Originally, when the player started up a level, they had to survive 5:00 minutes while enemies poured in through breaches in the walls. The player could attack and destroy enemies, which would drop pick-ups, which then gave the player the option to patch up walls to stop or delay enemies from getting in.
However, this lead to some easy ways to glitch the game, about halfway through the timer the player could patch up all of the whole up to about 50% and then would have almost nothing to do for the remainder of the time. The player also had the option of avoiding patching all together, and (while it did grow a little more difficult with more enemies), players could circle around mobs and kite, picking off enemies one at time or simply just waiting out the clock.
While we hoped that balancing all of this in Alpha and Beta would solve some of these issues and keep the challenge of the player, some early attempts at play testing showed that simply increasing enemy speed or decreasing patch's health didn't do a great deal to mitigate the issues.
So, after looking through our game play, we've decided one thing to try was to scrap the game timer and turn the game from a surviving the clock objective to a surviving long enough to collect X number of items objective, in this cause Gingerbread cookies. In addition, we've set up patching so that the player will use those same gingerbread cookies in patching up holes, so this gives the tactics to the player of either taking on the hordes of enemies and trying to defeat them as quickly as possible to collect the items they need or try and patch up some of the wall holes to control the flow of enemies.
While some of these ideas are untested, we're prototyping them out over the weekend to see if maybe they'll take the game in he fun, challenging direction we've been aiming for from the start. Keep an eye out for more information!
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