really really solid entry, i loved the way the traps fought you for making high combo strings, i liked the play with the multipliers... i liked the concepts of a lot of the upgrades and how they played into eachother,
was a bit unfortunate that some of the gear only worked if they were in specific slots, i wish that maybe they had a base effect and were better in those slots, or that there were more interplay with the actual item placement on the character, because for a lot of the upgrades it just didn't matter (though it was also confusing at times so, maybe it was for the better that they didn't all interact with the item slots)
some things were unclear,, i ask myself ; "what is a loop? what is a cross? what is a square?" "what does making stronger mean for simple effects" "how bad could a curse be" it sounds obvious, and maybe from a rules standpoint they are, but i just couldn't really get enough info from what i saw while playing to figure it out (i also basically instantly died every time i got a curse, so it seemed unreasonable to ever go for equipment that gave you them)
the gameplay itself is well balanced, however i think the upgrades/equipment are not, the power difference between them is very severe to the point that it's impossible not to take some items, vs some which strictly don't work somtimes, or only show you what you might get next (which doesn't change anything at all about your decision-making)
i did find a pretty uh... powerful strategy, which allowed me to get these scores legitimately by getting a lot a lot of multiplier ("lllllllllll" was my first run, "ibrokeit" was my second run, "rutbnyRBLY" was my last run where i perfected the strategy)
cute game, puzzling out the boards felt nice, had a lot of fun, one of my favorites i've played so far, GG!
*(oh psst, i had to use trackpad to rotate, and it was an uncomfortable control, Q and E to rotate or something would have been so much more comfortable)
Haha, that L name made me groan due to UI breaking and went to add a trim for name on server side. And after I managed to do that and also fix the broken geolocation solving due to my server host having done some changes, I see that you also managed to break the UI with too big scores. Hey at least it didn't go integer overflow! 😅
But yeah, 4 days wasn't really enough to do proper balancing. Especially considering there was always other (more fun) things to focus on like doing art, audio or adding new stuff.
example loop (just a string of one tiles going around with a hole in the middle)
❇️❇️❇️❇️
❇️🅱️🅱️❇️
❇️❇️❇️❇️
example cross (one in middle and straights to any dir from that)
🅱️❇️🅱️🅱️
❇️❇️❇️❇️
🅱️❇️🅱️🅱️
example square (same width and height)
❇️❇️
❇️❇️
And for the booster one that enhances others, they are always just increasing/doubling the amount/multiplier on the target and the effect is shown in the effected tooltip. So like this would normally be double but it's upgraded to triple due to the neighbouring booster.
And I already added alt ways to rotate (just in place click without drag, Q/E A/D left/right while holding and second finger tap on touch screen) for the post-jam version.
I also don't get it why your scores show up multiple times. It should only show the best for each player (name changes don't matter, it uses random generated unique id). 🤔
Never mind, it looks like indeed did take names to account too which I changed now to how it should have been. I'm pretty sure it was like that earlier, I've been using this same leaderboards on all my games and it used to behave so that even changing the name afterwards and doing a "bad run" would update your name for existing top scores.
yeah i'm so sorry about the long name - it was my first run i didn't expect anything and i was just seeing how big i could make my name and thought it was funny when i was playing buhahaha
yeah, still doesn't answer all my questions, and i could ask you more - but mainly i explain to communicate to you that i couldn't intuit what was going on via the text alone, some sort of visual indication or explanation would have helped me understand while playing is all (something like showing example loops on hover, highlighting the outline of each loop when breaking a combo, things like that)
oh and also at some point it said quintuple but i only had one of those strength things, was that a bug?
Yeah, probably would make more sense to include examples like the ones I put here to explain the shapes on the tooltips themselves.
The multis go double -> triple -> quadruple -> 5x -> etc so definitely no quintuple anywhere. But even if it was quad with just one booster, I guess that might have been a bug. But boosters also affect other boosters so you could go booster -> booster -> multi and end up with quad even if it only had on direct neighbouring booster.
well, honestly what i did was abuse 2x planter, my entire board was practically minimum 5x score tiles, i spent the whole game doing 2x combos with the planters to farm for multiplier tiles, i used the wildcard to make it two colors that were doing planter stuff to farm much harder, i had basically zero score until the very final combo, the entire score was done on the last level where i made one giant combo to finish it off on top of all the x10, x13,x15,x8,x9,, panels across the board: big number happens
Right right, that seems ridiculously exponential scaling in comparison to everything else. I guess at least adding the area bonuses together instead of multiplying them wouldn't make it quite as ridiculous. 🤔
I added these for the post-jam version, I guess these would at least help a bit? Any other weird things you didn't quite understand I could try to improve for the next version?
those do really help yeah!
me and my friend who was watching could not for the lives of us figure out how much damage the traps were supposed to deal, if i could take a guess it would be the round number or something? but otherwise there was no indication.... lost a few runs to saying "yeah i could probbs spring a trap and be okay" - i could not
i had NO IDEA what finesse could mean in the slightest "receive no bonus" is not text on any relic many would ever willingly decide to pick up - in other words i don't know why the text is relevant to me
i don't know why i would care about "scoring closed areas in reverse order" either.. we don't know enough about the way scoring works for this to make any sense..
most other relics were self explanatory, maybe the "preview the next upcoming curse" relic is confusing to me but not comprehensionally, just contextually; again, you aren't given any resources to prepare for a curse more or less, so knowing one that's coming doesnt help so much, but even so it took me a while before i even knew where curses came from, i hadn't seen anything that gave me curses, so i really couldn't gauge it at all
(uhm, and this one is maybe just a bit unfortunate, but the first time i played the game i was putting the equipment i got in the hand slots then head first, and came to expect the sprite changes and orbs.... and then i put an equipment on the one slot below the torso and it didn't change the sprite! which was very humorous to me; "where did it go?" i asked., on a later run i later noticed my guy had a tail, it might be worth to always give out a tail or something to avoid this unfortunate question)
Thanks a ton for these, they really help me pinpoint what descriptions need to be given some thought to make them clearer! ❤️
Traps indeed do damage equal to the level number. I guess it'd be nice to show it somehow to leave out the guesswork.
Finesse and Broken Chains indeed need knowledge on how the scoring happens to really evaluate. So you've probably noticed that when an area is scored, the size of it becomes the base multiplier for the next scored area. And the areas are always scored from smallest to largest. So with Broken Chains, the order is reversed and by scoring the biggest area first, you have more control on what multiplier it uses (as often you'll also close some smaller areas at the same time). Finesse in same way skips the adding x2 multi for those small (often accidental/forced) areas and lets you keep the previous bigger multiplier.
The curse preview was indeed intended as a way to see what the curse on the 12th level would be so you could prepare for it a bit. But I think it's even more useful for checking whether the next cursed fork item would be a "safe" item to take. But yeah, would probably help if there were more ways to prepare for the upcoming curse.