Fun, polished, perhaps a little too easy. I’m no expert at card battlers so it’s hard to comment on balance, but clearing the first floor on my first clueless attempt didn’t leave me with much of a feeling of accomplishment. Think Slay the Spire: I think it took 2 or 3 runs before I beat the first boss.
One thing that I think is missing is some sort of visual of your opponent. Would add to the sense of progression to go from smashing lowly thugs/slimes/rats, to demonic chaos gods or whatever. Even if you just show a portrait before the battle.
Could you tell me what resolution you are playing on? this is clearly not how this screen is intended to be displayed, you are missing an X on the top right that allows you to close the merchant.
For the time being you can try pressing escape and changing the game to windowed mode, this way you can lower the resolution and hopefully see the full screen!
Oh my... yes, very addicting. I had to stop playing because the game got stuck on a luck event (something with a fire orb), I couldn't press continue and the game wouldn't let me proceed because it was still "going on". I tried to go to the menu and continue, but it would set me 10 minutes back and was stuck even worse.
First time I played warrior, didn't know what I was doing, but quickly got the hang of it even though I died early on. Then finished a full run. The second run was with an adventurer, which got very weird very quickly, as I got the "random dice of doom" (random effect for both players) which was kinda... chaotic. Both players constantly getting double health etc... eventually I died to some card dealing 30 damage because it would gain attack based on both graveyards? Pretty absurd but funny.
A little confusing with spells and minions sharing the same art.
Power tripping was pretty fun when I got the same card upgraded twice, 2 mana for 8atk 13defense or something like that.
When crafting cards, I didn't realize they don't end up in the deck right away, so I'd play without them without noticing.
Might have more to say tomorrow, gotta sleep.. played it far too long, lol.
I'm so sad to hear that the game died for you. I changed that specific event, specifically for the adventurer and I fricking forgot to test it, very unfortunate.
The crafted cards going to the vault is a bit confusing, I have to do something about that.
At any rate, thanks for the feedback, I'll look into that bug and if I can fix it I'll upload a new build, feel free to download that next time you play if you actually end up taking it for another spin!
Alright, so I played a few more runs. Veeeery fun and addicting. Played some more adventurer but couldn't finish. But it was definitely the most fun because of how wild it would get, sometimes both players having >50 health. Then I played wizard and pyromancer. With the wizard it was hard to get something interesting going. I ended always milling the enemies to death because I never managed to get their health down. But I guess that's somewhat intentional? However, what bothered me was the teleport ability. I never wanted to skip combat before a fight, only during one. Would have been nice to have it as a escape mechanic (and maybe try again?). Even had the wand to get the ability refill, but that was pointless.
I tried crafting, but the forges were very rare. However, I really enjoyed the theory crafting. Took most of my time to figure out what combo to go for. That lead to 2 "issues", however:
The final time bonus multiplier was annoying, because of how much time I would spend planning.
Because I was often "short" on gems, I ended up creating maxed out cards with high mana cost which I could summon from the graveyard for insane effects (triple "on any card played deal 3 damage") and effectively no crafting material cost. So, I would spend all my resources on a low mana "revive on exhaust" minion or something like that and using "discard" to put the op minion in the graveyard. While this is fun, it feels kinda broken being able to almost oneshot enemies. I will definitely experiment with it some more.
However, I had initially tried the build with a minion with "During each of your Standby Phases, discard 1 card." But this discard effect would not trigger the "When this card is Discarded" effect. The pyromancer however works pretty well with the many normal discard effects.
When crafting, I also hadn't realized I could scroll down the atk/def values. I assumed that I would only get values above 3 when I hit random. I was also missing some "negative" effects like "to summon this card, sacrifice/discard" modifiers to work in synergy with the discard effect, or lowering the mana cost.
At the merchant I sometimes had cards with negative gold costs.
Venom with high defense seems op.
Hm, that's about it that I can think of right now. Imo definitely Kickstarter worthy.
So, I'm level 9, got most classes, except for Assassin and maybe one more. Since level 6 or 7 the game feels almost impossible to lose with the hero upgrades. I died a few times during the first time playing, but haven't died ever since as far as I remember. Feels more like I'm just playing my combos without much regards for what the opponent does. Also, the health potions are so strong, "Strength" feels almost pointless. I tried the "Craft a minion with 4 effects" quest, but didn't figure it out yet. I assume it has to do with a specific item and/or luck event to get there. Other than that I have like 80 to 90% of the main quests/achievements. My usual run time is about 50 to 60 minutes. The fastest was 35. I tried the sub 20 quest but that wasn't really for me. I played on difficulty level 8 or 9, so maybe that makes a difference, but I didn't want to cheese it by playing on level 1. If you want to know anything specific just let me know. Otherwise here are my notes from playing today:
Bug where the combat was stuck at "Battle Start". the arrow would jitter between "Main" and "Battle Start"
Infinite loop, I'll attach a pic: had two minions with "When you gain life, gain 2 life" on the field plus "Compendium of Curses" and "Ring of Regeneration". Not sure if the items had something to do with it, but the cards would trigger each other indefinitely. I managed to stop it by opening the inventory and closing it.
Second infinite loop with 3 cards. Same as before plus "on HP: discard 2 cards from opponent hand at random". This time I could stop it by spamming escape while spamming the next phase button. Both times it stopped when I was at around 330 health. Maybe there's a hard limit there?
Game crash: I was playing a run for about 50 minutes and had to pause. I was in the "Dungeon", so nothing was happening, but after 10 minutes I thought I might as well hit escape to stop the timer. 30 minutes later I came back, hit "resume game" and it froze: "not responding".
Would be really nice to "keeping" decks after finishing.
I found the Quest tab only rather late... while I did see it, and the number, I never clicked it. The connection from the text "Quest" to my "level score" wasn't very clear. Also, I thought the achievements to unlock classes/decks etc were hidden.
Records: would be nice to see highest damage dealt (highest single monster attack, highest overkill, such things)
I'd love an option to "keep"/replay/save a deck after finishing with it. Some builds are so fun, I want to replay them.
I'm on level 8 or 9 now, but enemies don't play much different. Sometimes they don't play anything for the first few rounds.
Bug when crafting: the 3 cards on the left keep rising. When I take my time, they'll eventually cover the gem selection.
When going for specific quests, it would be nice to mark them. Would make it easier to remember what I'm going for, maybe even seeing progress (like beating 9 champions). I'm not sure, but I don't think I could check the quests from inside a run?
Some card combinations are so bad, they shouldn't appear on random cards imo (example: 2 Mana: Add 1 mana).
Navigating the skill tree is a little awkward. Maybe I haven't found it yet, but so far I always have to refund everything. I'd expect to reduce the number of a single skill by right clicking. Also, at first it wasn't entirely clear how unlocking works. Having to click once for unlocking - which takes "Quests resource" -, and then again clicking to apply - which takes "Experience resource" - took some time to get used to. Another thing is the "Level X Unlock", which wasn't entirely obvious from the start. I thought "level" referred to my own level, not the amount of skill points used in that tree.
Bug on "Block -> Confirm Attackers". Button is stuck in "Confirm attackers (red)", arrow on "Block", minions raised but no yellow glow. Priority cards are also not glowing blue. Just nothing happening.
Bug on loading/continue: Similar to what happened on my first play where I tried to load the game: the dungeon was was "greyed out" as if everything was inactive. After the last bug I had to load, then I misclicked on a different route, so I wanted to load again, then it got stuck (basically was loading the same game twice within a minute).
I wished there was an option to continue the dungeon one more time after the final fight. It always takes me to the final boss to finally get my deck power rolling, but then it's already over.
It would be interesting to know "who" or "what" I'm fighting, like another commenter has said. Having an enemy "face" like in Heartstone would work really well here. But more than a face, something like knowing what kind of deck/class I'm fighting against.
And I can confirm that the bugged luck event (fireball) now works.
Infinite loop bug on "gain health". The [Gentle Cultivator] would trigger each other. And the [Mech Spy] would get triggered in turn.
This loop happened twice, and both times it would go to roughly 330 health. Not sure if it's by chance.
This is what the bugged dungeon looks like after loading.
Well, first of all, thank you for all the feedback, and for playing in general!
I'll go over some of your comments.
-Difficulty: It is a bit hard for me to balance the randomness of enemies, the power of the meta-progression elements, and the power of the different classes with the player skill. The first 20 difficulties could be very easy for veteran card game players while difficulty 0 could be nightmarish for new players. I'm thinking of ways to balance this, but the AI being kinda of weak right now is a result of me nerfing it so much for the sake of inexperienced players feeling cheated by cheap AI cards. Also, I'm thinking about nerfing the meta-progression skills since they are a bit too strong at the moment. Lastly, you mention enemies not playing differently. They indeed don't change much in the way they play, but rather their decks get stronger the higher the difficulty. I know this isn't ideal but it is what I could manage for now. Not playing cards only occurs because their randomly generated deck was maybe terrible and they didn't get any cheap playable cards.
-Strength and potions: This is true, strength goes from being quite desirable to being basically useless with meta progression. I'm thinking of ways to deal with this.
-Infinite loops: The game has a hard cap of 50(I think?) triggers per card per turn, but that does take some time to reach with two cards. People like going infinite so I left the cap very high, but it might be a bit much, I'll do something about it.
-Quests, meta progression, and how they are unclear: These two systems are in fact a bit unclear when you first pick them up. Hopefully, once I get tutorials going this issue will be solved. Also right-clicking to level-down should be implemented at some point.
-Keeping decks: A system to keep records of your previous run's decks is being worked on for both the purpose of just checking your best decks of all time, to having them available for custom runs once those get implemented.
-Cards rising bug: That was supposed to be fixed but a recent change might have broken them I'll check it out.
-Quest tracker: This was requested by other players and I do want to implement something like this at some point, so yeah, it is on the list.
-Giving enemies a face: This is indeed something I should do, I'm going to try and figure out a way to get this going at some point.
-Bugs: I'm really sad to hear you encountered so many bugs. Having a screenshot of what the field looked like when those occurred would've been extremely helpful for the bugs in combat. For the loading bug, I haven't encountered them myself lately, but they have been known to happen before. If you even encounter them again in the future, sending your savefile my way would be really helpful. It gets overwritten as soon as you start a new game, so if you intend to send it, please keep that in mind.
-Game crash: Haven't seen this one before. I'll try to test out the scenario you mentioned.
-Card combinations being bad: That specific scenario (Add 1 mana for a cost of 2) was supposed to be forcibly fixed already but I guess it can still happen, I'll look into it. In general, I do want to keep some level of silliness for card generation, but I'll think about restricting more dumb combinations in the future.
-The Assassin quest; To unlock the assassin you need to craft a Minion with 1 active and 3 passives, add it to your deck, and play it during battle for the achievement to unlock.
Again thank you very much for your feedback and comments friend!
Thanks for the detailed explanation, but that wasn't necessary! Though appreciated.
While the inifinite loops are fun, they're somewhat annoying because of how long they take to resolve - especially when the time is running.
I'll keep an eye out for the bugs.
Btw, are there "static" (non-random) cards? Not from the starter deck, but from packs and shops. One card I had, some 7/7 dragon minion that would cause the enemy to draw 3 on my stand-by or something, would get refined but the "draw 3" didn't disappear. I was just wondering, because that card had a unique name - nothing that seemed random. Was a nice touch if intentional.
No problem the least I can do is give a proper reply to comments!
There's no static cards (yet). SRs and URs have a chance of being generated with unique names based on their card art. Refining can either decrease mana cost, remove negative effects, or increase attack and resistance, so maybe you got one of the other refine bonuses.
I think one of the charms of the game is how it sometimes generates cards that seem very well designed even though they are completely random.
Definitely can be addicting. I noticed that the battle phase seemed to freeze on some turn around the 45minute mark, everything else was working fine and I could exit to the menu and rejoin the same run so I didn't take a screenshot of what happened but the enemy had three monsters preparing to attack and I had no blockers but I couldn't click the confirm blockers button to make the attacks go through. Also would it be possible for you to make the whole card text appear upon hover not just the keywords? I just ask because personally I had a hard time reading some of the effects of the cards that had a lot of text so I couldn't play around them properly.
Card crafting is very fun. The card art clashes with the aesthetic of the rest of the game a bit including the name font. The game is very GPU intensive for some reason.
i consistently have issues with Unity games being too zoomed in with no way to see the sides; in most games this is an annoyance, but Card Artisan has too much on the sides that i can't play without. i assume there is little you can do about this but i thought i'd let you know
no idea, i assume because my resolution is 1600x1050 or something. going windowed doesn't change that view and i think the only resolution option i have is 1250 width or so times whatever height
I see, thanks for the information. I still have to do a lot of adjustments for resolutions other than 16:9. Honestly if you are actually interested in playing the game I can make a custom build to adjust to your resolution right now.
Comments
Fun, polished, perhaps a little too easy. I’m no expert at card battlers so it’s hard to comment on balance, but clearing the first floor on my first clueless attempt didn’t leave me with much of a feeling of accomplishment. Think Slay the Spire: I think it took 2 or 3 runs before I beat the first boss.
One thing that I think is missing is some sort of visual of your opponent. Would add to the sense of progression to go from smashing lowly thugs/slimes/rats, to demonic chaos gods or whatever. Even if you just show a portrait before the battle.
Could see myself getting addicted to this!
Can't pass this screen!
Hey friend!
Could you tell me what resolution you are playing on? this is clearly not how this screen is intended to be displayed, you are missing an X on the top right that allows you to close the merchant.
For the time being you can try pressing escape and changing the game to windowed mode, this way you can lower the resolution and hopefully see the full screen!
Oh my... yes, very addicting. I had to stop playing because the game got stuck on a luck event (something with a fire orb), I couldn't press continue and the game wouldn't let me proceed because it was still "going on". I tried to go to the menu and continue, but it would set me 10 minutes back and was stuck even worse.
First time I played warrior, didn't know what I was doing, but quickly got the hang of it even though I died early on. Then finished a full run. The second run was with an adventurer, which got very weird very quickly, as I got the "random dice of doom" (random effect for both players) which was kinda... chaotic. Both players constantly getting double health etc... eventually I died to some card dealing 30 damage because it would gain attack based on both graveyards? Pretty absurd but funny.
A little confusing with spells and minions sharing the same art.
Power tripping was pretty fun when I got the same card upgraded twice, 2 mana for 8atk 13defense or something like that.
When crafting cards, I didn't realize they don't end up in the deck right away, so I'd play without them without noticing.
Might have more to say tomorrow, gotta sleep.. played it far too long, lol.
Thanks for the feedback friend!
I'm so sad to hear that the game died for you. I changed that specific event, specifically for the adventurer and I fricking forgot to test it, very unfortunate.
The crafted cards going to the vault is a bit confusing, I have to do something about that.
At any rate, thanks for the feedback, I'll look into that bug and if I can fix it I'll upload a new build, feel free to download that next time you play if you actually end up taking it for another spin!
Alright, so I played a few more runs. Veeeery fun and addicting. Played some more adventurer but couldn't finish. But it was definitely the most fun because of how wild it would get, sometimes both players having >50 health. Then I played wizard and pyromancer. With the wizard it was hard to get something interesting going. I ended always milling the enemies to death because I never managed to get their health down. But I guess that's somewhat intentional? However, what bothered me was the teleport ability. I never wanted to skip combat before a fight, only during one. Would have been nice to have it as a escape mechanic (and maybe try again?). Even had the wand to get the ability refill, but that was pointless.
I tried crafting, but the forges were very rare. However, I really enjoyed the theory crafting. Took most of my time to figure out what combo to go for. That lead to 2 "issues", however:
However, I had initially tried the build with a minion with "During each of your Standby Phases, discard 1 card." But this discard effect would not trigger the "When this card is Discarded" effect. The pyromancer however works pretty well with the many normal discard effects.
When crafting, I also hadn't realized I could scroll down the atk/def values. I assumed that I would only get values above 3 when I hit random. I was also missing some "negative" effects like "to summon this card, sacrifice/discard" modifiers to work in synergy with the discard effect, or lowering the mana cost.
At the merchant I sometimes had cards with negative gold costs.
Venom with high defense seems op.
Hm, that's about it that I can think of right now. Imo definitely Kickstarter worthy.
Final feedback for now... maybe...
So, I'm level 9, got most classes, except for Assassin and maybe one more. Since level 6 or 7 the game feels almost impossible to lose with the hero upgrades. I died a few times during the first time playing, but haven't died ever since as far as I remember. Feels more like I'm just playing my combos without much regards for what the opponent does. Also, the health potions are so strong, "Strength" feels almost pointless.
I tried the "Craft a minion with 4 effects" quest, but didn't figure it out yet. I assume it has to do with a specific item and/or luck event to get there.
Other than that I have like 80 to 90% of the main quests/achievements.
My usual run time is about 50 to 60 minutes. The fastest was 35. I tried the sub 20 quest but that wasn't really for me. I played on difficulty level 8 or 9, so maybe that makes a difference, but I didn't want to cheese it by playing on level 1.
If you want to know anything specific just let me know. Otherwise here are my notes from playing today:
Infinite loop bug on "gain health". The [Gentle Cultivator] would trigger each other. And the [Mech Spy] would get triggered in turn.
This loop happened twice, and both times it would go to roughly 330 health. Not sure if it's by chance.
This is what the bugged dungeon looks like after loading.
Well, first of all, thank you for all the feedback, and for playing in general!
I'll go over some of your comments.
-Difficulty: It is a bit hard for me to balance the randomness of enemies, the power of the meta-progression elements, and the power of the different classes with the player skill. The first 20 difficulties could be very easy for veteran card game players while difficulty 0 could be nightmarish for new players. I'm thinking of ways to balance this, but the AI being kinda of weak right now is a result of me nerfing it so much for the sake of inexperienced players feeling cheated by cheap AI cards. Also, I'm thinking about nerfing the meta-progression skills since they are a bit too strong at the moment. Lastly, you mention enemies not playing differently. They indeed don't change much in the way they play, but rather their decks get stronger the higher the difficulty. I know this isn't ideal but it is what I could manage for now. Not playing cards only occurs because their randomly generated deck was maybe terrible and they didn't get any cheap playable cards.
-Strength and potions: This is true, strength goes from being quite desirable to being basically useless with meta progression. I'm thinking of ways to deal with this.
-Infinite loops: The game has a hard cap of 50(I think?) triggers per card per turn, but that does take some time to reach with two cards. People like going infinite so I left the cap very high, but it might be a bit much, I'll do something about it.
-Quests, meta progression, and how they are unclear: These two systems are in fact a bit unclear when you first pick them up. Hopefully, once I get tutorials going this issue will be solved. Also right-clicking to level-down should be implemented at some point.
-Keeping decks: A system to keep records of your previous run's decks is being worked on for both the purpose of just checking your best decks of all time, to having them available for custom runs once those get implemented.
-Cards rising bug: That was supposed to be fixed but a recent change might have broken them I'll check it out.
-Quest tracker: This was requested by other players and I do want to implement something like this at some point, so yeah, it is on the list.
-Giving enemies a face: This is indeed something I should do, I'm going to try and figure out a way to get this going at some point.
-Bugs: I'm really sad to hear you encountered so many bugs. Having a screenshot of what the field looked like when those occurred would've been extremely helpful for the bugs in combat. For the loading bug, I haven't encountered them myself lately, but they have been known to happen before. If you even encounter them again in the future, sending your savefile my way would be really helpful. It gets overwritten as soon as you start a new game, so if you intend to send it, please keep that in mind.
-Game crash: Haven't seen this one before. I'll try to test out the scenario you mentioned.
-Card combinations being bad: That specific scenario (Add 1 mana for a cost of 2) was supposed to be forcibly fixed already but I guess it can still happen, I'll look into it. In general, I do want to keep some level of silliness for card generation, but I'll think about restricting more dumb combinations in the future.
-The Assassin quest; To unlock the assassin you need to craft a Minion with 1 active and 3 passives, add it to your deck, and play it during battle for the achievement to unlock.
Again thank you very much for your feedback and comments friend!
Thanks for the detailed explanation, but that wasn't necessary! Though appreciated.
While the inifinite loops are fun, they're somewhat annoying because of how long they take to resolve - especially when the time is running.
I'll keep an eye out for the bugs.
Btw, are there "static" (non-random) cards? Not from the starter deck, but from packs and shops. One card I had, some 7/7 dragon minion that would cause the enemy to draw 3 on my stand-by or something, would get refined but the "draw 3" didn't disappear. I was just wondering, because that card had a unique name - nothing that seemed random. Was a nice touch if intentional.
No problem the least I can do is give a proper reply to comments!
There's no static cards (yet). SRs and URs have a chance of being generated with unique names based on their card art. Refining can either decrease mana cost, remove negative effects, or increase attack and resistance, so maybe you got one of the other refine bonuses.
I think one of the charms of the game is how it sometimes generates cards that seem very well designed even though they are completely random.
Definitely can be addicting. I noticed that the battle phase seemed to freeze on some turn around the 45minute mark, everything else was working fine and I could exit to the menu and rejoin the same run so I didn't take a screenshot of what happened but the enemy had three monsters preparing to attack and I had no blockers but I couldn't click the confirm blockers button to make the attacks go through. Also would it be possible for you to make the whole card text appear upon hover not just the keywords? I just ask because personally I had a hard time reading some of the effects of the cards that had a lot of text so I couldn't play around them properly.
Hey friend!
Thank you for playing! I wish I could've seen a screenshot of the problem you mentioned, but oh well.
Regarding zoom, you can scroll up on A card and have a big version show up for ease of reading.
Card crafting is very fun. The card art clashes with the aesthetic of the rest of the game a bit including the name font. The game is very GPU intensive for some reason.
Thanks for playing fren!
I'm working on renewing card art but it might still clash a bit. Fonts are hard but I'll try to improve.
I'm still trying to find out why the game is so GPU intensive, it shouldn't be tbh.
Thanks for the feedback!
i consistently have issues with Unity games being too zoomed in with no way to see the sides; in most games this is an annoyance, but Card Artisan has too much on the sides that i can't play without. i assume there is little you can do about this but i thought i'd let you know
Hey! Thanks for the feedback.
How do you mean exactly? Are you trying to play on 4:3 or something? Or do you mean it just from a design standpoint being annoying to play?
Why and how is your screen like that?
What's your resolution ? Also you could try playing not on full screen and changing the resolution so the window is smaller.
no idea, i assume because my resolution is 1600x1050 or something. going windowed doesn't change that view and i think the only resolution option i have is 1250 width or so times whatever height
I see, thanks for the information. I still have to do a lot of adjustments for resolutions other than 16:9. Honestly if you are actually interested in playing the game I can make a custom build to adjust to your resolution right now.
if that's easy for you, please go ahead. otherwise i can just keep an eye on your devlogs to see when you've added support for different resolutions
I figured out a quick and dirty solution that should fix the problem for you, although I'll have figure out a proper implementation later on.
I'll upload the fix in a bit.
There you go, friend. Please give that a try and let me know how it works out
Not sure if the Mac version was also fixed, but I’m getting a lot of screen cutoff in fullscreen:
Hey friend!
Thanks for the feedback. Could you tell me what resolution you are playing on?