Suggestion - More skill levels/tiers

Hai! Just thought I'd share my thoughts on this.

I find it too easy to max out all your skills. Rarely takes me more than 3 minutes to be maxed at everything (Yea, so I don't do much defense in the beginning. ), and it sort of removes the tactical decision-making. I totally understand if it weren't Uber's intentions to make the game that complicated, but I feel it would be a nice addition to add two or three more tiers to the skills. I'm not saying the skills should be more powerful, just saying it should be harder to maximize them, so you'd have to prioritize.

So instead of needing $550 to max a skill, you'd need about $750 - $800 per skill? And I'm not a big fan of just increasing the upgrade prices either, since it would seem like a more negative change in my mind.. It's all psychological.

I don't know. It's all just suggestions and stuff, take it or leave it. However, I definitely wouldn't mind hearing your thoughts on this.

I'm sure they did A LOT of testing on this very subject considering the game revolves around money. And no offense, but I find it hard to believe that you rake in almost $2000 in the first 3 min of the game. That would be a tough challenge for XShadowStormX.

i dont agree. most of the time i'm limping around with half upgraded skills trying to up turrets up and keep people out of the base. a raise in the skills would be terrible if you ask meh.

I will admit that I usually have my two main skills (most used, i mean) maxed out within the 1st 4 or 5 minutes.

I wouldnt be opposed to increasing the cost per skill AND adding in an endorsement that reduces the cost of skills as well.

Aight, nevermind then.
Thought it was normal to max it out fast, but I was wrong.

Your a Sniper aren't you? You can max it pretty fast if you don't die and get alot of headshots.

And build more turrets, Be a team player.

It is possible to max out your personal skills fairly quickly but you do it at the expense of helping the team by building/upgrading turrets. I rack up a ton of cash as Support but I'm constantly fighting whether I need to spend on turrets or my skills.

It's all about priorities isn't it?

Anyway when we originally prototyped the game we had much more complex branching skill trees for each character. It actually took a lot of discipline to cut it down to what we've got.

Awww. Just for giggles, could we get some examples of what was left out?

And I mainly play support or assassin. Max my skills, and then either build turrets, spawn bots or use annihilator, depending on the situation.

There are plenty of skills that were changed, dropped or modified. In addition some skills that used to have different paths got combined. For example when upgrading hack you had a choice between the range upgrade path or the rate of fire upgrade path.

We did so many experiments I could even begin to list them all. The supports airstrike had a ton of revisions to it for example. Assault had an upgrade path for laser trip mines. Just all kinds of stuff that we tried.

Snipers can kill bots for money to, if you forgot. By upgrading their traps and rifle, a sniper can deal some serious major dmg to advancing bots. It's not just about building defense it's about escorting your bots too. If you clear a path, you win.

That sounds awesome!
But I can see why most of it was dropped/melted together, since people would probably end up spending too much time upgrading, if it was more complicated.

Slightly off-topic now, but I was wondering whether you had an "Ideas team" when developing, or if mostly everyone contributed with "Wouldn't it be cool if.." and "How about.."?

What's interesting is that the more you play the game, the less money you actually try to spend on skills. When you first start your only concept is maxing your character but as you learn the maps and how to play you start realizing that you can avoid upgrading a skill if you use a Custom class. Likewise you may only need to take a given skill up to level 2 on certain maps and can use that extra cash for defenses, juice or map specific actions. Spending more money on level 4 skills is full of fail, not because the idea is not fun but because the costs would become too high and you would not be able to support anyone but yourself.

Works for me.. But I use all of my skills evenly, soo.. :/

I usually max the most used skills rather fast also, I would not be against them being a little more expensive.

Neutrino...sounds like you guys had a little feature creep at the beginning

The process for making the game involved a lot of experimentation and trying things out in "white box" form before we went into full production. I don't know if I would call it feature creep or just experimentation before settling on the correct solution. It's counter-intuitive but a lot of the difficulty in making a game is scoping the feature set appropriately. This was particularly difficult for us because we have so few people. Everyone on the team comes from the AAA $50-60 game side of the industry where we could create something with a massive scope. I still think we have an insane amount of stuff for an XBLA title from a small startup studio.

Sign me up, if you ever need testers. I won't mind white-boxing.