TumbleSeed is a deceptively deep roguelike about balancing a seed up a dangerous and ever-changing mountain. · By
I've only played a few rounds but here are my initial impressions.
Just got myself stuck in a wall with Timed Teleseed aura, but was able to teleport myself out of the wall. Still seemed like a bug though. Even without the bug, I don't see myself picking up that aura next time I see it. It kept interrupting me and getting me hurt. I guess I'm kind of a risk-averse roguelike player.
I think roguelikes like TS are all about the decisions when it comes to "upgrades" like the auras. I'm curious why you decided to only give one option for the auras rather than making it a choice like the crystal rooms. To emphasize that picking up the aura is optional?
Just got myself stuck in a wall with Timed Teleseed aura, but was able to teleport myself out of the wall. Still seemed like a bug though. Even without the bug, I don't see myself picking up that aura next time I see it. It kept interrupting me and getting me hurt. I guess I'm kind of a risk-averse roguelike player.
Yeah, that's a bug, sorry. Honestly, the timed teleseed is probably one of the worst auras there is. Or, rather, one of the most jarring and bizarre. Maybe give it a shot with some others.
I'm curious why you decided to only give one option for the auras rather than making it a choice like the crystal rooms. To emphasize that picking up the aura is optional?
We were initially testing auras as something that you'd pick in a crystal room or shop -- on the same level as seed types. I was playing with this for a while and it just never felt right. In the end I realized that auras just aren't as important as seed types and placing them at the same decision-level as seed types made me not use them, and made them seem bad. However, when I just dropped them in a room in each camp, they were immediately shaping my runs and I was having a lot of fun with them.
Right now it's sort of just giving you one since it's the simplest way to test auras as a gameplay system that doesn't interfere too much with the systems that already exist. In the end if we do keep auras in the game we could very well do more interesting things like choices between auras, sacrificing resources to get auras, etc. So yeah, mostly for simplicity, testing, and isolating the experience.
The crystal shield aura seems really powerful. Combining that with a bomb seed that gave me (probably too many) gems got me a full two stages further than I've ever been, finally dying on the boss when my gravy train ran out of gems.
I also got the thorn aura which seemed more fun than actually beneficial, but I don't think that's a bad thing.Aura's feel like something that should absolutely be in the game, it incentivizes not getting hit and adds a ton of variance to gameplay.
My main experience so far has been with the Thorn Aura (Crystals -> Thorns, in case that's not what it's called). That was incredible amounts of fun and I picked it up when I had 1 crystal and 1 heart, and it carried me all the way through the second biome in a terrifying glass cannon fashion. If I had more health when I picked it up I would've felt like a god. It's definitely overpowered at the moment, in my opinion. Maybe make it truly a glass cannon item where you cannot gain HP while you have it?
I also came across the aura that's supposed to give you two free seeds, I believe, but I was confused about how to use it, if I needed to get hit? I ended up dying immediately so I didn't get to find out.
It's definitely overpowered at the moment, in my opinion.
Yeah, I'll say that there are a bunch of them that are probably overpowered right now. The design process that has been most successful for us has been "make a thing too strong so that we find out if it's fun and then tone it down".
I also came across the aura that's supposed to give you two free seeds, I believe, but I was confused about how to use it, if I needed to get hit?
If you go into a crystal room or shop there should be a little circle with the arrows-in-a-circle emoji. If you roll over that with it it should work. Though, now thinking about it, I'm realizing there might have been some changes that broke it in crystal rooms. It is... very alpha right now.
Love the Thorn Aura story! Playing with variables like health gain will definitely be tools to pull out to make these crazy things more balanced haha
So I am not sure how I feel about aura's, after a bunch of runs they are not adding enjoyment for me. They feel like in most cases they are diminishing the strength/reason to care about many types of seeds, duplicating them, or could be implemented more cleanly as seeds rather than auras. That if the goal is to expand the value of tactical choice there is lots of opportunity to make what seed you are playing at the time more valuable with the same end impact that auras have.
I can understand wanting to explore ways to add more layers of resource management, but I think the game probably doesn't need it? I think there is a strong set of systems in place without auras, that depth can be achieved through additions and balance within those systems instead of though adding new systems, at least in this case.
Hope I don't come off as too negative, is just one opinion :)
I think part of the thing I have with auras is there are already a lot of seeds in the game that purely add to the noise and need some balance. Aura's feel like they are just adding more noise to the background of things I don't really care much about. A normal run for me goes like this:
I try to stay around 10 crystals
I try to stay around 5 thorns
I grab any shield type seeds and keep them active
I plant maybe 1 checkpoint per zone when I remember
I stay on hearts otherwise and get as many as possible
All other seeds etc I ignore as they are not as valuable in most situations, and are actively bad in many.
All the shields in general I think are very very powerful, they greatly impact the distance of a run. They are just automatic takes and I always hope to see them instead of anything else.
For all weapons, homing enemies render them somewhat useless. Once the enemies are thick enough to justify using weapons in the first place instead of going around them, you have to keep moving all of the time to avoid the homing types. Moving into your own weapon fire is bad, moving away from weapons that need to be aimed is bad. Thorns take care of enemies in a way that protects you more in general, and is not possibly harmful to yourself.
So to summarize again, right now the starting seeds are all incredibly important, but after that I only care about shields, which make a huge impact, and any other pickups seeds/auras are mostly noise.
Maybe there are some types (especially of auras) or combos I haven't seen yet, but if they are that rare to get then I would say the vast majority of players will never see them.
Maybe the problem is thorns, hearts and shield are too powerful?
Like if there was a limit to 1 thorn, and a limit to 3 hearts, and the shields were only very very small areas and cost a ton, like 10-15, I would probably care about the other weapons a whole lot more.
this is really interesting. thanks for this perspective.
for me (and i suspect us) it's very different and i personally find shields to be one of the least useful seed sorts with nearly all other weapons preferable to thorns. i wonder if that's because you don't get time/opportunity to practice with these other seeds and so you'll never risk trying them out enough to feel comfortable whereas you get to try thorns out every run guaranteed.
that said, i'm going to try and give this strategy a shot. my guess is that it's a very survivable build while i think we try to maximize and "thrive" by getting tons of crystals, buying up a lot of suits, hearts and etc.
the more of these looks into "this is my strategy" the better we can reveal our complete blindspot of what it's like for an intermediate/advanced TumbleSeed player, so if this changes please update us! hmmm, maybe this warrants a fresh thread about this specifically...
As a concept, I approve of auras.
As for the particular auras, here are some of my impressions:
That's about as much as I can remember. In general, I feel like auras are best when they augment your play, rather than revolutionize it. When I grab one seed, that doesn't necessarily make my entire run about THAT seed, but that often happens when I grab an aura. All of a sudden, the entire run is about THAT aura, and every other choice I've made in the game becomes secondary.
In the end, I'm starting to shy away from auras in general. Maybe once I've played a ba-jillion hours and I'm a TS Master that kind of augmentation will be welcome, but for now, I just want to master the Bullet Seed.
ah cool i like the idea of the gold/emeralds giving you 1 thorn and the rest goes into the bank.
there's also this bounce friend aura that i dig, here's alpha member omnigryphon playing with it to pretty interesting/cool effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvi5bxDAF0w&feature=youtu.be&a (i haven't gotten it in natural play yet)
