Post by CyberShadow in PCB DEFENSE comments

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Nicely done. I gave this a couple more hours. Here's my notes:

What do you think about making pickups collect on mouse hover, instead of click? It's how many other games do it, and removes one tedious element of the gameplay currently.
It can be a little difficult at first to make out what is a pickup and what is an enemy, they both can have the same color and shape. Maybe making pickups more visually distinct would help.
It can be a little difficult to understand a turret's level at a glance, I'm wondering if instead of flipping between green-ish/yellow-ish (or later yellow-ish/red-ish), it would just progress on a gradient, e.g. cyan->green->yellow->orange->red or something like that
Curious why building a turret is LMB and upgrading is RMB. Building a turret is a bit like upgrading the slot from level 0 to 1.
Wondering why the boss alert is a modal popup which pauses gameplay instead of just a banner or something like that.
Wondering why the '2' key tries to upgrade the same turret fully before moving to the next, is one fully upgraded turret really better than many partially upgraded ones for the same cost?
Trace Flood is more of a buff than debuff with any AoE upgrades, it massively inflates the score / SP earned for the run and the pickups usually make up for the number of enemies.
Not sure the "Back Tax" corruption works as intended. I think it can actually give you a discount?
Generally, some of the corruptions seem a lot more debilitating than others, and their threat stat doesn't always correlate. E.g. the energy capacity decrease is almost inconsequential since energy regeneration is the more important stat. E.g. the "-95% damage dealt" one just seems like an instant-run-ender. (Or maybe figuring which corruptions are bad, which are OK, and which are actually good is part of the game, and the threat stat is a red herring?)
Not sure if intended, but the "kill income" corruption also applies to the pickups, causing the game to generate $0 cash pickups. (Not that pickups are a major source of income past early game.)
I am not sure but I think "kill income" (or maybe some other corruption?) also applies to SP earned. That seems unintended as the choice wastes the entire run.
You can get trapped a little if you take the "multishot" upgrade early. With poor energy generation, the raised energy cost can be a major problem.
Some upgrades apply only to some weapons and do nothing for others, but you're still forced to buy them to unlock the next tier. Wondering if some skills could just have weapon-specific variants; that would also avoid having to put "does X if you have weapon Y, otherwise does Z" in the descriptions.
Maybe this is intentional, but the bolt weapon turrets are a lot worse than they could be because they aim directly at the enemy instead of leading the target, and unlike the core are not aligned with their path. An upgrade to improve "accuracy" (actually leading the shot) may be interesting but I guess would be a matter of balancing.
Bug: If you buy the turret slot count upgrade mid-run, the existing slots are not realign, so the new slots overlap the old ones.
Bug: If your screen / tab is taller than the play area, if you click the bottom of the play area you activate the buttons at the bottom of the screen, as if there was a second invisible copy of the buttons above the real ones.
FPS tanks in Firefox when the boss appears, I think due to the bloom effect. It persists over the game over and skill tree popups, and clears on a new run. I see there are some options related to this in the settings, but I don't think there is one for this one.
The short music loop is nice but a bit repetitive for how long it takes to beat the whole game. One simple fix would be to have loops for menu, regular gameplay, and boss.
The game mechanics page mentions that Auto buttons persist to local storage but they actually seem to clear on each run start.
One idea for balancing (and you can ask your AI assistant to do this for you): a simulator with an AI playing the game instead of the player; then measure win rate at different difficulty levels, average SP earned, etc. This should help measure and compare impact of different upgrades and corruptions.
Stopped playing because even with a fully maxed out skill tree I can't get past level 24 (out of 30) with the laser, sooner or later I'm forced to choose one of three run-ending corruption choices.

Hope this helps :)

This is one of the best write-ups I've gotten on this game. Couple hours of play + this level of notes is genuinely rare — thanks for taking it seriously. Going through your list, because you deserve a real response and not just a "thanks!":

Drops on hover instead of click: yeah, you're right. Click-to-collect made sense in my head when I started, but watching people play it's clearly just friction. Changing to hover.

Pickups vs enemies confusion: agreed. I'm going to make pickups visually distinct (round shape, pulse ring, bigger icon) so they read as "collectible" at a glance instead of blending into the enemy swarm.

Turret level gradient: this is a great idea and I feel dumb for not thinking of it. Cyan → green → yellow → orange → red is exactly how it should read at a glance. Doing this.

LMB vs RMB: you're right, and other people have said the same. Building is basically "upgrading from 0 to 1" so it should be the same button. Moving everything to left-click. Right-click will become a secondary action later, but for now, one button.

Boss alert modal: fair point. 2.5 seconds feels long mid-run, especially when you're about to die and just want to keep playing. Cutting it to 1.2s and moving it to a banner at the top of the screen — no more pause, no more modal.

Trace Flood corruption: yeah, this one's broken in a way I didn't catch. It's supposed to be a threat but the extra kills just inflate everything.

Back Tax: good catch, it's a bug. The intent was "level up costs 30% of your money" but the formula ended up doing the opposite. Fixing.

Corruption balance in general: you've nailed the core issue. The threat stat was designed to correlate with impact, but the numbers got away from me. I'm doing a pass where every corruption gets re-rated based on actual run impact, not my initial guess. The -95% damage one is getting downgraded from "instant run-ender" territory (probably removing it or softening it dramatically). The -90 energy cap is going from Threat 2 to Threat 1. Etc.

Multishot energy trap noted. I'm going to soften the cost scaling so early multishot doesn't brick your energy economy. It'll still cost more, but not "3 bolts = 9 energy" brutal.

Bolt turret leading: you're right, and this is subtle. Core cannon doesn't need lead because it's shooting from the center at incoming enemies. Turrets on the ring get the same logic applied, which is wrong — they need to predict where the enemy will be. Adding lead calculation.

lot upgrade bug: confirmed, on my list. When you buy extra slots mid-run, they overlap. Fixing the realignment logic.

Letterbox click-through this one's from my recent resolution independence fix (v3.1.0). The letterbox bars sit outside the game area but clicks still register. Fixing by clamping input to the virtual play field.

Firefox FPS with boss I've heard this from one other person. It's the phosphor bloom post-processing buffer, which is GPU-heavy and Firefox handles it worse than Chrome. I'll add a fallback that disables bloom during boss fights if frame time spikes.

Auto buttons persistence the help page is lying. They reset per run intentionally — the reasoning was "each run should start manual, no inherited automation." But the help text says otherwise. Fixing the text.

"Level 24 wall with maxed laser" — this is the one that bothers me most. The difficulty curve is supposed to let a fully-maxed tree push past 30 on a good run. If it can't, the late game is effectively softlocked, and that's a design failure, not a player problem. I'm going to look at boss HP scaling past level 20 and the corruption tier cap.

Thanks again for this. Real talk: this is the kind of feedback that makes the next version dramatically better.

itch.io

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