itch.io

Yeah, I mean with jam games you kind of always expect balance to be what it is. Just not enough time for anything else, really. But I think it's hard to really go into what needs to change with the shop mechanic, until the enemy scaling gets dialed in. Because I don't think the risk/reward of the shop is inherently bad. It's just that when you need to go ultimate greed to outscale the early enemies. It kind of removes the actual risk/reward. Since you have to full risk no matter what, so it isn't really a choice. But rather just built in run ending risk.

Currently you're somewhat reliant on getting organs as well. Since you expect to take some early L's, you kind of need to just keep getting new organs for the bonus life. Which means that when you go 3+ shops with no organs. That's basically game over.

Then lategame my biggest gripe with the shop is that you have so much invested in all your body parts. That re-rolling and risking having to chop something off is just never worth it. So you're just piling up money, that you can't ever use. Since re-rolling is too much of a risk. That felt pretty bad, just from a "feel" perspective. Like yeah, at that point you're strong enough that it doesn't matter. But having useless currency always just feels bad.

For something like Twitching Eye and Tripod. Which I would say are overall the two biggest problem items, one early and one late. It feels pretty bad to almost be forced into stacking Tripods for legs. If all legs had some level of health attached. It would make it feel like you actually had a choice about which ones to get. Since currently if you don't get early tripods and your enemies do. You simply get stat checked, since you start a fight at 50% HP anyways, and then they have like 3x your base HP. So you're essentially fighting an enemy that you need to be 6x stronger than. Just to break even with them.

Then for twitching eye, a CDR cap at some value would help. The issue with CDR is always that it gets better the more you stack it. So it either needs a hard cap or some incredibly heavy built in diminishing returns. At the end of the day though, an item that gives you consistent scaling is just always going to become the best thing to have at some point. If there was a crit consumable eye. That'd obviously be our other eye every game. Until we're crit capped on all items. So it's just a scarcity thing mainly. If this is the only way to get persistent scaling, of course it's going to be the best thing. Then on top of that it works on CDR, which is the single strongest attribute to stack, making it even better.