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(+2)

Super addicted to what little I can manage to play. Even if it takes me 30mins to get a handful in the polycule, I can't stop going back to try again! Sadly 70% of my runs end thanks to a crash. 

I particularly enjoyed the 'send to opponent' type effects. I'm a little iffy on the slime ones as they merge very easily and they don't tend to have any effect at the 6* potency since...they're supposed to take up cauldron space not sit in the infinite liquid state! Would recommend that they 'revert' to solid on cast, so that they go back into the cauldron instead of disappearing. At least for the ones that are meant to be thrown at the opponent. Would be a great way to make use of the opponent's liquid mechanic if you filled it up and the moment they cast they're hit with a wall of slime! Maybe a slime that cleans the opponent's slime on infusion but deals allure based on their slime potency at cast.
 

edit:Wow this ended up as a wall of text and a half! TLDR; Lots of troubleshooting to find out my pc is officially potato and to fix that would require gambling on bsod, and that's just to fix whatever the debugger wants not what the game demands.
 
I can only guess that my gpu is barely strong enough to play the game but only marginally and any performance humps means a crash. So essentially, I can only ask for better optimization if I want to actually play.


 
 
 
I found out exactly how outdated my pc is because of this game haha! All the debugging told me that I really really needed to update my graphics driver...only it took me a couple days of troubleshooting to find out that my pc has a manufacturer lock on it's drivers and they stopped supporting my pc years before even intel stopped as well. I found out I can 'unlock' it by reverting first and then using external programs/tools and make it update towards intel's drivers(which has a community that recently put out a new update), but that comes with the bsod risks, don't know if this game is worth bricking my computer...it's real close though~~! I also think the error code is the debugger failing and not what actually crashed the game since it won't stop trying to access debug files for drivers that don't want to be debugged and the community is only as helpful as 'ignore that as the developer'. It wasn't a waste of time though, I at least found some updates for other drivers that couldn't be found automatically by windows. In the process of all that I found out my calculator was corrupted...somehow, and it was the pebble in the cog stopping the 'final' windows update from going through, that took a full day of troubleshooting to fix. Managed to update everything as much as possible and cleaned up tons of clutter. So yay for a slightly faster pc experience...even if it had zero impact on my gaming experience. I can now use my browser at normal speeds even under slightly above average throughput! 
 
The problems I'm facing thus can't rely on the debug logs, and I'll just do it old school via guestimation!
 
During launch is most likely the more common performance issues. It's just my pc has potato gpu so frame drops during preloading become game breaking instead. Pretty sure what's crashing me on launch is the wavy texture plus the front heavy loading. When the wavy font moves around by going through the different menus it does a decent sized frame stutter. I can see it being a draw on the system through the tutorial with it's moving boxes of texts.
 
Then what crashes mid game seems to be a combination of different entity updates like honey blocks detecting if it hit another honey block but it'll crash if it checks at the wrong time. Game also really hates when I hold a potion whilst the opponent is casting, or hover descriptions, or hover over refresh. This one's usually ok early on but the more potions out the worse it becomes, and especially so the bigger the polycule count as if the cache is being filled with prior rounds. Maybe some potions or sprite transformations data aren't being erased?

 

I've found the honey block and sprials to be particularly heavy on my pc. There's also the milk transformation, but that depends on the sprite being effected for some reason. Some sprites really don't like the milk, like instant crash even on the first step of milkers. On that note some sprites improve my performance quite a bit so sometimes I reroll just for my witch to be one of them. Weirdly they can tank the effects well enough that would slow or even crash other ones.

Deleted 200 days ago
(+1)

huge respect for your troubleshooting skills 🙏

I'll see if I can use some of this information to optomise the game a lil further, but I won't lie - I don't really know how much of this I really have the power to fix

(+2)

 The troubleshooting was mostly just sifting through useless guides/Q&As. Also because every source on my pc's spec was vague about the graphics name/spec/gen, I still don't actually know since it's 1 of 3 very different ones and I just used the archived manufacturer files that encompassed the whole pc build. Though thank the heavens for some random guy who gave succinct cmd prompt lines which fixed dism/cbs before attempting to fix the pc.
 
The launch bug...not much since that's just potato intel graphics, but maybe add a persistent and more thorough settings menu. The game always opens at max resolution, and it'd be nice to be able to tone down the particle effects and animations like bubbles, spirals, and such. The reduced particle effect could just be a singular bubble that expands briefly before popping, lots of entities spawning and erasing is a breeding ground for some to become permanent if the process gets interrupted. The wavy text is probably the easiest to turn off, which I'm sure is why hover descriptions add so much strain. Don't know why hovering on the refresh does, maybe because of the little animation it does? Holding potions is more a physics problem which is...a huge ask to optimize to say it lightly! A more specific ask would be a 'clear effects' button in the pause menu, since sometimes a transformation is applied poorly and the game really struggles from after that. Which gets cleaned a bit after clearing the level, but there's a subtle change in the minimum strain from then on. The spirals only really become a problem because...they're kind of op and you're more likely to have at least half your pot filled with a dozen or more of them before you clear the level. So the shear quantity of spirals become a problem when they all individually spin.
 
Another optimization is to put all the transformations into a buffer zone. Like a 'combo' counter or something where it'll hold all the effects until after the potions settle down, then applies it either sequentially or at once depending on how the coding handles transformation. Though if you go that route, you'd also have to include an after battle break so that we can actually admire the sprite's transformations since it currently skips straight to the 'shop' menu upon winning. The shop is also a great point in time to clear up the cache a bit and should overall keep the performance in peak condition throughout a run. Stuff like double checking if all the potions and transformation have been cleared, as well as freeing up prior sprites from remaining cached since it'd be rare to get identical sprites. It'll add a loading time, but it'd also speed up the game.
 
I'm also going out on a limb and guessing that the honey block has extra/redundant checks since the other slime blocks don't crash my game. Honey will crash my game if it collides with something at heavy strain moments, even if it's not the honey block being dropped in.  Probably not much of a difference for others, but when you're already throttling the line even slight spikes become more obvious.