Hello everyone!

Last week I released an alpha build of my new game Destroy The Monoliths. Today, I’m happy to share an update! Version 0.2 is now available on itch.io and it comes with a few important changes. Let’s talk about that in this devlog!

Reworking the offensive mechanics

Destroy The Monoliths is a real-time strategy game that has some tower defense vibes. But the main focus, as emphasized by the title, is offensive. However, this aspect the game needed more work. I was not very happy with the current system and the player feedback I got after the alpha release confirmed this feeling. Attacking the monoliths was very frustrating and not very fun. You had to frequently shoot with your shields on and retreat, or just assault and die repeatedly. The main issue comes from the instant retaliation from the monoliths. I added this after the pre-alpha to prevent players from destroying monoliths too quickly. Giving some attack power to the monoliths was actually an interesting idea, but it turns out to be a bad fit for this game. So I decided to try another solution. Let’s review the changes and their consequences!

Downgrading monoliths

I removed the instant retaliation and also the health regeneration. Damaging a monolith still triggers additional enemies to spawn however. But this defense feature alone is not enough. So, what is the solution to prevent payers from destroying monoliths very fast? I gave them a lot of health. A whole lot. Like 1.5M+ points. The initial player DPS with the laser bullets is 400 damage per second. That means you need to shoot at it for more than an hour to destroy one monolith. This takes indeed a lot of time, problem solved.

Wait. But how do we win the game then? Shooting monoliths for hours seems very boring. Yes, and that’s the point: players are not supposed to attack monoliths anymore. The game now displays the exact health value of monoliths so you can see how little damage you make to them. I think the player will understand very quickly this is not the right move. But who will destroy the monoliths if not the player? Simple answer: turrets.

This is now a tower offense game

The game had tower defense vibes because you can build turrets to defend your base. But I think I should push this aspect further. Destroy The Monoliths is a building game. You mine resources and then build turrets. You build turrets to defend your base because you want to be able to respawn and mine more resources. But you now also build turrets to attack because you want to stop definitely the enemy waves and remove the need for defense before the map runs out of resources. The core actions in this game are mining and building. Sure you can attack enemies to assist your turrets but this is a secondary mechanic.

So this game is about building turrets to besiege monoliths. This is a tower offense! I added a very special building, the neutronic bomber, that specifically targets monoliths. And it does an insane amount of damage. But it will still take time to destroy the monoliths because they have a lot of HP. In the meantime, you need other turrets to take care of the enemies spawned and make sure the bombers stay protected. How you lay out your siege bases is up to you, that’s where the strategy comes in. Just be careful: neutronic bombers are expensive and loosing a few of them could be a major setback. 

What about temporary upgrades?

The goal of temporary upgrades was to allow the player to gradually scale until being powerful enough to take the monoliths down. Obviously, with the new attack mechanics, temporary upgrades make no sense anymore. So I removed them. XP level-ups will occur a bit less often, but you will each time get a new technology to choose. Besides, I decided to partition the options instead of mixing them all. The HUD now shows if your next XP level will offer a new building, weapon or relic.

Closing words

I hope you will like these changes. From my play-testing, I feel they make the game more enjoyable and unique. The hook appears clearer: Destroy The Monoliths is a real-time strategy tower offense game where you mine resources and build turrets to besiege monoliths that otherwise keep spawning ever more enemies.

The update is available on itch.io. You can read the full changelog below. Please give it a try and send me your feedback! I want to make sure the core gameplay is robust and fun before starting to work on secondary features and expanding the amount of content available.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time for another devlog!

Full changelog (Alpha v0.2)

• Rework of the offensive mechanics (see details in the post above)
• Removal of temporary upgrades
• Added a halo at the feet of the player to have an additional health indicator in the middle of the screen and complement the one at the bottom-left of the HUD.
• The player now dashes towards the aiming direction instead of the current velocity direction. This allows to instantly change direction with a dash move no matter the ground friction.
• Added a sound alarm and a brief message overlay to notify when the Core is attacked
• Added a few more information in the buildings description panel (e.g. status effect turrets now display their reload duration).
• Player XP level is now capped at a certain level + some HUD tweaks for the XP display
• Monoliths start to spawn enemies more progressively instead of all at the same time
• Revamped liquid mercury texture so that it contrasts better with the ground
• Fixed buildings reloading status not being saved properly, which caused all buildings to become synchronized at the load of a savegame
• Tweaked enemies death sound
• Some enemies now directly target the last entity (player or building) who attacked the monolith is spawning them
• Now displaying monolith health values
• Some tweaks to the campaign select screen
• The player status panel can now be accessed while choosing a new technology
• Improved map type and biome icons
• Tweaked the buildings range halo to be more visible even on frost maps
• Fixed some mistakes in the translations
  
• Various small bug fixes