Polycraft - A WebGL 3D tower defence game

This game (like everyone else is saying) is technically and visually impressive.

My advice for this game: drop the up-front PAY US LOL bullshit. Don't make people click through 18 menus to play the game. Drop the stupid achievements: "You clicked exactly where we told you to! Here's a diamond!" just isn't doing it for me. Let people start right away by building a town. No weapons, no build restrictions.

THEN once people have something to protect, start laying on the "That's a nice little town you've got there. It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it." Town under attack? Need a new tower fast? One dollar won't kill you.

Not that I ever play any F2P games (ever), so take this with a grain of salt, but suck people in and give them a reason to pay you. Everyone likes games where they build stuff. Now make them pay to fight entropy... but you've got to get them building right away, because I lost interest pretty fast.

Technically impressive, but the shoddy F2P kills the game.

If the game is tedious and boring without burning premium currency, you've failed at F2P.

The technology is impressive - it felt responsive and looked decently detailed. I stopped playing almost immediately though once every action had a slot-machine audio/video feedback to it. Its straight out of any Zynga game and it reduces gameplay to 'push button A' 'go to location B' 'repeat'.

I was hoping for "Torchlight on the web" but got "Farmville in WebGL".

Why is this special? What a horrid user-experience trying to actually get to the game though.

Everyone wanting to be wowed by webGL can go browse the latest crop of Ludum Dare entries instead.

pretty impressive visuals. it seems like running something like Torchlight in browser will be pretty simple soon enough.

the game itself is still just another boring f2p cow clicker though :\

Technically wonderful but man do we have to have achievements all over the place? What is moving your mouse pointer and clicking an achievement now?

When will we reach a point where the use of WebGL is no longer a headlining feature? WebGL is cool and all but I have never wanted to play a game based on the current coolness factor of it's underlying technology.

Games should be about fun.

I'm interested in WebGL but i'd rather be seeing links to posts about how people use it and how they performance tune it than just links to games built with it. I don't learn anything from just playing it.

I have the impression that many games are way more expensive nowadays because of this special currency business model. I usually would buy a game in a range between 20-60$ but those pay-for-my-currency games have packages between 2-100$ and if you are really addicted the 100$ one won't last a month, at the end I don't buy anything, when sometimes the game is awesome, I buy a package to "support" the company.

Is there any blog or article by the authors with a behind the scenes description of the game? (team or solo, artist, technologies, infrastructure, ...)

The game is nice but I prefer reading about those as I see a lot going on the tech side.

Gameplay trailer here: youtube.com/watch?v=pSDp5srTgrA

looks nice - haven't got far enough to see the tower defence side of it though

That is quite awesome! I am not a fan of pay2win though. Also nice domain.