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Could you have multi-color symbols that combine with both colors as usual, but where that kind of multi-color symbol only activates itself if other symbols with both colors are present in some combination? To encourage multi-color decks?

If a player is stupid (me) and clicks the 'reels' button during a transition between stages, the game crashes.

Sorry Marmoreal, I recorded a long video, but for various reasons, including that I am a noob at video recording and at OBS Studio, I recorded it at very low quality (pro-tip: always record videos in high quality, and then use some other programs to create a compressed version). The produced video has painful artifacts in some segments, but if you skip those, you might still find some value from the video. But if you decide not to bother, I have listed some of the things that I remember, as well as general commentary. If my internet connection was better, I would have streamed it on Twitch. At least the video is less than 3 GB despite being more than 5 hours long.

https://mega.nz/file/c2czAahD#_p_rX0Y96GIlcXW9prSk4LpXBl1wUpdZmVHobKE_xoM

• I played through maybe everything, completed all the story missions, and played all the optional missions (I might have missed one non-story forest mission type). The game is both very large in scope and mostly very polished and fun and good. I have difficulty believing that this was done by just one person, even considering how many years it has been under development. I mostly liked the humor, even though it is not quite my preference. The army hero trio mission was a bit dark at the end, even mentioning "genocide" (I would have left out that word myself), but from what I understood, the character was spared at the end.  The army hero trio mission is clearly still a work in progress, with some clear bugs, like enemies still spawning after retrying a boss fight, and dialog being immediately shown after defeating a boss, possibly causing dialog to be skipped passed by accident due to frantically clicking a few extra times in the frames after the boss has died.
• Will you continue developing the story content, which I assume might take a lot of time and work? Or will you end it on a cliffhanger, and release the game, and add further story updates in updates or (free/paid) expansions? Or something else?
• I never realized that you could use healing, I only saw it after playing the game, in the input settings.
• When the archer-mage is in invulnerability-mode, if she dashes, she becomes vulnerable even while the mode is still going on, which was annoying in one boss fight.
• The boss fights were mostly great, and what I would expect from a team of professional game developers, not a solo amateur. Really nice!
• Nitpick: I dislike the low number of males in the army, men make better meat shields and cannon fodder, but that is a thematic preference.    
• Genuine GMI energy, my impression in the thread was that this was some small game in development hell with a quirky theme and a small amount of content and animation, but you have a lot of content and cutscenes and animation. I would have worried about the scope, but you have already completed a huge amount. Really nice.
• I mostly liked the story and the humor in the game, and was caught a bit off guard with the darker themes. The mixture of high levels of silliness and darker themes may be common to some kinds of story telling, though.
• Would it be possible for collectible items to gravitate towards the hero if the hero is within a certain radius? The crates in some maps also took more hits to destroy than I would have expected.
• Nitpick: When in the level-up screen, is there any way to see how many ability points you have left?
• Nitpick: When selecting a chest after completing a non-story mission, could the highlighted chest stand out more from the other chests?  I did not realize that I had selected a chest the first few times I saw that screen, and kept clicking the chest without realizing that it was selected.

https://mega.nz/file/F2kWWQIC#VxoBGZDpquI5GVBKOWLRAzWW5upoLPHN0bfM1DnvXC4

I also found that a start with the Dart symbol is much easier than some other start, due to the somewhat reliable way of getting at least a bit of poison in with a dual-colored symbol.

I am tempted to record a video where I go full munchkin with a green mono-color build, and upload it such that you can see it. And try to defeat every enemy I find. I have defeated the Chieftain a number of times with a green mono-color build - green can even get good direct damage, with for instance the heart symbol.

I tried it some more, and poison is useful in several cases. It is especially useful at the very start, since you have a large mixture of colors of symbols and only one dual color symbol, and dealing damage consistently can be difficult. But if you get off a bit of poison, time may be on your side, even if you never hit a damage dealing effect again. That can give you symbols and tokens to get rid of some of the colors, and even removing one, and especially two, can make a deck much more powerful.

After understanding the game, I played it a bit for fun. and at the third level, I got a crash.

Are some mono-color decks meant to be brokenly powerful, or would it be an idea (good or bad) to add one or more mechanisms that penalizes mono-color decks or incentivizes non-mono-color decks? Players might like the mono-color decks, but it feels a bit too easy to me.

Nice game.

I have beaten the demo twice now, and I do not get how pressing the bandit works. At the default state, do you just press 'space', and wait? Can you affect the outcome? Maybe time it at the start and then wait? Outside of extra turn tokens or the 'Rusty Cog' artifact, is it only the initial timing that matters, and otherwise you just have to wait for the result? I never tried timing it, until I got the 'Rusty Cog' artifact, and by then all the items I had were one color. Could the time spent waiting for the result be decreased, to one second? But one artifact/item had as an effect "1 second lane". Also, having to wait that long for the spin to complete is annoying and time-consuming. Maybe it is just me that is the issue here for not getting it, but if other players also do not understand, making it clear (and less time-consuming?) how the spinner works would be good. At the start I was deeply in doubt about what kind of game it is - is it a action and reflex skill game, where I have to time things? And I kept being confused for quite a while. But then I realized that it is a deck building game. The Steam description makes that clear, but I stupidly just skipped reading any text. I enjoyed it a lot more once I just skipped any actions and reflexes, but that almost turned each battle into an autobattle, and took a lot of time. I discovered at some point in the settings that you can speed up battles, which helped. I am still confused on this point, for some of the battles give the impression that the player can have agency in the battle, but apart from the initial timing when spinning each turn (and Rusty Cog and Extra Turn tokens), is there any agency, or is it almost autobattle? Even if there is no agency, showing the battles is good for letting the player understand what is going on and what each enemy does and their strengths and weaknesses.

Mini-games were OK, I disliked the Space Invaders mini-game, it is normally a skill game, but can it even be beaten without a lot of luck? The other mini-games I encountered were good enough. However, at some point, I skipped any and all mini-games.

For the deck building, I was in doubt about what to get. I quickly realized that a mono-color deck is really powerful, since it activates many more symbols per turn on average. In particular once I saw that shops offered the ability to remove a symbol. I first tried with a blue deck, but not getting full health between rounds meant that you could get worn down. Red symbols can combine with power and attacks, but they have the major drawback that they can cause retaliation damage. I then went with a green deck due to both poison, regeneration, health gain, maximum health gain, life steal. And after a few tries, that turned out ridiculously powerful. Removing any and all non-green symbols using shops, never picking up non-green symbols no matter how good they were. Items vary greatly in their power, and some are very powerful and also fairly cheap. Shops are therefore priority targets.

Poison is really powerful, since you do not risk getting massive amounts of retaliation damage, and it keeps stacking up on the enemy without going away. Early on, it is also very helpful, since before you get a mono-color deck, you can go several turns without dealing damage. Poison also works even when the enemy has filled your deck with bad symbols (a neat concept).

After I won once, I kept restarting using the menu until I got a start with the Dart symbol, because I wanted a green build again.

I almost did not have to care about which enemy I went up against, in particular once getting powerful and getting to the second and third floor. I did lose one run to one enemy when I did not pay attention, the ghost one that deals 20x3 damage, but I won that easily on later runs after paying attention and using up all the Extra Turn tokens. I always avoided the copy cat enemy, and I do not know what that one is like.

The game is full of atmosphere.

Marmoreal, when I defeat the first enemy golem with the knight golem, nothing happens, no way for me to progress, no cutscenes. I backtracked to a mechanism, but it still gives the message "It won't budge". Can you confirm that this happens in your build as well? I am recording a video, but I do not wish to upload so short a video that just ends in a bug.

I did enjoy the game, do not get me wrong, I just do not feel that I am playing it the way that this genre of games are meant to be played. But I am not experienced in this genre, and my expectations for your game specifically may be wrong.

The video is here, at 1:45:00: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1969737788

Early but nice tech demo. I streamed it a bit, but stopped after I had connection issues and succeeded in defeating the top-central two enemies. I did not lose any units, and defeated maybe half of the enemies.

I ended up beating it, nice game.

Streamed it a little bit, nice demo.

WASD/IJKL and cardinal versus rotation: It might just be habit, I guess I would be more used to rotation, as in AD and JL is counter-clockwise/clockwise. It would also be fewer buttons. On a gamepad, having it cardinal makes more sense due to the sticks.

You are welcome, I hope to play it in future demo days. If you are still narrowing it down, it might make sense for you to more frequently get feedback - maybe post it frequently outside of demo day in agdg? And elsewhere?

I died at the boss battle where you pick up the second key. I am not good enough for this genre of game, but it seems good. Is the intention not to have saves and loads? I also streamed it.

Nice game, too difficult for me, at least if you are meant to do each map in the first 1 to 3 tries, but I did complete all the campaign levels. I streamed it if you want to see it.

Nice game.

Light blue text (used for emphasis) on a dark blue background is a bit difficult to see.

Combat got stuck for me:

I can select and deselect team members, but not end the turn, or even exit combat. It happened after I incompetently let my team members get attacked from two sides.

Visiting Trader's Rest does not replenish fuel. It is not possible to visit or to replenish fuel at Impact.

No auto-saves (yet)?

In one combat, I set the woman on overwatch duty, but once a group of 3 bandits was reduced to 1 from repeated overwatch, she did not shoot anymore, despite there still being a single bandit left. But it charged into combat some turns later, once I used a radio distraction.

Grid bug:

I am trying to enter "Redoubt", but bandits spawn whenever I try it.

Combat got stuck again.

Overall, some nice, albeit small, improvements from when I last played, I saw some bug fixes. It feels a bit ambitious, in some ways, with panning cameras and all, and combat, and inventory system, overworld movement, enemy AI raiders, radar system. Also neat. I like the game overall, but very early in development, and maybe on the ambitious side in scope.

The bombs did not work for me in the last level.

When using keyboard, why let WASD and ILKJ rotate instead of going for cardinal directions? You may have a good reason for it, but it did not feel good to me, at least in the beginning.

Is there a simultaneous aspect to the golfing? From the levels I played, it did not appear that way. Will that change in later levels? Or are there no more simultaneous levels?  Which is fine, though that begs the question whether you could instead just have the game be controlled with just WASD and QE, and then give players the ability to switch between characters, like you can switch between fairies in Poke ALL Toads. Will the balls shot from different characters be able to interact?

In the "hills" level, could the hills thematically be changed to some sort of abstract slider, or maybe a conveyor belt as in Factorio?

Will there be scoring of how many balls a player uses to win the levels?

Did you ever release Bearcycle on mobile?

I enjoyed playing the game, very brief though it was.

Very nice.

I wanted to stream this more, but my internet connection is less reliable than I hoped, and my poor arm needs rest :) . Great game from what I saw of it, its genre is of the highly difficult type.

I tried to stream this, but failed, due to internet connection issues. I played the rest of it offline.

I experienced a few (software) bugs, but not anything that would matter for this genre of game.

I first thought that the combat might be intricate, and was bothered by the lack of UI information on enemies, status effects, and all that. But, the combat is honestly trivial, once the player gets what kind of game it is. The combat will not be the main draw of the game, the story is, though having combat in this genre and type of game is probably necessary - combat mixed in with story sections. You can respec as much as you want, and the obvious solution is to go for some combination of "hit all enemies". The combat gets boring, and in the password-locked content, I did not have to understand what the enemies did and did not do. If I failed a combat, just restart it, and try again, and if that does not work, respec and try some other combination. And there are few real combinations, from what I see. The total state space of perks and unlocks feel much smaller than might be apparent at first glance. But combat being interesting and challenging might not be that important.

If this is a game meant to earn a profit, or at least some sales, then the story telling will be the main driving factor. I disliked the story personally, but I can see parts of the market liking it. Please do not take my criticism of the combat the wrong way, for relative to other similar games, the combat is decent.