Hm, thanks for the feedback. I've never played the Mac build. One of our developers kind of made it on a whim. I wonder if there was some weirdness there. 

Hey, thanks for the feedback and thanks for playing!

I agree with your comment on the AI difficulty. I think I may have over-tuned it to the level 1 stage. It's essentially applying the same tactics no matter what stage it's on, but the impassable terrain on stages 2 and 3 definitely mess with their plans. It feels kind of weird, but I wonder if I should have swapped level 1 and 3. At one point I considered making the AI a little less aggressive on offense in level 1 because you have to make basically no errors or they will dunk on you (literally). 

The player move indicator was a struggle for us in development. You weren't seeing a bug; you were seeing an edge case. Essentially players can move and "attack" once per turn, so we turn off the highlight once they've done both. However... technically you can move and have no options to attack right now. But if another teammate pushes an opponent into you, you can then take a push attack action (or a pass if you're passed the ball). So we can't really turn off their highlight after just moving. Or, rather, we could, but we lose some strategy and potentially frustrate players the other way. It's an annoying issue. We talked about adding color coding or icons, but I didn't like the increased complexity of adding weird iconography.

Good point on pressing Esc to cancel out of movement options. Definitely it could make sense to include the text "Press Esc to Cancel" in the bottom left when you're choosing. I agree with your opinion on Undo as well. It's annoying to make a bad move by accident or whatever. Since there's no RNG, it should technically be allowed to just totally go back to the beginning of your turn if you want to play it differently as well as going back player actions. This feature idea crossed my mind during development, but it was a touch too annoying to code so I didn't get around to it. RIP.

Thanks again for your time and feedback!

Thanks, Tom.

That's a fair point about selecting a player. I think the tutorial should probably explicitly have a line like "Hover the cursor over xyz and press space to select". I saw a tester or two struggle with that for a moment, but I was maybe too quick to write it off like "Well, people have played Fire Emblem and know how to handle these types of controls, hopefully.." But I think it's an actual point of friction that could be smoothed away fairly easily. 

A few people have said that about a mobile device, but I don't see it. Part of that is because originally we had mouse controls and you would click on the character then click the space to select it or what have you, and it was actually kind of visually weird to be trying to click on a tile behind players' sprites. That's part of why we ended up going with cursor control at the end of the day. I've said it to other commenters, but, ugh, I feel very burned by the isometric perspective in a lot of ways. 

Thanks a lot for giving our game a shot, though! 

Thanks for the kind words. I went back and forth on the keyboard controls. At one point, I had it set so that up was always "towards the net" on both offense and defense but some testers were confused by that. And then some testers were confused by the current implementation as well, where the perspective never changes.. My main takeaway is to avoid isometric in the future, ha.. 

Thanks for the write-up! 

Originally this was going to be more like basketball. So, like, any given time you had an X% chance to score if you take a shot minus X% from nearby defenders, etc. So I had that totally coded out before I realized, wow this isn't fun. So I ironed out the game rules with a friend on a checkers board. 

Wish we could have had more narrative. That was a run-out-of-time issue. I don't think we leaned into the ridiculousness enough. 

Totally agree on the camera angle. We used Final Fantasy Tactics as a camera angle base, but I think it doesn't work super well in a game where it's totally flat. Makes you realize how much those games used terrain verticality. Early on I was cursing that isometric decision, but we already had so many sprites. We tried things like making the tiles larger, but nothing really alleviated the issue. If I had a magic wand I would probably do a top-down view. Make it more tactical, or whatever. 

I would have totally added a cursor "jump across holes" feature, but we added that stage literally on the last day, and I was scared to, ha.. 

The AI I think might be too cruel on newcomers. I thought about making it a little stupider on offense turn 1 level 1 because, as is, they will go absolutely ham and you basically have to make 0 mistakes on defense. The AI isn't quite as good when holes or lava are involved, though. I may have coded around the level 1 too much. 

Thanks! I had never done this type of AI before. I had a lot of fun making it. Generally my AI are "walk at player" types. It was cool doing more of a behavior tree implementation.