itch.io

the second character once, which i find much more intuitive and fun to play

I am glad you liked Mage. Interestingly, while many players agree that Mage is fun to play, some also find him less intuitive, since Warrior is just straightforward “burst damage” character, while Mage requires player to plan across several turns and stall to regain resources right from the start.

If you have a rule for - i want this behaviour and for + i want this behaviour… for me a second word would help…

I understand your point, and indeed “perfectly additive” status like strength is best suited for going negative. However, even for more complicated cases, negative status may be simpler.

Consider the defence status. Currently it is “subtract from incoming damage, if was >0, spend amount equal to damage reduction”. Suppose I split it into “defence” and “vulnerability”, both of which work only if >0. Then the rules must additionally state:

• If both defence and vulnerability are present, smaller one is subtracted from larger one and the difference is actually applied (which is one more thing to calculate mentally).
• Cards which change the sign of statuses, like “Adapt”, must explicitly list all pairs of “opposing” statuses.
• “Defend X” for non-constant X must be re-formulated as “if X > 0, apply X defence, else apply X vulnerable”
• Cards which base their effects on defence, like Bash, need to be re-formulated to “Melee 1*(defence - vulnerability)” etc, (or rebalanced around new defence system).

Overall, the amount of text needed to explain the defence mechanics will grow. The radical solutions is, of course, just to remove “negative” statuses from the game, which many other similar games do. However, I specifically think that added depth of interactions is worth additional complexity here.

map of slay the spire is mostly there to reduce complexity and not to increase it

It is debatable, and StS map is of course a good design, with is why it is copied by most modern games. Still, consider that:

• Right from the get-go, the map offers player to plan the entire route, which is about 4-5 decisions even before the first battle.
• Possible future encounters and their relative probabilities play approximately the same role in StS and my game, but calculating probabilities is much harder in StS, since you have to account for multiple encounters at once
• Opportunities like card upgrade and removal are rarer in StS, but it makes planning for them harder. Basically, you have to decide beforehand whether you want a path allowing to upgrade a card, while in my game upgrade is always available, so the decision is simpler.

All of the above is not a negatives for StS, as it is just another level of strategy, which is simpler in my game. Naturally, beginner StS players can ignore the complications and just click on next stage randomly, but that is also true for my game.

take a look at the coming opponents (it’s good that it’s there in some sense and i only noticed recently)…

That feature is very new, was just added in latest release (see devlog). You may look at the neighbor thread on this forum for a discussion which lead to this feature.

expect the player to … read the description of every possible opponent

Probably the most jarring difference is that my game explicitly exposes the complexity which is hidden in other games. For example, experienced StS players actually do the same, the difference is that they remember all the enemies and their strengths / weaknesses either in their mind or on a separate spreadsheet (see, for example, Jorbs videos for examples of the latter).

Maybe hiding information like the possible enemy list from beginner players may help…

it feels like the process of creating it was “putting a lot of rules and cards in very fast” …

You can read devlogs to gauge development pace. Looking now myself, I see that over the last year, I introduced about 120 cards, so 10 cards per month on average. Not sure how this speed compares to other games.

a game which has more complex card rules … magic the gathering … more similar to your game.

Another keen observation on your part, MtG was indeed second-largest influence after the StS. Multi-color card cost and persistent hand between turns are most obvious MtG similarities.

Regarding your suggestion of slower unlocks: although I long resisted it, it seems like the way to go since many beginner players request it.

compared to the first version I played the warrior plays better now

Perhaps the main difference is that you are now more experienced. When I watch your video, I can see that after trying and learning certain cards and items you have already improved your play (which is the intended player progression).

What I see is the same as the first screenshot, sans the lines on the squares. How do I get to UI on the second screenshot?

This sounds very promising, so I tried you project. However, I does not seem to do anything.

I can create / delete “boards”, whatever they are, but no way to edit actual images / sprites? I tried pressing just about any key and mouse button, nothing helps.

default filter doesn’t take into account the “encounters may appear earlier” ascension.

Will be fixed in next release. Meanwhile, you can manually add 1 to the high value of stage range filter

I could always have my own conducts to have a reason to drop ascensions

If you find some interesting conducts of this nature, I can add them as achievements.

For example, existing ‘Revolutionary’ achievement is somewhat close to the ‘remove starting card’ goal you mentioned.

Released v0.31 with some changes discussed above

I pushed new update with changes to Dreamwalker. I replaced Dispersion with new Somnicide card, which makes some encounters much more comfortable, and is more thematic.

New Psychotic Strike is a bit unreliable, since it can randomly produce guilty dream, but combos well with negative statuses from Otherworldly Tune and is one of the very few cards with multiplicative upgrade scaling. Hopefully this would be enough to make it worth picking.

I did win once on max-ascension, exploiting new quest for Bounce card, which makes good addition to status-managing toolkit, but takes a lot of brainpower due to combinatorial explosion of possible outcomes depending on card order.

I went to laguna and realized I can’t kill the kraken tentacles in time before fatigue kills me

Kraken is a natural enemy of insanity-based builds. I did consider making tentacles flee/die when “main body” dies, but, although thematically good, it makes Kraken too weak against burst damage builds.

idealized, more experienced player would’ve seen that coming.

I have added “View possible enemies” button to next encounter preview, to reduce amount of memoization needed for such decision. I goes with general principle of “give player convenient access to all information not explicitly hidden by game rules”. You still need enough skill to understand which enemies are good / bad for your build, of course.

I avoid using conspiracy … delirium does it’s job

Yeah, when creating Conspiracy, I added potentially much better scaling to compensate, but seemingly that was not enough.

I’d actually appreciate having a reason not to have all ascensions up.

One, admittedly convoluted, reason is achievement hunting. For example, quest-related achievements are much easier without ‘harder quests’ ascension. Of course, that is only relevant if you are into this sort of thing. I personally am not, but I know a few players who enjoy forcing builds and chasing strange achievement goals.

Overall, I think currently late game is too easy in the sense that if you live past ~stage 15, you are probably busted enough to just stomp the rest. I have vague plans to add significant spike in difficulty for the final boss, comparable to Heart in Slay the Spire.

I too suffered from lack of this feature. If your goal is only to create lobbies, you can share links directly to the nested iframe, like this: https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/15886391/index.html

Unfortunately, these links are unstable between game versions, so they are not suitable for long-term publication.

Thanks for putting thoughts and efforts in your reply. This kind of discussion is the main reason I develop the game, since I enjoy exploring unusual and intricate mechanics.

I can see how the current defence (and some other statuses) description is insufficient, and will certainly try to improve it. It is true that “resistance” is more often used in games with negative values. However, resistance is also strongly connected with the notion of multiplicative changes (i.e. “resist 50%”), as opposed to defence, which is frequently additive.

You are quite correct that the decision to allow negative statuses is rare among similar games, but it was quite intentional and currently every status (and even every resource except HP) can be negative, with most of them having real effect depending on the sign.

This creates some interesting and non-trivial interactions which I quite like, as well as actually reducing overall complexity in a roundabout way (since I currently have 27 statuses, which would grow to ~50 if I would replace every negative status with corresponding “inverted meaning” status).

For example, consider Wyvern monster, which does “Repeat 4: (Defend hero -1, Melee 1)”. This sounds quite weak, until you take into account compounding nature of negative defence. If hero has 8 defence, this attack do no damage. However, if initial defence is zero, it does 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 14 damage, enough to one-hit weaker heroes.

Another example is negative strength, which obviates requirement for (1) separate “weakness” status (2) additional rules on interaction between strength and weakness.

Your comparison with Slay the Spire is very on point. I intentionally deviated from “simpler is always better” rule of card design which StS embraces. I compensate for complexity a bit by simplifying other parts of the game (such as UI and game map).

i frequently stumble over cards “which talk about status effects” I haven’t even acquired yet

I did consider “trickling down” unlocks in the beginning, so that player gains access to new cards / statuses at a slower pace. Note, however, that actually the Warrior is already “simple and straightforward” character compared to later ones, and his cards are mostly very simple “gain buffs, beat enemy, heal self”. Even Heavy Blow, which is indeed hard to read on first try, is basically just “hit, getting more damage from Weight effect and Critical status”.

Later heroes / cards use indirect damage, hand manipulation, card modification, summoning, etc.

concept of toughness though… (it felt kind of expensive to pay for it…

One other issue I noted watching your playtest is that probably I should reduce probability of rare cards. Note that some cards, including Scaled Skin and Feast on Flesh are rare (with golden titles). Rare cards are more powerful, but also have higher requirements / downsides. So taking a rare card early can be viewed as a risky investment, hoping that necessary ingredients will arrive in future rewards. By default, the game scales up probability of rare cards with each stage, from 0 to 100%.

Problem is, full game contains 20 stages, but stages after 12th have to be unlocked. So the rare card probability grows too fast precisely for novice players, where it can lure them into taking too much unsupported cards. I will certainly think about balancing this.

I played your game a bit. Here are few notes:

• Game UI does not scale with the browser window in non-fullscreen mode
• After the first look, I was really hoping for the game similar to Orb of Creation, but yours is much closer to Cookie Clicker, which is of course ok, but less interesting for me personally
• I suggest to make costs on disabled buttons well-visible, since they are actually the main thing player stares at when he waits until next click
• I suggest some indication of available purchases on the tab buttons (e.g. number in parenthesis)
• Manual clicking income is not reflected in mana/sec making it much harder to judge relative efficiency
• Balance-wise, manual clicking is made obsolete way too fast IMO
• Since the game is Cookie clicker-style, I suggest to copy many useful features from Cookie Clicker UI, such as separate display of income for each unit type, and maybe combining unit purchases and upgrades on single screen
• After quickly reaching ~1000 mana/sec, further progression feels rather bland, since production units do not differ in anything except production speed. I suggest either adding more interesting upgrades, or, if they already exist, making them available much sooner.
• Text in “about” and “privacy” misses spaces after periods.

negative player confusion triggers as if it’s 1

Fixed

Spider Web has no sanity immunities

Fixed, and gave it immunity to ensnared to boot.

spawn of silver getting more guarding is considered the lucky outcome

Fixed, it was a bit funny since I stared at the “obviously correct” line for a few minutes, thinking that I was affected by insanity from my game, until I finally saw the typo:

E.guarding(new RandomInRange(0, 2), { invert: true }), vs E.guarding(new RandomInRange(0, 2, { invert: true })),

dazzling ink improves the multiplier of infectious delirium

Will fix, but this bug also affects some other cases, for example splicing “Melee” effect from Spear into Revenge with Idea. I need to review those carefully.

vitality damage from all sources triggers guilt

Yes, I have already noticed this, and consider this bug serious enough to again publish mostly-fixes release. Unfortunately this change requires some extensive refactoring, so it will take a few days.

Meanwhile, I would like to get some feedback on Dreamwalker. He is certainly very hard, I actually did not yet manage to win on max-ascension. What was your experience with Dreamwalker? I would like to buff him slightly, but without affecting his core “identity”.

So far, my ideas include:

• Give “negative insanity” statuses some benefits, like (bad example) additional melee damage from negative fear. So far, I did not invent interesting enough benefits.
• Tone down guilty damage a bit, but it will make it almost useless when applied to enemies
• Ignore attacker’s guilt when the victim is immune to guilt itself. I like this idea both thematically (no guilt for destroying mindless things) and for balance (since currently the most dangerous enemy in early game is a chest, as it forces player to use Eldritch Light). The main downside is that this change is hard to explain in status description
• Give Dreamwalker a summon (as a way to circumvent guilt). I will certainly add dream-themed summon(s) anyway, but the question is whether to add it to the starting deck.
• Either buff Dispersion or remove it from starting deck, since, although it does save you very rarely, it feels like a burden 90% of the time.
• Maybe you have other opinions?

Thanks a lot.

A few clarifications / notes:

• “defence” works like this: when taking damage, defence is subtracted from the damage, and spent at a rate of 1 per damage prevented, but only if it was >0. So if defence = 3, and incoming damage = 5, then incoming damage becomes 2 and defence becomes 0. If defence = -3 and incoming damage = 5, incoming damage becomes 8, but defence stays at -3. I will try to re-phrase the explanation.

• The “replay” button on tutorial window lets you see the flashing animation again if you miss it. Were you curious what it does? Maybe you thought it does something else?

• It seems that you did not notice “Melee self” effect on Punch card, which acts similar to cost 1 in some ways, but is preventable by block, so you could play Block card before Punch to avoid this self-damage.

• Self-damage is affected by strength, so gaining strength should be managed carefully. You did see the “Brass Knuckles” item which mitigates this (but self-damage was not the problem this run, so your decision not to take it was good).

• The “Spring” card indeed appeared too early (i.e. you did not yet unlock the cards with Clockwork mechanics), I fixed that. I also delayed unlocking of Heavy Blow.

• As usual in deckbuilders, picking even a good card has downside of bloating your deck. In this game, you encountered 3 powerful card/item combinations, each of those could let you win. However, you deck was too large and you drew only 1 of them in your final fight.

• With deck this thick, game should have unlocked the “stashing” mechanics which helps to temporarily remove unneeded cards from deck. But due to a minor bug, unlock was delayed. Fixed that.

• The toughness does reduce card cost, so 6-cost Scales card pays for itself if you play more than 6 total cost of cards afterwards. Playing Scaled Skin + Muscles gives your 2 strength, which you did manage to pull off once. This combo is powerful but very expensive, and default healing in the deck is not quite enough to support it.

• You picked two copies of Feast of Flesh and did not encounter +vampirism card or item, which is unlucky. Feast of Flesh is “win the game with one card” level of power, but only if you have a source of vampirism. After unlocking quests in this game do a lot to increase your chance of finding missing combo pieces.

• You picked Flimsy Shield + Sun Shield + Bash, which is also extremely powerful, but needs card draw and/or more copies of Bash

• You picked Revenge, which you did use well, and correctly noticed that intentionally spending HP may be beneficial.

• The Second Wind card and Blank Paper item could help a lot with card draw.

• The “does-nothing” Boulder card has lots of uses. Simplest is to spend HP for Revenge, especially in combination with vampirism. It did not happen in this game, but with enough vampirism and toughness it may occur that hero is unable to spend HP even if he wants to. Another use is some cards (like Fling or Fair Trade), which do effects proportional to card cost.

• The final battle is perhaps still winnable. The key is NOT to play Feast on Flesh, play only Revenge on the first turn, and maybe play a Secret Technique on the second turn, when your hand contains several attack cards, to buff them all. Salamander Flameraiser can be considered a hidden boon, since it exhausts you cards, getting rid of expensive ones to free the space in hand. If you did not play since then, you can post you “autosave” (press export/import button in “saves” window), and I will try to check if I can beat it.

Thanks again, I gained some valuable insights from your playtest.

This sounds like PotionCraft and other similar potion-brewing games. I do not see anything wrong with this concept, but that is true about almost any other game concept too. The implementation and specific details are what matters most.

Regarding embracing monotony/repetitive actions, I suggest to look at incremental games for inspiration, there are many alchemy-related ones as well.

I played a bit more. Level progression, UI and tutorial are all much better. Separate thanks for volume controls.

I like most of new graphics, except balloons, are now visually hard to parse due to strange white blob, and “mats” where player must place a weapon due to their “noisy” look.

When playing on Windows/Firefox, I experience significant lag every time I pick up the weapon, so severe that music pauses for half-second.

The step-by step nature of tips is very good idea. However, it seems that using tip has no downside. Maybe give 1 less star for level if tip was used?

When playing more complex levels, it is sometimes tedious to watch the process again and again while figuring out next weapon to play. Maybe add “animation speed” setting and / or “quick play” button

Overall, good job on improvements!

In my recently posted devlogs, <meta property="og:image"> tag points to the project cover image, while previously it correctly pointed to the image inside the post. As as result, posting link to external sites such as Discord shows wrong preview.

Example of correct tag: https://alsoknown.itch.io/way-to-crown/devlog/1123383/v028-new-antiquarian-hero-weight-effect

Example of incorrect tag: https://alsoknown.itch.io/way-to-crown/devlog/1144822/v030-insanity-rework-new-dreamwalker-hero

Here is current list of items which I would like to balance, but unsure about exact solutions. Any thoughts and additions are welcome :)

• Burnt Pancake. This item is probably the “most broken” on this list, due to its interaction with exhaust / single use effects. I like the interaction itself, but I feel it is too easy, so perhaps some extra downside / hurdle is needed. At a minimum, I will probably make this item rare.

• Cezvee / Coffee. Maybe Coffee should be slightly nerfed? Down to -12 fatigue? I am especially interested in impact on higher ascensions.

• Crude Scale / Delicate Scale. Both items are far too weak / niche. At the minimum, I will modify them to allow both descending and ascending sorting, but I feel some additional upside is needed.

• Diamond Ring. This is one of the oldest items, and unlike other rings, I find myself never picking it, since the downside of skipping turn is too harsh and the potential upside of infinite Wisdom scaling seems unreachable. There are ways to mitigate the downside, like Censor History and various methods of postponing defence, but maybe some buff is needed. Maybe just add quests for combo pieces?

• Garlic. Item works as intended, but the effect is too weak in practice. Maybe the problem is actually that enemy vampirism is too rare / low?

• Ice Cream. Although it counteracts many snow enemies and comboes well with Icicle and Permafrost, I feel that +MP effect is too weak, since if I dare to pick ice cards I usually already has solved MP regeneration. Maybe increase MP gain or replace it with some other effect?

• Mittens. Similarly to Ice Cream, seems that upside is insufficient

• Inquisitor Seal. This item serves two main purposes: as a convenient method to branch from MP to Wp cost, which works fine, and as a way to guarantee full Wp replenishment for deck without MP cards, which is too strong. One obvious fix would be to limit Wp replenishment, but I like the idea of gaining more benefits from negative resources. The most interesting idea I have is to add “If MP card is in play” condition, but may be it is too harsh?

First, thanks for taking time to playtest my game, especially since you had to put much more effort than I did in yours.

using the output numbers on the cards rather than engaging with the math.

That’s ok. The intention of the formula is to help player understand what influences given number, and the pre-calculated result is to reduce (not completely avoid, since some effects are interdependent) the need to calculate exact values.

RNG formulas actually confused me even after re-reading. The die icon’s hard to make out.

Do you mean you did not understand that the syntax means ‘random’ when you first saw it, you was it still unclear / confusing even afterwards?

Impale card might be a little crazy; Yes, I should probably nerf it a bit. That being said, the game has lots of overpowered combos, as the Impale it not the craziest one.

point to fear … All it does is reduce sanity, which reads like a weird form of damage?

You correctly identified the fact that fear is slightly “boring” currently. It can be seen as a form of damage, which, unlike HP damage, is cleared up between stages, but is not prevented by defensive statuses.

In the next release, I have already made significant changes to fear / insanity: in particlar, hero sanity is calculated as (HP + Wp), and fear effects of most enemies are scaled up to balance. This way, at least buffing max HP is less universal counter to both fear and damage.

typo on the potion(s)

Thanks, fixed

cuttlefish grinds the game to a halt … as mage

Early Mage has generally hard time against Laguna enemies do to lack of damage in starting deck. I have already added some mitigating factors, in particular more quests with damage-increasing rewards (but you probably did not unlock quests yet).

I am on the fence about what to do. On the one hand, experienced players just know not to enter Laguna without strong damage card / item, which is exactly intended part of skill in the game. On the other hand, beginner players will certainly feel bad in these encounters. Maybe I should lock harder encounters behind some achievement…

The deepest one can get you in a spot where it’s impossible to win, but it still takes ages to actually finish you off.

Weirdly, this can be solved by buffing Deeper One damage and/or adding damage to Deepest One, so that they kill you faster. On the other hand, the game has a lots of “you lose but the game does not know it” situations, and the player is expected to just give up and restart.

This feels unusual, but my analogy is giving up in chess even when you know that by perfectly playing the end game you can drag the game for 20 more moves.

massive prevalence of symbols… stave off certain kinds of players

You are correct, it does. But this seems unavoidable since the core concept is “not being afraid of complexity”.

Thanks again for your feedback!

I am a hobbyist developing free fantasy-themed card game ( https://alsoknown.itch.io/way-to-crown ).

Both yourself and your music sound interesting, so I would like a conversation with you.

Please contact me on discord: alsoknown1

I do have a game ( https://alsoknown.itch.io/way-to-crown ).

Note, however, that my game is large and complex, so please don’t spend too much effort unless you happen to like the game :)

destroy towers by right clicking

Heh, I totally missed that. Why the right-click is used for both moving and attacking? That is extremely awkward, at least for me.

make attack automatic instad of right click?

Why not put in on the left click?

you are suggesting that towers attacking from fog of war are revealed on minimap?

At least those which are in the walls and thus remain invisible no matter what player does. Alternatively, you can modify map generation to put towers only in the corridors.

Now that I understand how to get upgrades, they seem to work – not much to say since currently they are very basic, which is normal for first prototype.

Good luck with development.

Good job, the game is now playable. Some more feedback:

• Constant regeneration may be not the best choice, since it forces player to just sit in the corner for a long time, which is not fun. I suggest putting healing consumables into the maze instead.
• Towers inside the walls are not marked on the minimap, which is bad. I understand the player technically did not “see” them, but I suggest to still show them.
• The “laser” tower seems to be the worst since it is somehow impossible to dodge. The damage seems to happen even when I clearly move out of the red line.
• The minimap flickers when player moves – seems to be the issue with scaling / viewport
• Although the “follow cursor without clicking” control scheme is indeed much better than previous one, I would still prefer an option for using keyboards. Also, this genre usually implements dashes, so maybe you want to as well.
• I did not find any upgrades you speak of in your first post. How do they look?

I tried your game in browser (Firefox/Windows) and unfortunately found some significant hurdles.

• UI does not scale when playing in small window, cutting off part of the screen
• UI does not scale in full-screen either, making use only of small part of the screen
• Game does not capture mouse, making it almost unplayable for me (since I have browser gestures enabled). If you do not want to capture mouse for some reason, I recommend to add keyboard controls.
• Controls in “Options” and “How to play” screens do not react to input, including “close” button, forcing player to restart game
• The gameplay does not resemble the video you posted, towers seem to be located inside the walls (?) and are invisible to player.

So it seems that the game needs some work. I can test again if/when these problems are fixed.

massive aesthetic changes

I tried new update. Visuals are indeed much more pleasing now, although if the initial cutscene is supposed to tell some story, I was unable to decipher it.

you test my game, and I’ll test yours!

I would appreciate feedback on my game (https://alsoknown.itch.io/way-to-crown ). Note that my game is also card-based deckbuilder, but is rather large and complex, so it make require some time to playtest.

Otherwise, you might need a dedicated keyword.

I went this route. It is now called ‘empower’

curiosity is just a really good card

Adding Curiosity was a bit of lazy design from me. I just went with go-to card for hand management.

I have now replaced Curiosity in Antiquarian’s starting deck with new Collectomania card, which, although harder to use, gives a reason to keep duplicate cards in deck as well as potential for infinite, somewhat similar to Priest.

I trim the deck to … one curate

How did you replenish Wp with just one Curate?

“Any item trigger” is a bit much imo, and has very different outcomes depending on what items you find.

I agree with the first part, but the second part I find desirable. The unique quirk of this hero is supposedly to force player to re-evaluate all items, making use of otherwise irrelevant ones just for the triggers.

For now, I increased her negative perk, making all attacks reduce all the way to 0 (instead of just -2) upon use. She is still pretty OP, but power spike is a bit slower.

rune of balance upgrades it’s effect on it’s own … also happens with lockstep.

This bug affected all cards with ‘cycle by cards played’ effect. Fixed.

sleight of hand consumes luck

The bug was actually in the Bargain card. I forgot to pass ‘imitate’ flag, so Bargain spent luck while trying to preview number of cards it would affect.

curate often doesn’t count the magic missiles

Fixed

sword dummy increases the poison multiplier of scalpel melee instead of the constant

This interaction was left intentionally as a way to empower weak / rare weapons like Reforged Sword and Scalpel. I agree that wording of ‘Melee values +1’ does not communicate that idea at all. Underneath, the formula is “value * (poisoned) + plus”, so value is the coefficient. I do not know if you noticed, Secret Technique works the same way with cards like Revenge and Feast on Flesh, which makes it very powerful (and the name is kind-of pun related to this hidden interaction).

So my preferred way of fixing that problem would be to re-phrase Sword Dummy ability, but I currently have no idea how to do that. Ideas welcome.

Since both Curate and Bargain are in starting deck of Antiquarian, I am inclined to do next release sooner, even though the batch of new content is still small. But before that, I would like some feedback on Antiquarian balance – do you think her ability should be nerfed as it scales too soon and without enough effort from the player? Maybe gain 0.5 Shoot value per effect trigger? Or any other comments on her?

new version that should hopefully fix the issues.

Yes, I was able to finish tutorial.

movement problems, I cannot really reproduce

Simplest way for me is to click “Shift” 5 times while having Sticky Keys on. Maybe consider using WebGLInput.captureAllKeyboardInput ?

Some more notes:

• Art style is ok, mix of cozy and “burning hell”. I wonder if adding lots of dynamic lighting would be an interesting direction to evolve
• Some terrain elements are a bit too low contrast, I got hit multiple times by stumbling on pillars I did not see at first.
• “Burning barrels” give me a strong expectation of either “explode on hit” or “hurt player on touch”. Maybe change graphics and / or add some of those interactions.
• The “character upgrade” progress is far too slow IMHO, I suggest adding a reward after every wave (of course, rewards should be made weaker for balance – maybe give common rewards after each wave and rare rewards after each 3 or something like that).
• Implement “character stats” window and add numbers to rewards. This is what bullet hell players crave :)
• Maybe reduce starting “weak” enemy HP to make initial “boring” wave finish faster. (I think a cheap way to do it is by adding several versions of each enemy differing only by size and HP).

I played your game a bit. Few notes:

• It seems that game does not capture keyboard and mouse input (tested in Firefox / Windows). Therefore, pressing Left Shift to dash triggers Window’s “Sticky Keys” warning, and right-clicking does not work, so I am unable to finish tutorial
• It seems that sometimes character gets stuck moving in some direction even after I release all the keys
• Tutorial tells about dash and shield cooldown indicators, but the icons on the bottom do not change.
• I think it would be better to pause game to give player time to read tutorial text

I am open to testing more if you fix the problem with controls.

I played the game a bit. I like the core concept and think it has a lot of potential.

Few quick suggestions:

• Please add a way to mute or volume-control the music
• Triple-click method of playing card is a bit awkward. I suggest to create separate “select target” action, so that there is no need to click enemy if it is already targeted, which would make at least single-enemy battles less click-intensive.
• Maybe cancel dragging when clicking outside the possible target? Current “sticky” behavior is a bit irritating.
• Maybe add a way to cancel and rearrange actions from the timeline? Currently swapping the order of two actions requires too much work.
• I suggest numbering or otherwise identifying tutorial stages. Both as progress indicator and for easier reference.
• It seems that the stage which teaches to increase damage allows increasing enemy’s damage?
• I gave up on the stage which teaches to break on the next turn, since I do not understand what that game wants from me now (but I spent just 5 minutes on it, so maybe I am just being lazy).

Good luck with your project!

Everything in this sub-thread should be fixed in v0.28.

The only exception is bomb vampirism issue, which requires some extensive refactoring, so will be fixed next release.

found a quest bug reproduction:

Wow, that was a fun one to debug. The triggering condition was having exactly 5 gold at the end of stage while playing with “Quests are harder” ascension.

There is a quest (“Buy some ink”) where prerequisites depend on difficulty (it requires [difficulty + 5] gold). When loading the game, assignment to quest difficulty was too late, thus incorrectly including this quest into a list of available quests, screwing random selection.

freeze, happens when you upgrade Buckle Up with a rune.

Fixed

Sorry for late reply, day job consumed too much of my time. Thanks for detailed reports.

flimsy shield sometimes defends outside of turn 1

This one is a bit funny. Due to a typo, Flimsy Shield counted enemy’s turn instead of player’s one, so it gave defence when the target enemy happened to be just-summoned. Fixed.

self-damage of burning cards is affected by your own critical a bomb dealing “melee all” damage heals you if you are vampiric I think evasion deals with falling damage as well as it deals with melee

I have found few more instances like this, in particular falling damage also uses hero’s critical. Will fix, but it requires some work, so maybe next release.

reloading victory screen saves sometimes gives different quests

So far, I failed to reproduce that. If you will be able to catch more precise circumstances, please tell.

Telescope shows a monster with a one-word-name

Good catch, fixed.

ice shards in general often just don’t seem to exhaust

This was due to the effect ordering: “Force end turn” ignores the rest of the card. Fixed.

game freezes when discarded swindle plays ice shard:

Fixed

quicksafe forgets recent meat ration

Fixed

All fixes will be available in the next release. Before release, I will still try to search for a mixed quests problem and do more testing for a few days.

You are correct, it is a bug. Fixed to summon lich only once, fix will be available in the next update. Thanks for paying attention :)

In recent versions, additional important strategy aspect is to plan card affinity.

Here are few points not (yet?) documented in-game:

1. Affinity between cards does not scale with number of similar effects or costs in the deck (e.g. if you have at least one card with “Melee” effect, gaining more cards with that effect does not further increase affinity).

2. Affinity is multiplicative between different “sources”, so for example if you have both St-cost cards and fire cards in deck, affinity of Pyre will be significantly higher than if only one of these conditions is met.

3. Items which directly name cards, such as Elephant Figurine, give strong affinity to those specific cards.

4. Affinity works regardless of stashing, so if you want to find specific off-color card, it may be useful to first pick any card with same cost just to stash it and increase chances of finding the original target.

Card banishment is another powerful method to narrow down the pool of card rewards.

1. All ban effects are ‘dynamic’, and can be undone by using Black Box, gaining resources in case of Anchor, or rearranging altar items in case of Altar of Missing God.

2. Similarly, banning card rewards does not affect existing cards in deck, but some related quests help to remove such cards without paying removal cost.

3. For high-level play, it is good idea in general to familiarize yourself with quest prerequisites. In particular, picking off-color altar items is now probably the most reliable way towards card banishment, since they not only enable Altar of Missing God, but are also prerequisites for corresponding quest, similar to ritual cards vs Ritual Circle.

New release (v0.26) contains some tools to banish cards. Most powerful is probably the Altar of Missing God, but the downside is that you must, counterintuitively, pick an Altar for resource you want to banish, so inexperienced players will frequently miss that.

The Anchor is now rewarded by 2 new quests, both rather easy. Minor downside is that some otherwise useful items, such as Pauper’s Bowl, anti-synergize with Anchor.

I am not sure. Does the character look like a pink-insh blob?

On the first level, I was instructed to just press W, and the blob did move to the right (which is a bit strange, in the usual WASD scheme I would expect that W moves character up). I did try to “choose direction” with mouse, but nothing changed.

On the second level, there was no pink blob on screen, and nothing moved at all no matter what I pressed.

Tried to run, got this in browser console (Firefox / Windows):

ERROR: does not have a library for the current platform. index.js:369:18

at: init_library (modules/gdnative/nativescript/nativescript.cpp:1479) - Condition “lib_path.length() == 0” is true. index.js:369:18

SCRIPT ERROR: Attempt to call function ‘new’ in base ‘NativeScript’ on a null instance. index.js:369:18

at: _ready (res://addons/godotsteam/steam.gdc:5) - Attempt to call function ‘new’ in base ‘NativeScript’ on a null instance.

After entering the game, I received instruction of “Hold W, choose direction, release”, but pressing W (as well as any other keys I tried) did nothing.

Sorry, I seem to have some problems with either Internet connection or itch itself. I may have accidentally deleted your post, please re-post if so.

I considered that also, but that seems way too powerful, especially of more than one resource is banished.

During debugging, when I restrict card pool to a matching single-resource cards, my win rate with “basic” heroes (Warrior, Mage, Rogue, Priest) goes to nearly 100% even with ascensions.

So it seems like some compromise is needed. I will definitely add more banishing options to the game.

What do you think about adding resource-banishing rare items with corresponding hard quests, similar to how the current game handles “immunity” items (Jade Ring, Helm of Courage etc.), which are also very powerful?

Also, the game have many items and cards such as Shimmering Robe and Kaleidoscope, intended specifically to help with using “off-color” cards in the deck. Do you feel those options are too rare or not sufficiently strong to justify picking such cards?

I actually am very interested in this idea and already considered implementing it (this is commonly called Banish in most roguelikes, so I will refer to it as such).

My primary problem with this mechanics is that game has so many cards (more than 360 currently), that banishing just a few of them will be too small of impact. Game currently has “banishing” items (Porcelain Dove and Anchor) which remove whole classes of cards from rewards, but of course you need to find those items first.

If you have specific suggestions on how to make generic banish more impactful and / or about new banishing items, I am very interested to hear them.

How often were you using the left and right click abilities?

In general I find the current weapon system confusing (or maybe just buggy?) Left-clicking sometimes work and sometimes does not, and I did not manage to reliably reproduce the reason.

I also did not find significant difference between left and right-clicking – both seem to spend “power” meter and then strike with white “slash”, so after trying it few times I just used left-click for simplicity.

I suggest to make hero attacks mostly automatic, with clicking reserved either for “timed” blocks / attacks (e.g. significantly increase damage for next few “frames” with a few seconds of recharge, so player has to click precisely at the moment of connection, or something like that)

Or maybe make clicking mechanics different for different weapons.

Did you find any new weapons

I did find some polearm-type thingy (Halberd?), which allowed me to one-hit every enemy. It was all good until I found some large enemy (boss?) which one-hit me.

I also found some other items but not exactly sure if they did work (For example, chicken promised to increase my blade damage by 25%, but I did not see difference in damage numbers after equipping it)

I played a bit. It seems to be very similar to your previous game (which I also recall testing), both in positive and negative sides.

I did notice lack of shop and bigger arena, but why not improve the existing game?