I’m also having a lot of difficulty figuring out what to do; I get the general idea (bait the snake into the fruits so that it stops to eat them, allowing you to create distance), but I would have benefited from some introductory levels/isolated areas to teach me how to play it.
I love the concept of this project and each individual game I’ve looked at has been interesting, my brain’s just not quite big enough.
I’m enjoying this, and the presentation is very clean and well thought out.
I just unlocked chapter 3 and will have to continue later, but a couple of thoughts on experience so far (sorry if some of this repeats other comments, wrote it without reading others):
As with most games like this, i quickly found myself wishing I had at least a rudimentary copy/paste to clone/move/rotate an arrangement of pipes/machines.
When preparing setups before connecting colors, I sometimes had issues with pipes connecting too eagerly, realized I’d need to pump colors in to set them up side-by-side. It’d be nice if there wwas a modifier key I could hold to draw pipes without them connecting to anything except the tiles you’re dragging your cursor to/from, if that makes sense?
For figuring out ratios needed to achieve certain colors, I find decimal RGB values easier to wrap my head around than hex. “0,128,256” is much easier for me to work out than “0080FF”.
There’s some oddities (bugs?) with the color notebook… it’s unclear if the specific hex value is important for deliveries, or if it just needs a matching name, but I see my notebook records even accidental “failed” color mixes I’ve run into (I think?). I also see that for some reason, some colors show hex values that I’ve definitely never generated them with, or with hex values that don’t match? It gets a bit confusing, and when I check various colors with a screen color picker, the hex values the game claims often don’t match what’s being rendered? A bit hard to explain, here’s short video showing: imgur link.
Fun concept, I had a good time playing. Early on I worried a bit that I might get bored, but it held my attention. I imagine there’s a lot of room for creative things you could do to expand on the idea if you chose to develop this further; various unlocks hidden around the map, build zones in different places requiring transporting items, prebuilt machines in fixed positions around the map, etc.
I’m guessing the “can’t lift items higher than 1 block” is a measure to prevent an exploit where you could feed the same item through a 2x machine repeatedly, making completing the game trivial?
But the exploit is currently possible anyway, since at time of writing the way it works is “you can’t lift an item more than 1 block from the position you picked it up at”, meaning you can build a “staircase” of extra items and carry your target item up half a block at a time. (I tried this on a new run to test, and of course easily hit the goal with a single ~1e16 item a couple minutes after unlocking the 2x machine)
An alternate solution here might be to render “raw” items you mine differently than “refined” items that come out of machines (different shape and/or color?), only allow the player to pick up “raw” items (removing the height lift limit), and tweak the physics of refined items so that they can’t be lifted by raw items or otherwise physics’d upwards.
As someone that only speaks english myself: I genuinely don’t mean this as an insult, you’re coming across as somewhat demanding and slightly childish yourself, because of your tone and the heavy (and misplaced/undeserved) condescension.
While this site started out exclusively English, and is still primarily english, at some point (7+ years ago) they started making a more global push and expanded the language offerings.
This person might be interacting with the site through their native language, and using this as a free platform to publish things online, sharing it elsewhere. If you check their profile, all their previous uploads actually were in English, and got zero engagement. The first comment they’ve gotten, after years here, looks like this one you? So I can’t really fault them for not trying to appeal to their non-existent english audience.
The real issue here isn’t this person for publishing this, it’s that itch doesn’t offer “supported languages” tags for games so that people could filter their searches to just their known languages.
anyway, please be nicer thanks :)
Appreciate the response. I gave the new build a try, but wave 11 was still basically a death screen. I can believe your tester finds the game easy, because I did as well all the way up until that point, but it sounds from your message like wave 11 isn’t meant to be the current end of content, so I’m not sure what I’m doing differently.
I won’t have any free time to play for a long while after this, but I’ll share my experience from this time as playtest feedback in case you find it useful:
I survived until wave 11 without getting hit, with a bunch of flame towers with the extra short range fire attack, always-away-from-princess knockback, higher knockback, multiple damage upgrades, player ice aura, I think a flame loop?, and emergency player speed to both quickly kill enemies & keep them away from center as long as possible. (fire was the last type of tower I tried out of all of them my previous playing, but it ended up feeling the strongest) When wave 11 hit, anticipating a lot of “big enemies”, I ran around with my emergency speed quickly hitting and ice aura-ing each to slow them and give me more time to damage them and have the fire do its thing. I did what felt like significant damage to them and I might have killed one there right at the end, but it didn’t really matter because they all steamrolled past my slow aura and flame tower knockback wall, collectively doing enough damage to KO me nearly instantly. It gave a strong impression that the wave is intended to not be able to be beaten. Having tried this with several builds, I’m not sure what you’re doing differently that makes it trivial, but hopefully you find a way to guide future players towards the solution. Good luck with your game.
I kept coming back to the game for days and being stuck in the exact same spot as you, feeling as if I’d tried literally everything, but I just finally got it after spotting something on this page that made it click and I feel silly.
What to do after getting the green key, if you’re stuck:
While entering “from the left” from within red is possible, no matter what you do, you can’t seem to retrieve the purple key that way.
You need to look for a different way to arrange things to find a door that you can push your red key into from the left, to enter that purple key room.
There are some interesting concepts here that appeal to me and I’m interested to see where this goes, but the current build is pretty frustrating to play. I tried half a dozen runs, trying a different approach each time, but every one ended with an abrupt wave wave that had way more “big” enemies than usual all seemingly with a couple stats that I couldn’t handle (absurd speed, absurd health or defense or knockback resist or something, etc) enabling them to just steamroll past my defenses and instakill me. (Edit: I did one more run to check what wave, and it happened at wave 11 (died))
From those runs, I got a grand total of 47 gold (150+ short for the first available $200 purchase?). Needs a lot of balancing work.
Aside from balance, I’d suggest making the pickups & xp more visible (maybe give them white outlines around their borders to make them pop more?) As they are now they kinda blend in with some of the background terrain and are easy to miss (I didnt realize things were even dropping until middway thru first run).
I’m also stuck here despite coming back to this daily and trying everything I can think of. Feel like I have to be fundamentally missing something but no idea what.
I thought using db for the volume sliders was a cute thing I haven't seen done before. However, I would like to be able to mute the music, and the minimum volume on that slider doesn't actually mute it. (nothing against your music, it doesn't sound bad or anything, I just personally find it very difficult to think and focus on a task when background music is playing. I'm playing with the entire game muted instead, but it would be nice to be able to just have the sfx. thank you)
Seconds before you commented I finally realized about the armor thing lol; I didn't realize the glittering indicated armor at all on my first play. I had hesitated to use my metal units because of their low health, so despite me paying attention to stat changes, I never gave myself the opportunity to understand it absorbs a hit (to make that understanding leap I would have ALSO needed to have actively noticed both the particle effect, and its absence afterwards, which I clearly didn't in the case of Dwarves ). I like hidden mechanics conceptually so I get the intent, I just totally missed it here.
The space management stuff I understand would be pretty complex to "fix" here in a way that prevents it from ever happening in the first place, but I think there might be some ways you could handle the "error case" more cleanly. Referencing other merge games I've played, for cases like this I think they usually have a "bubbling" objects that are being forcibly given to the player when they don't fit on the field (they go into bubbles which float above the grid, allowing you to "pop" them when you do have space). Dunno how well that'd fit here, but something to consider.
Glad I could help, and your inexperience doesn't show at all, you clearly know what you're doing in terms of presentation and a lot of the little UX things developers frequently overlook.
I didn't beat the game, ran out of time to play when I did (was taking me longer than 20 minutes, which is not at all a complaint, and I made some mistakes by putting off killing enemies and just continuously merging them; the lack of space started to really hurt, and I realized it would have been far more manageable if I had dealt with it early and depleted my low/mid-tier units' health as low as possible without them dying instead of merging them immediately).
But I do intend to come back and play again from the start, really like this game and have a high opinion of it, also highly recommend.
Sharing feedback and notes about bugs/experience I had while playing:
- DISPLAY BUG: Some creatures, such as Gnome II & Armatus II, will display the "combines with" information of the last thing hovered over, instead of being empty since they merge with nothing other than themselves. (For example: Hover over "Water III", then "Gnome II": the Gnome II's tooltip will say it combines with "Stone III" and "Water III") This doesn't affect all Tier 2 units. (Ent II's tooltip is normal, for example).
- UX: I would like it if some interactions were made clearer in the tooltips; Mushroom unit hints in a "lore" way that you can feed it things by combining to increase strength, but it doesn't list it in the "combines with" area. It would be nice if it did, like how the healing herb clearly explains how it works. It makes me feel like I'm missing something with some of the other units, like Jotun (it says it freezes things, but in what way...? I couldn't figure it out)
- COMBAT BUG(MAYBE?): Speaking of Jotun: the last thing I did while playing was have it fight an enemy unit, but although Jotun got damaged, the enemy did not? I have no idea why. Pretty sure the specific fight was... I had my 7/18 Jotun I fight an 11/6 Dwarf II, after combat Jotun was 7/7 (taking 11 damage, as expected) but Dwarf was still 11/6.
- Putting souls in the cauldron deletes them; I think it'd be good if instead they returned at least a T1 soul, like how disposing other things containing souls works.
- UX: I would like it if, when dragging something on something else, it would display a preview of the "result" (hovering above the merge target you're dragging over, in the same way that the Ritual preview does? I know that might be complicated to add, just found myself wanting it more than a few times. I started taking notes on units partway in to better recall specific stat points.
- BUG: In some situations, I managed to have two objects on the same tile by moving a unit/object to a tile either right before or right after (?) opening a chest right next to it. I can't give exact steps to replicate, and not sure if it's only with chests or if it can also happen with resource nodes.
- BUG: Although the game prevents you from harvesting a resource if there's insufficient space, you can start harvesting and then either open a chest or split an existing pile to make the space unavailable again. When this occurs, the unit harvesting & the harvested item will be sent off-map, almost completely offscreen, in the top left. I suspect similar might happen if you start multiple harvests at once with insufficient space.
Clicking the settings gear button while the screen is fading after dying in a wave seems to hardlock (screen completes its fade to black, but then stays black and unresponsive to input)
Also found out this way that the web version doesn't have saving? Does the desktop version? Would be good to note that somewhere.
Enjoyed what I played, though, looks promising.
I'll reply to this comment since my question is somewhat related: Did Demonin give you permission to create this/re-release their code like this? And have they made a statement to that effect anywhere, or published their game under a license that would allow you to?
I assume so, but I ask because I quickly tried checking myself but couldn't find any license information about their project on their site or in their source code, and I couldn't find any mentions from you (or them) stating that you have their permission on either here, reddit, galaxyclick, or incrementaldb. (but I could very well be blind! so I'm asking)
You should make clear that you have permission, and you should make clear what license terms you're publishing this project under; many/most open source games online require that derivative works also adhere to the same license, which often results in those derivative works not being able to restrict distribution as you're trying to (but it's of course impossible to tell if such terms even apply here if no license is published)
Excellent game, loved this. Good length, very approachable. not too difficult while still being satisfying. Enjoyed all the puzzles and the process of discovering the game mechanics and techniques. (Paid all respects)
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I generally like to have game sounds at normal volume, but find ambience and music more distracting than most people, so I like to turn that down to absolute minimum (or at times, off). It would be nice if the volume controls offered separate sliders (at present, I am playing with the sound off as the birds were making it hard to think, but it's making me realize just how important the sounds are in this game as action feedback in the absence of animations). Thank you for considering.
Concept's fun and keeps me engaged, and it looks very clean. But right off the bat I feel like some upgrade balancing is needed, and I'm feeling a bit frustrated by ball damage in particular (at least at the very start of the early game, in this early build):
The pegs having just barely a sliver of health left (visually) made me feel encouraged to try to get the expensive (but paltry-looking) 5% damage upgrades, but as you can see above, only the very first upgrade I purchased increased my clear rate and there's no other flat damage upgrades in sight yet to help me 1-shot the (presumably) 4 HP pegs.
I thought maybe it would still helping me by having "mostly-dead pegs" deal less damage to my balls (proportional to the overkill damage I kill them with or something? so using 1 dmg to kill a 0.5 hp ball would assign the ball 50% of the full peg damage) but the game doesn't seem to work like that.
Additional feedback unrelated to RNG:
While playing this game, I have a text file open where I've written down a table of the "true costs" of prisms and artifacts (900k/90k/9k/900 for T3 prism, etc). If it isn't clear, that is because prism/artifact costs in the game are currently listed as "cost spent each 'craft'" and "total crafts required", but not the combined total, and I only want to start crafting once I have enough resources saved up to afford it.
It would be good to show both the total true cost required, as well as how close you are to being able to afford the true cost with your current resource stockpile.
All of your games feature a mechanic that has a "random chance" element to it.
While this isn't inherently bad on its own, and each use of it in your games DOES have some interesting parts to it, something that is very frustrating about it in your games is that (1) the feature has a high time investment cost to be able to do the "chance roll", and (2) is VERY swingy, with potentially insanely good or extremely mediocre results.
In "Squares", the issue was line bonuses: the ideal is max bonus per line, or nearly. Swingy in the early game, when you're struggling to fill 1 or 2 lines, and just as swingy in the late game; the difference between `9-9-9-9-9-9-9-9-7-7-5-2` and `9-9-9-9-9-9-9-9-9-9-7-7` is that the latter is over 10 times faster, a full order of magnitude.
In "More Tiles," the "Bless (3x bonus to random tile)" lottery is absurdly swingy depending on what you roll, and there's a high time investment per-run to be able to roll, and once again, you might get good rolls all the way up until the very last where you might lose it, since the way the bonuses stack matters.
In the previous iteration of THIS game, the issue was, of course, "Requests," because (once again) the bonus multipliers compound. The request rewards are random; for example, one critical bonus is the "x2 card drop rate" reward. If you luck out and roll multiple requests in a row on the same run that reward that, that 2x becomes 4x, then 8x, then 16x, then 32x if you get five "x2 card drop rate" requests. Even more swingy is the "cost" of the request: pray it wants 100k T1's and not 100k speed crystals, as that's the difference between being able to do more requests or having your run stop there. Very swingy.
And in this game, the "swingy high roll high-time-cost-to-be-able-to-roll" issue is "merge gems."
Each of these design choices highly incentivized me to savescum. I do not personally mind it all that much, because that (manipulating save-loads to get the random result I desire) is something I'm personally willing to do, because otherwise a bad roll after a high time investment would just lead to me quitting immediately.
I see this as a recurring "design problem" in your games, which are otherwise competently put together (though, no offense, but very clearly AI assisted, and I really think you'd be better served sticking with and improving one project than rapidly abandoning and letting the AI totally rewrite/refactor shit constantly; using AI can also be a skill, but part of developing that particular skill is figuring it out how to get it to improve existing things instead of churn out endless new stuff that will also have things you want improved), so I felt like I should take the time to write out why I feel like it's been an issue.
Very promising game. I agree with everything the above user said, had the exact same thoughts. This comment is going to be me largely repeating them in my own words (started writing prior to reading theirs)
For the early game, the things that I initially struggled with understanding were needing to interact with the flowers to recharge (I thought the flowers were water drops), confusion over why symbols were appearing in the queue for WAS keys but not D (At times when tabbing back to the game, I was trying to do WASD to move and didn't fully understand the resources yet), and confusion over where the NPCs mentioned in the guide were (didn't realize until the uncommon rocks that there were things other than flowers "under" the rocks; flowers under rocks was intuitive enough, people I didn't expect)
Pause before loop is the most needed QOL addition, and reworking queue management in general is probably second.
"Exposing more information" is the biggest thing the game needs though, period; not in a QOL way, but in terms of being able to enjoy and know how to properly play the game on a fundamental level. I want to be able to mouse over my stats and resources (STR, ROCK, LOVE, etc) and see how much exp it'll cost to level up, what multipliers they're applying to things, how those multipliers are calculated, etc, and hover over tasks to see their costs.
It's hard to make informed decisions about things without that information, for example:
I haven't read the guide you wrote in the description, but I imagine some of the game is easier for you to understand what the best course of action is, primarily because you know that underlying math. If we knew it too, we'd be able to figure out the optimization puzzles much easier, without needing guides or tips.
mana bonuses are buggy. It says it gives 3x and the preview for income gain before buying the building shows what I assume is the "correct" value (for "buying 3 of this building at once?"), but when I actually by it the income gain is less than advertised (I think it's still increased, just to 2x instead of 3x. the building icon says 3x though, even though the income is wrong.)
Note that this does not always happen, just most of the time, but SOMETIMES (for some building types? idk. hard to test), sometimes it gives the full bonus I saw advertised prior to purchasing.
Also, for beacons, I think those work correctly but the description doesn't update properly for the T2/T3/T4 "multiplicative" producers. I'd also suggest making it clearer that (1) beacons don't affect mana or knowledge structures (at least I think they don't?) and (2) that beacons affect a full 3x3 area (not just "adjacent" but also "diagonally adjacent") and that they stack multiplicatively with other beacons (I assumed these things, but the game has a VERY high time cost for finding things out and no way to undo mistakes mid prestige. Hard to carefully plan when you don't actually know all the rules.
