NodeRunner Deluxe
Fling Yourself and Get Upgrades to take out the Chaser Node!
An Alpha build of NodeRunner Deluxe, based on my Alakajam entry NodeRunner: https://aaronbacon.itch.io/noderunner
Collect Mods to give yourself new abilities and weapons to take out the chaser.
This is the first Build of the game, so I'm aware theres alot of balancing and redesigning to be done.
I'd love to get peoples thoughts on if anything seemed unfair/unclear, or if anything was far too under/overpowered.
Controls: (Explained Better in "How To Play" section):
- Left Mouse to Launch
- Right Mouse to Swap Weapons (Once Bought)
- Middle Mouse to swap Target (All Enemies/Chaser Only)
Mostly I'm looking for feedback on the UI and general balance feel of the game. Did anything feel too powerful? Close to useless? The Costs of Items are kindof just vague guesses at this point, but let me know if you felt that you weren't able to buy things at a rate you would have liked. I'm also cautious if the Chaser Upgrades are easy to read and keep track of or if they need to be moved somewhere else.
Ohh yeah, I remember playing the jam version of this quite a bit. Has improved a lot.
Almost beat it on my first run even though I basically had no idea what I was doing. Just lucked out to really powerful weapons. That short range thing, knife and the node mine one. Seems like those at least are almost mandatory. On my last run I had first two but not the mine one and just couldn't damage the boss fast enough to keep up with its healing even though I was circling right close to it (had shield and amazing healing myself too). But after several minutes he managed to whittle me down to dead. And at that point I was sitting on almost 2k gold too but the rare shops didn't really offer me anything good anymore.
Obviously it's still an early version but missing quite a lot of things that would make it much more pleasant to play. Sound effects for one. They really would help keep up with different things that were going on. Abandoning a run and starting again does not work and nothing seems to spawn.
The shop view should obviously be on top, now the damage numbers were able to obfuscate the choises.
The controls were simple but awkward. Feels like it's not that punishing anymore to whiff your launches as it was on the original version which is nice. Weapon switching was annoying and made purchasing more than one weapon kinda pointless. Allowing multiple weapons to automatically all shoot would be way more fun (but of course would need balancing). Switching between boss/closest targeting was interesting but would also need another way to distinguish which mode you were in without needing to read the text. And same for boss abilities, there really was no time to see what those were as they popped up in midst of action.
The boss abilities being on a timer feels a bit bad as if you are getting bad luck or just are not doing that great speed wise, you're just hosed as you can't really keep up. But I don't know if pausing or even slowing down the game for that notification would be a good choice either. Voice announcer for them would of course be nice way to keep the action going and still allow player to understand what happened. Or the announcement text could be more centered but of course would need to be less obtrusive to still allow the player to see the action.
Really need to make the enemy bullets more visible. Dodging them was hard enough already but not being able to notice them made it nigh impossible.
Some more (easy to implement) powerup ideas: better tracking, homing bullets (maybe too good), faster shots. The knife weapon could be stackable and even otherwise upgradeable (like its movement speed) too.
Went for one more try and…
Guess shotty with glass cannon is pretty good too 😅 Basically just ignored all small fries after a bit and circled around the boss and nuked it down.