Post by lfarroco in Fun, but suffers from a lot of the same issues as The Bazaar

Viewing post in Fun, but suffers from a lot of the same issues as The Bazaar

thanks a lot, I'm going to check those issues. I agree that the any reactions are waaay too OP and trivialize formations. the only ones that should remain are for cores (so that the user can have some liberty on the types involved), but that should be it.
this weekend I spent the whole time creating the multi language tutorial, so unlockables are still on the table.

Another idea that I had is replacing the "add random reaction" orb with a set of predefined powers, like increasing the core health every x heal/regen casts, or other unique powers like that. it should help making the crystals tankier (we still have an exponential curve to beat, but I'm curious to see what players can come up with!)

Skeppartorsk21 days ago

I think long term you probably need to just build some way of scaling core HP into the base of the core, something along the lines of +x* core health on <insert thing that is the identity of that core>. And completely make away with the flat +hp option on wave complete. Because currently you just pick HP early game to keep up with early stat checks. Then after that you get your core to 1.0s then you only pick hp after that. There really isn't much actual choice in that screen. So if the HP went away and just became a core mechanic of each core. Then it would probably help open up that design space to actually allow for some choices.

I think for me something more or less ideal would be if that screen always had "decrease cooldown". Then the other two would normally be 2 randomly selected reactions that you can add to your core (as in you get two randomly rolled ones, but you see what you get before you pick one), then a small chance for one of the 2 "reactions slots" to instead be a "upgrade core" option. That would lead to some actually interesting (and skill based) choices.

Random reaction in its current implementation is kind of problematic. Since 99% of the time any reaction you add that give shielding/healing/regen will just kill yourself faster against enemy poison reactions. So I personally never pick it, because any power it gives is so far outdone by how much it is 100% going to kill you later.

Also on the "improve x" option between waves. The increase power one needs to be rebalanced to something like +10% damage instead. Because when two options are multiplicative and one is additive. The latter will becomes useless by wave 2 normally. Adding +10% crit to a 120k power units is quite impactful, adding +10 damage is not. Same with the "sacrifice effect for power". That is never useful, +10 flat power is never stronger than whatever it ends up removing, and the gains are so small that something like picking gain random reaction -> sacrifice reaction, on repeat, won't ever be useful. Because it's just way too slow. So those two are basically "dead buttons" at this point.

I'm still not 100% sure on this. But it feels like fatigue damage is flat, rather than % of hp? Either way, fatigue starts way too soon and when you have 1k hp to your opponents 500k hp. It's not exactly fair. I've realized that some of the deaths I thought were to random poison ticks were actually just due to fatigue starting way faster than most builds could feasibly chew through 5m hp + shielding + healing + regen. And since it hits you super hard and basically doesn't seem to impact the opponent at all. It feels pretty unfair. Not like there's a counter to being one-tapped by fatigue when the fight has pretty much just started.

lfarroco20 days ago

You are correct, fatigue damage is flat and increases exponentially. After 30s of timeout damage it will deal Infinite damage to both players (that will make you win, as it favors the player on draws). I think that increasing the timeout timer a bit will be good to give more room for units to scale and build up power, poison, regen.

I'm thinking about a revamped crystal upgrade screen, where you have sort of a skill tree to "awaken" perks. That should allow making the crystal feel more unique, as currently they are just regular units that can't be discarded.

The default game speed is actually 2x, as I'm still testing in which speed the game "feels" better.

Skeppartorsk20 days ago

At least with the current charge meta the game speed is so high it's effectively impossible to tell what is happening. Also the particle effects/beams/whatever you want to call them will usually completely block everything to the point where I'm really just looking at beams. Normally can't even see the fatigue timer as it's behind the beamception.

Also there is kind of a duplicate unit currently. There are two different on enemy shield poison units. The snakey looking thing and the fairy dragon looking thing both are the exact same unit but with the latter having slightly higher base values. There was something else I was going to report on, but I've currently got quite the fever, so brain is not braining.

Something making the cores a bit more unique wouldn't be bad. Currently you're more or less running the same board no matter what core you get. Sort of the issue Dooley had at one point where you just went drill and pretended your core didn't exist. But most cores here are strong enough that you actually want to build around it (or they were last patch, maybe not so much this patch). I think with us now having a physical damage charge infinite unit (Inquisitor) Crit core went from one of the better ones to practically useless, since your inquisitor will just do what it does, except better. Growth and Quick are probably the best ones rn. With Growth being the better one due to its insane long term potential. The others are all more or less "meh", but build-aroundable and easily capable of 10 wins obviously. But I feel like 10 wins is so fast that Infinite mode becomes the game.

The Poison core I'd say is probably by far the worst one. Since it's just worse than normal poison units and also to make it do something you need to charge engine it, but your inquisitor is part of the charge engine and will just out-damage it exponentially. I guess it makes your Spellbreaker give permahaste faster/easier than using the charge right regen unit + the lowest cd poison unit for the same thing? And it will perma slow your enemy at the same time. Which to be fair, would be super strong, if you didn't have an infinite charge engine that makes haste pointless, and you die from reactions, which don't care about slows...so yeah, it's basically useless.

lfarroco19 days ago (1 edit)

I probably got used to this game speed (as I'm the developer lol), going to tune it down!

One way of making the cores feel more unique would be unlocking skills for them.

For the poison core, some skills could be:

- add active ability: halve the power from the stronger enemy unit

- every 5 slows, increase a poison unit's power by 100

- when you steal power (new ability type I'm thinking to add), gain extra power

other ability types I intend to add, and have the cores interact with them:

- lifesteal

- power transfer (eg. move x power from left unit to right unit)

- on every x, do y (x with being damage/shield/etc)

with the board being a 2d grid we have more options, unlike a normal cardgame that is just a horizontal line

And currently the game is more balanced on the 10 wins, with infinite more serving to let the player enjoy an eventual fun build more :)

This week I will take things slower, as there's a lot IRL things showing up, but I will write down some ideas to code on Saturday.

Edit: Just had an idea. More complex units can be the ones unlocked as the player progresses and learns to play. That avoids having units that are too complex when the player is still learning. Another thing is adding a gold/platinum shop, and have overpowered units only show up there. This way we can make those units more scarce.

Skeppartorsk18 days ago

The power steal I think at least currently, would probably be one of the only things that can actually counter the oneshots you're getting the losses to. But I also think it would be incredibly overpowered as long as charge is still being too chargey. But that's more a charge issue than anything else.

I've still been having the issue where I most certainly am not dying to fatigue since it happens like 2-3s into the fight and through tonnes of shield, with the shield still being present after I died. It's always with the poison reactors. The post combat will show I took 0 damage from any source, including the poison. But I still just get one-shot. This also happens when regen>poison. At least I think it does, but it's hard to tell since as soon as you win/lose your poison counter goes down by a tonne. So sometimes you'll only see what the actual max poison was for like a single frame. Not sure if it's a bug with the end screen or a bug with poison sometimes dealing damage when it shouldn't. I think it's the latter. Because I've also had my health bar slightly dip earlier in the game when my regen>poison and having shown me as taking 0 poison damage. Though I guess that could also be just the end screen being bugged, at least it's not specific enough to only happen when tick damage is > your max hp. It consistently happens throughout.

Oh and unless it was fixed very recently, Arcane Anomaly is typoed to Arcane Anomally.

If you intend to keep reaction units largely the same as currently. I'd strongly suggest making it so that the enemy cannot ever generate a board with more than 1 counter unit on it. Because then it's still at least vaguely possible to race them and win. When they get 2x "on shield" poison. it's 100% doomed and there is nothing you can do. Shadow Assassin's numbers on the reaction (or their cd) probably still needs to be looked at, same as the any +crit on Spellblade. Both of those can and will deal north of half a million damage almost instantly on certain boards with there being essentially no counterplay. If you get to wave 40 or wave 50 or wave 60 with a good build is pretty much 100% down to RNG on which boards you face, not on how strong your build is. Having obscene amounts of fast shielding is 100% needed or you lose to a lot of things. So then you're just praying for no +all crit boards or poison reactors. Since those are effectively scheduled losses.

lfarroco18 days ago (1 edit)

Thanks again for all the insights : )
The thing about reactions to enemy actions is that I believe that it would be a mistake to have a full basic action as a rection. So "on poison, heal", "on shield, damage", has the potential of completely negating the other unit's action if the two units have the same power. We can tune it down by translating the reaction into power gain, as applying poison with 1000 power is very different from gaining 5 power. Most unit's cooldowns should probably be increased - with the other options being reducing the charged amounts. The initial idea in the game was not having enemy reactions at all. Maybe this behavior could be moved into unlocked silver-gold units, and reduce them to just 1 unit per type. I like how the inquisitor works in that regard.

I also noticed that the game is much easier to follow at 1x speed lol (some transitions' speeds need to be adjusted because they were developed with 2x speed, but the game makes much more sense).

As the game is mostly centered about getting 10 wins, I'm fine with "everything is op" in infinite mode for now.

My intention now is creating about 20 new units, 10 silver and 10 gold, to have the player unlock them.

The gold and silver shops allow the player to get an above-average unit earlier, but without much control on the types involved.

Another priority is addressing over-haste, over-slow and over-heal, and these builds are currently underpowered.

EDIT: going to check those poison ticks. We do have logic in place to only consider the difference if we have both regen and poison. I also noticed the poison counter reduce its value when the match is over.

Skeppartorsk17 days ago (7 edits)

Agreed the haste/slow/healing units need a lot of love. Since really the only point of "healing" is to counter poison in real scenarios, and regen is just plain better at that. It kind of leaves healing without a purpose, also the average CD of healing units is way too high, you're very likely to die between heals with the unit effectively doing nothing. For slow, like previously mentioned, anything that will kill you will either do so before you have time to slow it (Shadow Assassin) or doesn't care about slow at all (poison reactions). So that kind of makes slow a non-mechanic. For haste, it's obviously made largely useless by virtue of infinite charge chains. But outside of that, the Spell(breaker?/blade?) is the only useful haste unit since you can just get full board haste with that +1 low CD poison unit. The others kind of just...do nothing?

To me what would make more sense is if healing units had very short cooldown with relatively low base healing numbers and regen units had very long cooldowns with relatively large base numbers. That way heals now serve a purpose (buy time to get your regens off) and regen isn't just faster and better heal. For slow, I think if that witch unit with self +x on slow was actually given an active that scales with power it would open up slow builds to having a purpose. The other half is obviously just getting charge balance right, once that's sorted. Slow kind of automatically becomes better. Same as doing what The Bazaar did as well, just upping the CD on everything automatically makes haste and slow better. Since they have time to actually come into play. When you die to a 2s CD unit's first attack, slow/haste will never be relevant. And yes, you can get one-tapped by both Shadow Assassin and Spellblade prior to infinite. It's just a bit more rare.

A unit that would be interesting to me, would be a counter-counter. Something like "The Silencer" On (Enemy Reaction) Put that reaction on CD for 0.5 / 1 /1.5 / 2s. That way you don't automatically die to reaction units, there is counter play. Then you would probably end up with silly Silencer mirror matches where one would cancel the other out. The issue with a unit like that is that it would (in the current state of the game) be a 100% mandatory infinite mode unit. It would probably need to have some kind of hefty downside or large internal cooldown per unit on the effect, or it would just completely delete a lot of boards.

Edit: Made it Round 56 in the new patch. A lot of fun stuff going on, but still lose to getting one tapped by poison reaction when their base goes up to like 270k poison over 10s. Just can't beat that, I was able to build up to north of a million per tick regen. But it's just so fast there isn't time to get there before you die.

Got a cool 52m shielding a couple waves before I ate it to poison RNG at least.

Edit2: Figured out that by going slower on damage to only focus on Regen and Shield I could get back into the 60s. Hit 66 then died to a 2m poison reactor one-tapping me. Found a bunch of bugs, basically everything relating to +10% power upgrade and the two different power sharers is broken. Sometimes if you use 10% back to back, it only works the first time. Sometimes after combat you lose the 10% again. When you use power share (either one) sometimes it works, but most of the time it will remove the +10% bonuses you gained since last share and then add the share amount (The give 50% of power to allies also still reduces the unit that uses it to 0 power). Which late game means using power share reduces your units power. Also, not entirely unexpected, CPU usage when you get to late game is absurd and also the end screen UI breaks when you get past the 100m mark on things. Edit5 addition: So I've noticed a bit more about what happens. When you use +25% power to row (or +50% both bug out the same way). Then use another power sharer, the new one simply overwrites the old one, as well as removing any +10% applied to the old one. So if you had shared power to gain +5k power, then do +10% for 5.5k power. Then you share another power for +3k power. You don't end up with 8,5k power, you end up with 3k power. Any +10% power that was applied to the 5k power is gone, and the 5k is overwritten. This makes keeping up with the exponential growth basically impossible.

Edit3: I'd suggest probably changing all the poison reaction units to work the same as the regen one (charge on enemy regen). That unit is actually possible to beat if your build is incredibly strong. The on shield poison ones just aren't. They are 100% death with no way around it, and early game they are basically useless. So changing them doesn't really impact 10 wins. Only impacts infinite mode. I've figured out how to solve for Shadow Assassin (except with growth core obviously). So now I literally lose to the same two units (that are effectively the same duplicate unit) every single run. The only counter is to not run shield, which makes you lose to literally everything else. So there is no solution.

Oh and poison core is actually pretty good now. Went 10-0 and then 54 waves with it.

Edit4: New bug, units will just randomly revert to base power during the upgrades screen. This is the most gamebreaking bug yet. It will just arbitrarily kill runs. You'll have a unit with 1k+ power drop to 20 power by itself and it's game over. And cores still lose all reactions on upgrade.

Edit5: Oh and make it so you can lock tooltips to be able to scroll in them. When you're in infinite mode you quickly have your Core's tooltip go off-screen, so you can't see what all your reactions are. Since I've come to realize health is actually completely useless, only shield and regen matters. I've started to just spam add reaction post getting 1s CD. But you can only see a few of them. Since reaction shields don't trigger poison counters, they let you bypass the scheduled losses of poison on shield. Sadly the one time I actually got a good shield reaction on my core, and could see it and build for it. I then forgot about the "upgrade removing reactions" bug and lost the reactions and promptly lost the game.

Edit6: Got to Wave 74 with a no shielding (except reactions) build. Around Wave 70 the game start to freeze every time you load into a new fight. Takes like 5 seconds of it being completely frozen before it loads in. At that point even with me getting over 1B shielding per fight Shadow Assassin starts one-shotting again and the Charge on Enemy Regen poison dude is also completely unbeatable. So it's down to RNG of how early you get those two units in a setup after they hit critical mass.

1.38B shielding from a core that comes with no base shielding, obviously I massively undervalued add reaction (because I forgot reactions don't trigger reactions). That being said, my Mr. Krabs (Coral Builder) was still gettings its +16* after I removed all shielding from my build. So some reactions seem to trigger from reactions. But it was really buggy and it didn't always gain it. But suddenly it just decided to gain +4k power between two rounds, after having gained nothing for the previous x amount of rounds.

lfarroco13 days ago

Hey!
Just published a update with balance chances (no more basic abilities as a reaction), more detailed descriptions, and more interesting crystal upgrades!
Later this week, I intend to add unlockable units (they might show up in the silver/gold encounters)
This took a longer time, because I added new targeting and effect options to be used by the new units and crystals: target strongest/weakes ally/enemy, every 100 damage/heal/shield or 10 poison/regen, on over heal, on re-haste/re-slow, and more.

By the end of the week I hope to have a good package to finally apply the "1.0" label over it!

Skeppartorsk13 days ago

Looking forward to testing it tomorrow, most likely.

Skeppartorsk12 days ago (9 edits)

Ok, so there are issues. The change to Crystalline Geode completely breaks the game. To the point where my 7600x got stuck at 100% utilization and the game froze for around 30s at wave 16. Basically the crit only going to row is insanely OP. Making it so whatever is on that row becomes godlike instantly. Just slap a regen and shield unit on the same row and you cannot take damage. To make matters worse, Mana Source and Crystalline Geode (at Tier 1) create an infinite loop. The triggers from Geode charges Mana Source that then Hastes Geode + the other row ally which causes Geode to give crit 4 times which charges Mana Source. You get the point. I then upgraded Mana Source to Tier 2 for funsies. This was what broke the game completely. The -power on crit upgrade for the Core is also completely broken. Since it goes up to -300% power to 7 units pretty much instantly. This sets enemy units to like -1.4m power and is probably part of what causes the CPU to just die. Had to abandon the run at that point since it was effectively unplayable.

Edit: Oh and the grammar of unit descriptions has issues. Specifically the syntax you use works for spell effect, but not on damage. I forget what the exact wording is, but the expected wording would have been something like "on dealing damage" but it was instead "on used damage". Something to that effect.

Edit2: On some more testing, the infinite only seems to work with Quick Core. That being said I just got 10 wins running only Protective Core + Geode+Mana Source with no other units. So yeah, the power level of that row is not okay.

Edit3: The exponential growth re-slow and re-haste skills also have issues, as can be seen below:

Those two units started the fight with like 2k power. They now have 2.1 and 4m power and the Mana Source also has several thousands of crit despite that being a tier 1 Geode.

Oh and if you tab out of the game (to write this post, for instance) from the end screen where you pick if you want to go infinite mode or not. That run just disappears, no choice to pick resume run and go infinite. It's just gone.

Edit4: The regen unit that gives crit to column instead of row on any is also completely busted. Got it with +1.1x on crit and it instantly killed the game. Last I saw one of my units had 16b power on wave 9 before the game crashed (after being frozen for over 5 minutes).

Edit5: Fatigue counter renders on top of menu.

Edit6: Fatigue damage is way too low. Every single fight beyond the super early game goes to full Fatigue duration, which means it becomes optimal to build 0 damage and 0 poison. Then just do a full shield+regen permanent scaling build, and just sit out the full duration every fight, to outscale the curve as long as possible.

Edit7: The bug where permanent +10% crit gets removed between rounds when you give temp crit still persists.

Edit8: All the various power share bugs are still a thing too. I'm on wave 75 with there being 0% chance of anything killing me. But I'll have to abandon the run because it seems the game just cannot handle power numbers in the millions very well. Just loading into a fight freezes the game for 5+ seconds and 100% utilized at least one core every time it happens. Then once the fight starts it's just a slide show. The game especially struggles with regen and poison once they get north of 1m per tick (and that happens in seconds). When I dropped my 17m power poison guy for a 27m damage guy instead. It temporarily made things not that bad. Then I upgraded my regen guy from 4.4m power to 20m or so and the game went into full slideshow mode again. The biggest difficulty currently isn't the enemies. It's trying to make the game not crash.

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Viewing post in Fun, but suffers from a lot of the same issues as The Bazaar