itch.io

Oh crap, does empress protect from exhaustion too? Didn't realize that, definitely needs not to be so.

Good point, that card was one of the first reversed ones I made and didn't really balance it properly for player use and mainly for the boss. I guess the clones should be temporary only for the encounter where they're spawned.

The last thing isn't a soft lock. You just have to do the sacrifice as it says, it's not optional. This even is a way to discourage against just having too many queens.

At least boss fights and more cards and events. And I'm adding an achievement/challenge system too to have more something to aim for.

True, it really is. Will be fixed on the upcoming patch.

Huh, how? That seems like quite a lot... 😂 Did you just sac everything at that point? What would you consider to be an achievement worthy amount of souls earned in a run?

Yup, good point.

Yeah, sadly it can happen quite a lot/easily on this original version of the game. There will be an patch coming to it in about a week or so fixing this and adding a bunch of more stuff too.

I think you only have 2 (starting) slots on the raft so you're just switching between the two. You could replace the pawn with the second one though.

Yea maybe starting cards/pieces shouldn't give out any souls when left behind... 🤔

Any recollection what happened to that "ghost king"? Was it ever moving or acting normally anyhow?

Combinations of weird card interactions and bugs probably. Looking at the pic, it looks like the king is triggering the lovers effect (it caught from that one pawn with chaos ability). And it probably can probably "see" that pawn due to copied magician ability ie. allowing to telefrag on top of any piece. What a combo. 🤯

I guess there are also some missing game over checks on cases where pieces die on "weird" times like the hermit mines and gets stuck there. More things to add to my fix list, thanks for these! ❤️

Good point, maybe I should add some events or other ways to discourage just having too many queens. And I am indeed adding a bit more content and things to strive for in the upcoming patch (coming out in a week or so). There is at least gonna be some hand crafted boss encounters and a deckful of new cards too to collect. So structurally it will be a bit more like Coup Ahoo where after a set amount of islands (not quite sure on the count yet) you're going to encounter a boss and beating it would be considered a win of a run.

Nope 🤔

Any idea how the pieces were setup on the raft before the restart and them (all three?) being stacked on bottom corner?

Thanks for the pointers! I've actually even fixed quite a few of these already (along with other balance changes etc) and there is still about two weeks left until I can patch the game again so plenty of time to fix the rest too. Yeah justice definitely shouldn't trigger when the target does an empress dodge.

Yea, they’re very tough. Probably even too tough. They’re also not even mandatory to defeat to ”beat the game” and kinda balanced to be fought after getting loads of the available upgrades. 

Honestly there wasn't really much balancing at all in the current version due to lack of dev time. And even for the future patch version I'm working on, there isn't real rhyme or reason behind how I balance things. I just play around with it and see how it feels and adjust accordingly.

Yup, you are correct. It will be impossible to eliminate stalemates completely. But I would like to at least make they way less prone to happening in the early levels. Maybe the opponent should give up and still give out the rewards. I was initially thinking of it not being the opposite but maybe it'll feel better to the player that way. I gotta play around with it and see how it feels.

But as you stated, even detecting those stale situations isn't all that simple task to tackle with all the card modifiers. I guess with no "punishment" for stalemating and having the enemy give up would make it more lenient for the detection so it doesn't matter that much even if they sometimes give up even if they still had a fighting chance.

That is the intended way. You lose all the souls you don't use when you start a new run. So you can't just pile on quick one level runs and build up you souls to buy something expensive.

Well yeah, I gotta improve the early game quite a bit. But I don't really agree that the enemy should give up on a stale. It's a draw, not a win for the player. Maybe the enemy should run away in those scenarios not offering you a reward for the "win". But in an ideal world these stale situations wouldn't even be all that common. I think a lot of them are caused by bishops. I have improved the level generation to do less of those one tile bishop trap bridges and plan on doing quite a bit more of level generation finessing to make the experience all  in all smoother.

Thanks for the feedback! Yup, it does have some level generation issues especially in the early game. I have already managed to make it quite a bit better and I am indeed working on improving it further in addition to adding more content to it. So you can expect a patch to drop as soon as the game jam rating period is over (so in about a month).

Good ideas, I've actually already tweaked the island generation so that it doesn't do those one wide bottle neck bishop traps at all in the early levels and lowers the chance of them later on too. Only dark square bishops on early levels would be an easy addition and will indeed fix quite a lot of the problems. And forcing the raft to connect to at least two squares on the board would indeed make it feel better later on when you have more pieces on play.

Thanks! Yeah islands having those one wide bridges does indeed trap bishops pretty annoyingly. I have already improved this for a future version a bit. I'm sure there are already many different chess roguelikes out there but I intentionally didn't even check not to be unintentionally influenced (or unmotivated) by them. But there are so many directions you could take the genre combination so the world can easily fit multiple!

Thanks! ❤️

Yeah I gotta do something about that. I have already changed the level generation so that the single wide bridges (that are bishop traps) do not appear at all in the early levels and are much rarer later on too. Ideally I would like to detect the states where it's impossible for either side to win but it's not all that easy to do. Like usually a queen can't catch a bishop 1 on 1 but sometimes they can depending on the terrain. And of course card effects add a lot more complexity on top of handling the normal cases.

Oh yeah of course just finding out situations where you have no moves at all would be a piece of cake. But I was thinking more of detecting cases where you couldn't win no matter what even if you had loads of different moves to make.

Yeah, that sucks. But it should happen that much really, maybe you were just very unlucky. Detecting stalemates would be a bit tricky. With just the chess pieces it would be pretty doable but with all the different possible effects and their combinations, it seems safer to leave it to the player to decide. And I already changed the island generation to do way less of these 1 wide choke points and completely avoid them on the first islands too. But I guess it's gonna be a bit of a wait before I can patch the game again.

Haha, I don't know why I keep going for tarot cards that often. I decided kinda fast that I wanted the items to be cards as it synergizes thematically nicely with chess being a board game and obviously after the classic playing cards, tarots are the first thing that come to mind. And they really offer a nice well rounded and decently numbered set of pretty abstract and versatile themes to plan the effects around.

The difficulty, if you can call it that, is just the enemy counts increasing and they getting more and more cards and effects. So the real difficulty really is all about what kind of random stuff they get really. There was probably some weird random error happening on the level/enemy generation, I gotta do some more testing on the higher levels. I didn't really test at 10+ that much at all really. You should have still at least saved some of your souls even if it froze as it does save that periodically?

But I still do like the concept of the game and plan on keeping working on it for a bit at least. Gotta still work on balancing everything better, fixing bugs and adding more stuff.

Awesome, good to know that it worked and maybe I'll know to sidestep this land mine in the future. Patch coming right up to fix the logo fully too. Huge thanks for pointing this out and quick reply/re-test!❤️❤️

Pushed a patch now forcing everything to be left-to-right. Is it better now?

Is that the downloaded or web version? Looks like it's doing everything mirrored, everything that should be on the right is on left and vice versa. Except for the menu "opening direction" which is correctly moving it right (from left though, instead of off screen from right edge). Is your system/browser using right to left writing mode by any chance?

Oh I see. Yeah, the objectives get crazy hard to further you survive.

Here is a good explanation how it actually works. I admit that the wording for it in game can be a bit confusing.

Devil iirc

Probably at some point but I don't have anything planned right now.

This game wasn't made by the one who submitted it but me instead and he obviously has no rights to it. This dude has been doing this thing (joining all jams with prices with different stolen games) for years now, this is at least the fourth time he is using one of my projects it seems.
https://itch.io/jam/appodeal-accelerator-live-games-challenge-1000-prize-pool/ra...

The original game:
https://anttihaavikko.itch.io/claustrowordia

I have reported these to itch too but they seem to be taking their time in reacting to it.

Thanks for the heads up! ❤️ Yet another one of these loser scumbag thieves to throw shade at on my future game projects. And this one was dumb enough to try to use my original leaderboards on it too so now it looks like this...

Haha, nice! 🤣👍

You probably just got very unlucky on your first opponent. Also be sure to equip some gear before going for the fight.

The leaderboards thing is now fixed. The issue was not actually on your end but my server service provider (which was migrated from another provider) had some strict firewall setting on and blocked all web requests from non-browser apps. For the empty shop I'll have to do some investigations but it seems like normally it works but there can be some items appearing which make it not work...