 $20 purchases, even if you have to think about it differently. Whew, alright, that was my public service announcement. If you actually read this, thank you. Wanton Spoon posted:I have gotten a gold medal in Tactical Tower NEW without using any Sun Stones or Medals (though I'd have to replay it to remember exactly how I did it). But yes, in most towers it's literally impossible to get medals of the highest ranks without spending some medals of your own. It should eventually become clear why this is the case once you start paying closer attention to the Nexus, but I won't spoil it yet. I gotta say, I'm terrible at this game and expect my interest in progressing to slow to a crawl, but I really enjoyed the rollercoaster in Tactical Tower New. "Hmmm, who wouldn't want a GLORY KEY? I dunno what I could possibly use it for, but I'll gently caress around for a bit." "oh no i am a drat fool" "Well, it's a long shot, but maybe the Nexus can help me - oh poo poo the Nexus can help me!" STRONGERS ARE WAITING  "I'm not strong enough to beat this guy anyways..."  I'm currently in a Dark Timeline where I optimized and refined in Tower NEW, but then I realized I had accidentally used a white key I needed, like a friggin' idiot, and the closest save file I had where I didn't use it was like two hours before, and I don't even know if that's an abandoned save file where I was trying a tactics that didn't work out. I'm not sure if I should just take the bronze and try again later, or what. John Lee fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 17:25
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Wanton Spoon posted:Hey everyone, senpai noticed us: Title change plz
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Apr 23, 2020 18:00
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Wanton Spoon posted:I brought up the pricing in the OP because it's dramatic enough that I thought people deserved a warning up front about it, but outside of that it's not a discussion I want dragging down what I think is a quality game, so I'm going to try not to comment on it too much myself. I'm willing to wait and see just how much the pricing impacts the success of the game. Ok, I don't want to clog up the thread, but since the devs are apparently reading this, I'll post once more and shut up about it. I want people who make weird niche games to succeed and make more weird niche games. This is just a terrible move. Play time is irrelevant, there are many indie games that people play for thousands of hours, many of which have both better production values and lower price. Also, going by the stats released on the Steam page, only 8% of players broke 100hrs playtime. Now, this might be because the game is new, but it's always going to be only a fraction of players. 1000s of hours is going to be an even smaller fraction. Barely anyone plays ANY game that long. And with this being a very specific niche, you're already narrowing your pool of players quite a bit. Your starting price is a good final price for a game like this. Maybe if you get a decent following, you could bump it up by like $5. I mean, you do you, but I'm just saying - it's not gonna work.
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Apr 23, 2020 18:01
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If you're enjoying the game, be sure to leave a review! A few more positive reviews will change the "All Reviews" summary from blank to "Positive" and give people a better impression of the game.
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Apr 23, 2020 19:18
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I'll refrain from making my own comments as stated, but since you were hoping they would, I'll just point out that the developers did respond to the comments on the pricing: https://twitter.com/TeamNexus12/status/1253352428000497664 Lead By Example posted:A big part of the confusion regarding using your Nexus Medals is for some reason you can click doors that require keys to open them, but you seem to have to use the keyboard to open a nexus medal block. I was very confused about it as well since I've been using the mouse for everything. Really? Weird, I find the keyboard much easier to use, most of the time, since I'm usually sorting through groups of enemies at once. I'll occasionally switch to the mouse in towers where the staircases are placed far apart from each other, but most of the time even these are placed in such a way that it's easier to traverse ten floors just by holding down one of the arrow keys. Now that I'm getting used to holding down "X" to speed up the combat, though, maybe the mouse would be more precise. I might try it at some point. John Lee posted:I gotta say, I'm terrible at this game and expect my interest in progressing to slow to a crawl, but I really enjoyed the rollercoaster in Tactical Tower New. I think pacing yourself is important in this game. When I said I got a gold in Tactical Tower NEW, that was only after hours of study and failed attempts, and this doesn't include the hours I had already spent in other towers. Even now, I'm still constantly falling short of goals I set for myself and having to start entire towers over, but I still learn something new each time. You're not bad at the game, the game's just extremely hard, and it's designed so every single rank-up feels like a huge accomplishment. If you're getting frustrated, my advice is to move onto another tower for a while, but it's worth it to write down some notes about the current tower before you do that. Just enough to refresh your memory about which parts are important when you eventually return to it later. (The in-game notes should prove to be a godsend in this regard.) Call Your Grandma posted:Title change plz Yeah, but which part?
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Apr 23, 2020 19:43
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Wanton Spoon posted:I'll refrain from making my own comments as stated, but since you were hoping they would, I'll just point out that the developers did respond to the comments on the pricing: It's roughly translated, but it sounds like they're trying to say they only want people who really want/love the game to buy it, and that there's not a lot of point in trying to sell to people who can't truly get into it. Which is fine as far as it goes, and I hope it goes well! I still think the game would reach a much wider audience at a lower price point, and fans create more fans - word-of-mouth is very important. Even the small amount reading and participating in this thread caused a noticeable spike in sales, right? People who would never have heard about the game are buying it, and people who would never have thought they'd like this sort of game are some of those people! When new people hear about the game, they tell other people, and with a niche game like this a lot of those will be misses - but SOME of those will be hits. It's exponential growth, am I right? At the least, though, I'll be buying for sure, and telling my friends about it - it's just that it'll be a much harder sell when the buy-in is more than hundred dollars than right now.
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Apr 23, 2020 20:47
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Whelp, you convinced me. I've always been looking for more stuff like Desktop Dungeons and this sounds right up my alley. Probably gonna buy this as soon as I'm done with work. Also, is it just me or is the spritework very reminiscent of Chip's Challenge? It's something about the look of the tiles, and the colored keys matching colored doors.
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Apr 23, 2020 21:14
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Can I get more than two sunstones from each tower?
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Apr 23, 2020 22:57
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Char posted:Can I get more than two sunstones from each tower? Oh yeah, I haven't explained this part in detail yet.  You can earn multiple Sun Stones in both Pure Nexus runs and Best Score runs, but the number you earn is calculated differently depending on the run. In a Pure Nexus run, your score is compared to the medal rankings. However many "ranks" your score is from the bottom, that's how many Sun Stones you earn for that run. Meaning, if your score would be good enough for a copper, you get 1 Sun Stone. If your score would be good enough for a silver, you get 2 Sun Stones, and so on. In the example above, my Pure Nexus score is above the 900,000 points required for a gold medal, so I get 3 Sun Stones for that score. Separately, for the Best Score run, you do not earn any Sun Stones for any of the initial medal ranks. However, every tower has a "Sun Stone score" above all the normal medals, the number with a plus sign in front of it. What you do is you take your total score, subtract whatever points are required to reach the top ranking medal, and then look at however many points you have remaining after that. Divide this number by the "Sun Stone score", round down, and that's how many Sun Stones you earn for the Best Score run. In this case, the highest rank possible is platinum at 7,000,000 points, but my top score is over 9,000,000 points. Since you earn a Sun Stone for every 2,000,000 points you earn above the platinum score, I have 1 Sun Stone from my Best Score run. You keep all Sun Stones you earn across both types of high scores, so in this case, I have a total of 4 Sun Stones from this tower.
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Apr 23, 2020 23:25
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Arzaac posted:Whelp, you convinced me. I've always been looking for more stuff like Desktop Dungeons and this sounds right up my alley. Probably gonna buy this as soon as I'm done with work. It's bizarre, but also charming, how the dev is responding quickly to this specific thread. https://twitter.com/TeamNexus12/status/1253434650510258177 Don't worry, though, guys, it's bedtime now. https://twitter.com/TeamNexus12/status/1253450094453518336
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Apr 24, 2020 01:23
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I played the demo for 3 hours yesterday. Bought the base game today and I know I won't regret it. I'd been having trouble getting into games lately but this one is very engrossing. Two hours pass by like nothing. There are definitely aspects of the design that could be improved on (UI) but the core is so good I'm not ready to start complaining.
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Apr 24, 2020 05:12
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Further trip report: I've cleared towers 1,2,3 and 5! I even got a silver medal on 2 without using any nexus stuff. Speaking of nexus stuff, it does not seem all that impactful. Maybe poo poo gets extremely real once I unlock higher nexus floors.
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Apr 24, 2020 11:17
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I'm missing something on Tutorial D, the thirds I think? The one where you can't grow ATK. I always end up at some dead end.
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Apr 24, 2020 11:49
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Char posted:I'm missing something on Tutorial D, the thirds I think? The one where you can't grow ATK. I always end up at some dead end. I beat it last night. As far as I can summarize, the basic tricks are: *The first 4 or 5 levels all have Golden Feathers (exp up items) that are fairly accessible at low level mixed in with much high level enemies. Focus on getting these asap while leaving weaker enemies on the lower floors alive. Eventually, you'll get to a point where you can sweep back and fight a bunch of guys who do 0 damage to you but still give a decent chunk of xp. This helps a ton for getting on top of the power curve. *That said, once you get to the higher level where the stairs are blocked by a red door (I think level 5) everything above that is pretty tough, so you can ignore climbing for a while and focusing on clearing the lower levels as efficiently as possible. *You shouldn't need to take keys on levelup more than a few times. I think I took 2 +3 yellow keys and 1 +2 blue keys over 40 levels. *But don't be afraid to spend keys immediately to grab atk+ items. You're going to end needing basically every atk+ item in the tower, so if it's gated by a key instead of an enemy there's little cost to grabbing it sooner than later.
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Apr 24, 2020 12:10
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