itch.io

Hello! :)

First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to write these comments, I really enjoy reading them <3 And congrats on the win! Beating the game is definitely very hard at the moment, well done!

What follows is me dumping my brain, so it's a long one. I totally understand if you don't care about the stuff, especially in this detail!

A bit of a sneak peak of what's going on with the game right now:

I did a lot of playtesting and thinking in the last two weeks myself and I also encountered some of the issues you mentioned, like the overwhelming and tedious "late" game where fatigue is stacking up more and more.  I'm working on improvements for that. 

Also, Rogue's raw damage output is currently way worse compared to the Knight... Rogue will get a buff in the next update for sure!

Additionally,  there's some rather big issues I found in my playtests that I'm currently adressing:

• the monster movement is cool and dynamic... but I found it's TOO good. With the current mechanic, monsters can easily encircle and trap you. Noticing this early enough and evading such situations is tough and requires an almost perfect knowledge of the inner workings of how the monster "AI" moves. An impossible task for new players. And even I find myself trapped more often than I want to :D
  That's why I have been experimenting with different movement designs, that make monster moves more... predictable. So that players have an easier time planing ahead. I have a solution I'm 90% happy with, that will be in the next update. I'm very curious what you think! :)
• I always liked the idea of having a Dungeon Deck that is in direct competition to your Hero's Deck. I liked that it has a nice symmetry to it (your deck vs. theirs). And it also made the victory condition clear and straight forward: clear the Dungeon Deck of cards.
  But the way it is currently set up has a huge flaw: the pacing is really uneven! The first room is always the hardest, because the Dungeon Deck is full of Monsters and they all are at full health. If players make it through the first room, they likely defeated and/or weakened some Monsters already, making the next room comparably easier, and so on. The last room on a floor often only has only 1 or 2 monsters in it, making it really easy, but also quite tedious. Your comment about the late game fatigue makes this very apparent too. So this is all very weird and unusual from a game design standpoint... and simply makes the game worse. If anything, I would want players to get stronger during a floor, and not reducing the challenge they have to face.
  That's why the Dungeon Deck had to go. The latest build (not released yet) plays much more even and avoids a lot of the tediousness. It also allows me to design floors in a way so they get (slightly) harder towards the end... and design more cards that become better the longer a floor goes on to counter that, giving players some small-scale power trips.
  I'm still ironing out a lot of details, like what the actual victory condition of a floor is. But you'll see that in the next update, if you like :)

Pfew... thanks for reading my long rant! I hope it was somewhat coherent. :)