Visual Feedback : Making understandable chaos🤪

We wanted to share with you some of the early and new visuals used to help you learn about the different game mechanics. While we are still aiming for a wacky ambiance, we also want the tower defense aspect to be easy to learn for more casual players.

The arrows on the floor are a good example. While we wanted players to understand that they show the enemy’s path, we also wanted them to blend in rather than be too obvious. The first version of these arrows was very loud. There are only two enemy paths in our demo level, and the visuals were already competing with other game elements. While we do need to know the enemy’s paths to plan our strategy, we don’t need to see them as prominently as other elements like turrets or resource points. The final version is much cleaner and keeps the essentials.

Another important feature of the game is the crafting table. We needed players to understand what they have (their inventory) and what they need (which resources to collect). Many iterations were made to find the right interface. The balance between too much and not enough was hard to achieve. We don’t claim to have the best crafting interface of any game, but we have the best one for our game at the moment.

Lastly, we have the game HUD. We had to include the objectives to complete, the enemy waves to beat, the emitter’s remaining lives, and the time between the construction and defense phases. We needed those elements to be presented in a clear and simple way. Our designer came up with a clever idea for the multiplayer mode: the lines splitting the screen could serve as the enemy wave timer. All the other information would be displayed in the center of the screen for all players. It is therefore easy to access quickly to a lot of information.

Thanks for stacking with us — see you in the next devlog!

— The Hack 'n' Stack Team 💙