The game is really great! Art is very adorable and feels good to look at. Overall, mechanics like the shop and combat feel very polished, and the effect, like a cardboard effect and shadow casting, is really done well. But there is something that I feel off. The combat is fun because of the risk you have to take, but it's really gone at last because when you have armor upgrade that overwhelms your enemy's attack, like (In last boss: 40 for max attack of 30), you no longer have to risk anything and become invincible. I think having some kind of armour loss would be great for both sides because the gameplay is really long when we can't hurt each other. I also feel like the health isn't really there in the late fights because if the stat flips, I would get one-shot. One catch: what if we never upgrade our attack (18-21) and only on defense, will it be able to defeat the final boss (def 25-30), or will it become a soft lock? Anyway, it was a really amazing and fun experience.
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Yeah, balance and design were definitely a challenge :)
I believe that you can't beat the game without upgrading attack/armor. I hope it becomes pretty obvious when the player encounters enemies with increasing stats, maybe with stats equal to player's. So without upgrading the fights drag on longer and then become impossible. With current design player hopefully will prioritize attack upgrade, because it makes game a lot faster and easier 😀
But I agree that design is not perfect here, it's like in roguelikes, SlayTheSpire, for example. Sometimes you just can't win, and need to restart. I wanted to add some sort of meta-progression between games, but time frame was tight. So the current game is like one round of roguelike.