itch.io

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)

Found an OOB (rot13):

Lbh pna trg bhg bs obhaqf ba gur evtug fvqr bs gur ybjre-evtugzbfg pbeare bs gur znc ol neenatvat gur sbyybjvat juvyr ubyqvat gjb "ehooyrjnyyf" (guerr "ehooyrjnyyf" gbgny arrqrq, nyy bognvarq jvgubhg zhpu qvssvphygl sebz gur gjb fperraf cevbe) (xrl: v = tebhaq, E = ehooyrjnyy(cynprq), K = jnyy, j = jngre, b = cerqht ubyr) fgnaq orarngu gur E (ehooyrjnyy(cynprq)), cerff hc (qrsyrpgvat lbhefrys qbja vagb gur ubyr), snpr yrsg, cynpr ehooyrjnyy, cerff yrsg ntnva (qrsyrpgvat gb evtug), cynpr ehooyrjnyy, cerff yrsg ntnva (qrsyrpgvat gb evtug), gura cerff evtug gb jnyx bssfperra.

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(V vzntvar gurer zvtug or fvzcyre jnlf gb qb vg, guvf bar whfg unccrarq gb unir 3 ehooyr arkg gb vg sbe rnfl grfgvat naq vg'f nyjnlf sha gb gel)

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):

• I start with [1 damage] (kills pegs in 4 hits)
• +1 upgrade: [2 damage] (kills pegs in 2 hits)
• +1 upgrade: [3 damage] (kills pegs in 2 hits)
• +5% upgrade: [3.05 damage] (kills pegs in 2 hits) (also that's not how 5% works)
• +5% upgrade: [3.10 damage] (still kills pegs in 2 hits)

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:

• "How much motivation would doing [this thing] cost right now with my current stats? Can I make it over there and finish it before needing more motivation?"
• "Which rock should I tackle next? Not all rocks of the same rarity are equal, and I can't tell which has more 'health.' How do I prioritize efficiently without wasting loops checking the 'last rock hit' health bar?"
• "How much rock-breaking power is STR stat contributing? How worth it is it to spend a bit of time training STR in the loop prior to breaking? How much experience does each action gain?"
• "How much rock-breaking power is LOVE contributing? I am selling LOVE (boosts rock-breaking speed) for GOLD to exchange for more MOTIVATION (rock-breaking time). How much should I exchange to maintain the best rate of breaking rocks?"

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.