itch.io

Thank you for playing. Dirty Magazine might be too good to be a common, I've been thinking of bumping it up to uncommon or decreasing the money it gives. There should be music in the web build, not sure what happened with that. I don't do much to optimize the web build though since I'll be taking it down when the demo launches on Steam in a month or two. Glad you had fun!

Thanks for pointing out another bug. Also I'm redoing a bunch of the UI so I'll keep your log idea in mind.

Thanks for playing and for the feedback. Got a lot of complaints about the tutorial so I've already made it shorter, just haven't uploaded that yet. I'm redoing a lot of the UI, so I'll keep your shop ideas in mind.

What I liked:

• Good variety of items (are there actually millions???)
• Game makes sense intuitively, I had a "higher or lower" build and was kinda playing ride the bus, which was fun
• Art and music are good

Suggestions:

• The tutorial is too much. I didn't read most of it and was able to understand how to play. You could probably cut a lot of it out. I had the same problem with my game, you'd be surprised what players can pick up from tooltips and context
• You seem to borrow a lot from Balatro visually, like the loading screen using a random card, and the UI colors and such. Not necessarily a bad thing, it works well, just be wary of people dismissing this game as a clone at first glance. The gameplay and actual feel of the game are pretty distinct though.
• Having some kind of icons or artwork for the items would go a long way. Also making them a specific objects, like Balatro's Jokers, or my game's books does a lot for thematic cohesion.

Overall good game, I played for about 20 min and I had a lot of fun!

Thanks for pointing that out, I'll take a look at it.

Hi thanks for the feedback! I’m considering changing the way money is rewarded in some way so you get money based on how many turns you have left or something, but not sure if I’m gonna go through with that. Thanks for the notes on UI, I’m gonna do a lot of UI work in the next month or so. 

What I liked:

• Pixel art is fantastic
• You nailed the retro feel without it feeling cheesy
• Music is good

Suggestions/Bugs:

• Stat select screen doesn't have the right aspect ratio, there's a black bar on the bottom of the screen. I tried to take a screenshot but it didn't work which leads me to my next point
• I was unable to take a screenshot while running the game
• You need sound effects, which I'm sure you're planning on adding. The game feels so flat without them.

What I liked:

• Music is great
• Controls are responsive and movement is fluid
• The pace at which you introduce new mechanics is perfect

Suggestions:

• Maybe you already do this, but it would be nice to see the time to beat at the start of the level
• One small bug, the taskbar has the wrong name for the game if I right click on the game's icon. See screenshot:

What I liked:

• Art is cute
• Controls make sense
• Platforming gameplay is good

Suggestions:

• Echoing that other comment, either make this a blatant porn game or take out all the futa shit. It's offputting to me but the people who like it will love it if you lean into it.
• The music is a little grating, I think it's the instruments you used
• I had to go into the controls menu to figure out mouse/keyboard controls, those should be made apparent rather than just assuming I'm using a controller

Bug:

• The ladder in the beginning of the first level is bugged, you can't move, attack, or dash after climbing down. You're stuck in the idle animation until you jump

Just watched your video. Dude you're cracked at this game. Your vocabulary is insane.

Actually, both of those are accepted as a title of the book.

Thanks for playing. There are items that let you reclaim tiles from the board, they start appearing in the shop at round 4. Probably not going to change anything about the board persisting at this point, the whole game is designed around the board persisting across rounds. Though maybe I could add a version where it clears between rounds as an alternate game mode or something.

Thank you so much! And yeah Winnie the Pooh is the early game GOAT!

Thanks and noted. Do you have any specific examples of book names I might have messed up?

Thank you, I've been considering a multiplayer expansion if I can build up a sizeable player base for it after launch.

Thanks for the feedback, I dev on Mac so I didn't know about the Windows malware thing.

Macbeth was a rare but I don't think it's good enough to be one, it can fuck you if used improperly

I have been trying to think of a way to reward performance in each individual round, it's a tough issue.

And yeah, everyone hates the tutorial lol I definitely need to rework it.

Testing on Mac, played for about 15 min

What I liked:

• Tactical gameplay is fun
• Graphics and artstyle look great
• Tutorial was clear and informative

Suggestions:

• Making me wait like 5 seconds for each dialogue to play is excruciatingly slow, but I don't want to skip them or spam the enter key, that's annoying too. Maybe make the dialogue boxes auto play and not block user inputs?
• Music definitely sets the right atmosphere, but one note droning does get a little grating after a while
• There's a little too much exposition in the beginning IMO, and it's just military lingo and callouts, not really advancing the story at all so I wasn't invested in what they were saying and just wanted to play the game

Thanks for the video!

Thanks for letting me know, you're supposed to use the item by clicking a tile or board space. I'll try to make that more clear. It's clear from the comments I got this weekend that I need to rework the tutorial anyways, so I'll work on that.

Probably just Steam, Itch doesn't do much for visibility of your game. Steam doesn't do THAT much either but it's a little better.

Played the first level. This was like an acid trip and I loved it. Everything felt like a surprise, nothing made the noise I thought it would or looked the way I thought it would, and that was cool. I also like that the difficulty doesn't hold back. Maybe I'm just ass at the game but the first arena fight with the watermelons and flowers gave me some trouble. Only problem I found is that the tutorial assumes you're playing on controller, I had to figure out how to play via trial and error on mouse and keyboard.

Thank you! I've been getting a lot of feedback on the tutorial and the general sentiment is that it's too hand-holdy and verbose, I'll try to fix that.  Unsure what's wrong with the second screenshot, WAX should be playable there. Out of curiosity, do you remember if the tiles used to play WAX were bought in the shop or duplicated with a rune? There used to be a bug around adding tiles to your deck that made some of them unplayable, but I thought I fixed that months ago.

I played through the first level, spent about 10 minutes playing.

What I liked:

• Cute art style
• Intuitive controls
• Catchy music
• The tutorial explained things well without being too much text in my face

Suggestions for improvement:

• Maybe allow some kind of lateral movement with jumping, I almost got filtered by the moving platforms in the first level
• Maybe add a toggle like in Yoshi's Island with throwing eggs, where you can toggle the dash to be holding down shift and releasing vs pressing it again. If you don't know what I mean look up the throwing eggs controls in the original Yoshi's Island

Good game! I like it and think it will do well.

Hugboxing:

• Music is comfy and good, I like how it gets more stressful when you fight the boss
• Graphics are charming and cute
• Gameplay is genuinely fun, from a fellow "take a board/card game and make it roguelike" dev, you executed this really well

Crabbing:

• I wish there were a way to lock one individual item in the shop and not the whole thing, but I understand the design rationale to make it the way you did, there is added risk to locking
• I think the game is a little too easy, but maybe that's just because it's the demo

Overall great game, looks just about ready for release, good luck with everything!

Makes sense, thanks!

For sure. I'm not a huge craps guy so I'm not that good at it but I like this game a lot! You've made a lot of good progress since last DD

A huge UI overhaul is in the works, I just didn't have it ready for today. Thanks for playing and for the kind words. I think Jargon would make a great mobile game for the reasons you outlined about it being a great way to kill time. I'm considering porting it to mobile after PC release.

Hugboxing:

• The hat is health system is really clever
• I like how I was able to basically get how to play without there being a tutorial
• The music and visuals are great

Crabbing:

• The bat desynced from the mouse a few times, making it difficult to hit enemies
• Guns don't feel like they do much, but maybe I'm just using them wrong

Great game overall, can tell you and your team have put in a lot of work!

In regards to the browser version being laggy, I could optimize it but that kinda seems like a waste of time since my official steam demo will come out in January

Thanks for the feedback and thanks for playing! I agree, the game needs a lot of polish. That's my main focus before release next year.

UI bugged out in the pass line tutorial

Movement feels good. Any particular reason why you made bouncing it's own dedicated button instead of just hitting space again? IMO that would make more sense.

You can discard your letters if that's what you mean. Just click them without dragging to select them for discard then click the discard button. It costs 1 turn and no money. Thanks for trying it out!

Another feedback, I'd make the button to open the map closer to WASD, like C or Z or something. M is pretty out of the way for my left hand on WASD and my right hand on the mouse. Super fun game though, played the first few levels. This is gonna do numbers man.

I closed and opened the game and it works now. It's either an issue with the first boot or it's random. Either way it's worth looking into. Playing on PC btw

Not sure if this is a bug, but there's no text in any of the menus. I can't figure out what to do. All the UI buttons are blank.

Thank you!

It will be on Steam in December or January with a tentative launch date in March/April. I'm considering a mobile port, I'll do it if there's enough interest but I don't want to split my focus right now as I'm gearing up for the PC release

I put up a new build fixing the bugs you mentioned. Also added a ton of new artwork. Thanks for trying out my game!

Really appreciate the deep dive, sounds like you really "got" the game. A few clarifications and next steps:

• Leviathan: it does get multiplied. Its points participate in the word multipliers. If you saw otherwise, tell me which build and platform and I will check that path.

• Mid-round buying: not planned. I want the pacing to stay focused on the round.

• Turns vs discards: I have considered separating them like Balatro. I have not committed to that. I am evaluating lighter tuning on discards first.

• Bounty claim: there is an indicator right now for claimable bounties (small white bubble with an exclamation on the Bounties tab). Sounds like it is easy to miss. I will make this louder and maybe add a clear claim prompt at round end if anything is unclaimed, or consider making bounties just auto-claim.

• Feedback on bonuses: I will surface more info when a book activates, like a quick toast that shows the book name, points added, and any multiplier effect.

• Discard bug at 0 turns: I'll see if I can reproduce it. Do you remember what exact steps you took to get to the bugged state?

• Gold tile persisting: that shouldn't be happening. Clearly something is persisting in memory between games. I'll see what I can do.

• Visuals: I will brighten the board and tiles and see what I can do to make buttons more readable.

• Short words and using S and Y: I should probably reduce how many S's you start with. You start with 4, maybe that should be only 2 or 3 since they're so valuable. Playing short words you can expand upon is a good strategy, and one that I use when I playtest myself. Kudos for figuring it out, I don't plan on nerfing that in any way at this time.

• Broken book combos: since it's a single player game I'm ok with there being broken synergies, I think it's fun to discover and hunt for them. However the balancing for this game is still in progress, so I appreciate playtesters like you giving me feedback on what's good and bad. I'll see what might need to be tuned a little more.

Thanks again for pushing the systems. I really appreciate you playing my game and I'm glad you had fun!