Core concept is fun! Reminds me of Slay the Spire.
I feel like I understand the rules and could make informed choices during play. (Although a proper tutorial instead of a full-screen overlay identifying the different elements would be nice, I feel like the UI itself and tooltips communicate things clearly enough that it’s easy to make sense of the rules / how to play.)
General gameplay thoughts:
- In the beginning, it feels like I can end up very much at the mercy of RNG, particularly with the Paladin (who lacks damage in their default skill, and can get offered a lot of non-damage cards).
- I wish I started out with more slots — it feels like it makes the consequences of early RNG much more punishing when card size is another limiting factor. (Also it just feels like I can't around with different build ideas as much as I would like.)
- It feels odd that there are few battle early on. One the one hand, it’s kinda fun to just devote it to building your loadout, but on the other hand it’s hard to assess how effective my build is without engaging in an actual battle.
- I liked using the skill masters and blacksmiths to add abilities to cards.
A couple bugs:
- I got a level-up at the same time as a game over?
- After getting a game over, the shops were empty (even if I tried to re-roll). I had to reload the page to get out of this state. This happened multiple times.
Some UI/UX-specific thoughts:
- I was confused why I couldn’t move big cards around sometimes, until I noticed that you have to aim for the highest slot in the space you want to use. It would be helpful if the card could search slots above to “find” the nearest space it will fit in.
- Sometimes the attributes (e.g. Pet, Magical, Fiery) are hard to read depending on what’s behind them. A background would help avoid those cases.
- The dark red text (e.g. for Critical Chance) is hard to read when locked and near the bottom (e.g. for the Elementalist’s default skill “Elementary Magic”).
- Some animation/feedback would be nice when buying/selling things (e.g. coin “particles” around the coin-counter above, along with sound effects when buying/selling). (Sound in general when moving things into slots would be nice too.)
- I appreciated the cursor changing when I couldn’t drop things into specific slots (I didn’t notice the attribute text until later, and wasn’t sure whether some things counted as a skill/equipment, but the cursor-changing answered my questions.)
- I wish I could get more info on the enemy by hovering over them when picking a path.
Solid work so far!