itch.io

<3 Thank you!! We're so gonna make more rat content someday...

Yeah we are struggling with the web version. There is a playtest on Steam if you want to try full screen!

I love it! Being lost felt like the right thing and part of the gameplay, in a good way. I would get anxious that I got myself stuck, but everything kept working out and the loop continued.

<3  gracias!!

Check out the game => https://black-heart-games-studio.itch.io/messy-hearts

In this retro-inspired, pixel art visual novel, a workplace friendship begins to unravel.

Follow two coworkers as their connection deepens, blurs, and ultimately breaks. Set during a painful chapter of life, Messy Hearts explores mental health, trauma, blurry boundaries, and the complicated ways in which people can hurt each other, even when they have the best of intentions.

ABOUT THE GAME

This game has had a major overhaul, and this page is a relaunch (new game release) while we sunset the original legacy version. We feel the new release is the right move, as the differences are extensive.

• Full art style revamp, including color palette, capsules, characters, backgrounds, UI/UX, and animations.
• Branching dialogue instead of a linear narrative, with choices that allow the player to reflect on mental health.
• Character collection system with new characters.
• Therapy journal system.
• Narrative improvements and edits.

Noted! That's really interesting. Maybe we can have some challenge mode achievements down the line. I'll put that in our backlog!

Woo! Thank you so much :)

We are getting tons of bug reports for this bug, but are unable to reproduce it. I think we're going to be rebuilding ball rarity altogether to see if we can make this stop happening. Sorry that impacted you! Hopefully we'll have it fixed in the next build.

Hi, thanks so much for playing and for the feedback! i'll make notes of these. I'm glad the GoldCoin effects stack, I could swear we hadn't fixed that yet :sweating:  But good :D  I'm not surprised there are bugs with this. The goldcoin upgrade to spawn it is still fairly new and we never build the system for multiples. So it'll all have to get adjusted. This is a great bug report.

For playing with different buffs and stuff, the way I test the game is to Clear Save pretty often. Easier in unity than in the real game, but that is an option if you get tired of your run or want to roll on things quickly. It's in the Settings Menu.

Out of curiosity, what would be helpful for you if we had the option to turn off the achievement/prestige bonuses? I have never even considered having that option.

You can wishlist here :D https://store.steampowered.com/app/3684530/PlinkIdle/  Thank you so much!!! We're still in development and adding features, but the plan is to launch the game in 2026.

Yup, you found it. I think the flow is broken where you don't see the lock until you leave the prestige menu and come back. Apologies for that!

I'm so sorry you lost your progress T_T  I think having it properly save progress is still a little ways out, but I'll flag this to our engineers and start getting it prioritized. I notice when I'm testing the game in unity that I have to use the "CLEAR DATA" button in settings if I make certain changes and we definitely don't want players to have that experience when they've made progress in the game.

I'm so glad you're enjoying the game! We're working hard on it, so there will be more updates in the future.

Thank you, i'll add this to the bug list!

:O  I really hope not! Maybe a problem on webGL but it shouldn't be an issue with the app/.exe versions at all. Is this on the web version? I have this happen with other web-based idle games I play. If it's happening on the downloadable files, that's definitely a bug!

Yeah, I agree with that. Every time we adjust the balance, it speeds something up or slows something down a lot  XD  hopefully we'll hit the sweet spot soon. Thank you for the feedback! We are also feeling that it's too slow right now.

heck yeah! https://discord.gg/5AJNrjvrWN come on in :) 

We kind of pulled apart the game and rebuilt a lot of it, so i'm not surprised saving didn't work well. Sorry about that. :(  I think sometime early next year it will be more stable.

I will need to remember how to fix the fullscreen thing. It used to work!!  XD  WebGL makes me crazy.

Thank you! We'll add that to our bug list <3

Thanks for giving the early build a try. The current version definitely has bug on our radar with the drop button often misbehaving (we think if clicked right when the cooldown runs out). We'll be fixing it soon along with a number of other bugs that helpful playtesters have flagged.

They are probably broken/unfinished, and that's why they're still locked. Recently we made a choice to add upgrades to every stage (before they were scattered) so some of them are new and definitely not "real" yet. But they will be! We are taking a short break to address feedback and fix stuff, and then we'll be back to making that stuff work. :)  You're definitely not doing anything wrong!

Thank you! We have logged that bug and are working on fixing it. It is a bad one.

Thank you! We're seeing this issue ourselves too T_T  Every time we fix it it comes back. We'll find the cause soon I hope.

That sounds like a bug! We've made a lot of changes to that whole flow in our current build, so hopefully that won't happen again with the next update (in a couple of weeks).  There will be fresh new bugs (hopefully not too many though.) Thank you for flagging it!

We haven't decided on that yet. If you wishlist on Steam, you'll be able to see announcements for release when that comes https://store.steampowered.com/app/3684530/PlinkIdle/

But the Early Access version here on Itch is the full game, which is on sale right now. It's an older build, but you'll have access to newer builds and playtests as we release them.

In our new build, prestige is already lowered to 250k <3

And we're playing with balance/time and all of that.  We're looking for the sweet spot for progression to feel both challenging but not too draggy. So I appreciate your feedback that it felt too slow! Thank you so much for the updated feedback.

This is amazing, thank you so much for the feedback!

Stuff we've already fixed, but haven't pushed the update yet:
- prestige (250,000 required, and 2x multiplier i think)
- random peg max based on peg count
- upgrade wheel will no longer be associated with stages! card choices instead

Stuff on our radar:
- the pixel scaling issues you see on the pegs. i need to fix a lot of things T_T

Stuff we'll fix:
- ball rarity cost scaling
- great suggestion for the audio sliders!! will try to add that.

Stuff I'll try to keep my eye on:
- buckets are going to get slightly harder to upgrade at later levels, so i'll try to keep this feedback in mind. I don't want it to be prohibitively hard. I also want the ball multiplier to be much friendlier as the game goes on, because it does hit a ceiling in a really bad way.

Thank you so much for the feedback and for checking out the dev log! I do hope to have this stuff addressed soon -- a lot of people agree with you. I agree too.
We're working on having cards to choose from 2-3 random buffs instead of the wheel for stages, and I'd like a rule set where there will always been one active play vs one passive play to choose from. We'll keep the wheel because wheels are fun, but we'll probably attach that flow to achievements, prestige, or both. Just a fun boost instead of critical growth.
I think the new currency splits will help, with global and stage-based being separate, so hopefully there will always feel like there's long-term progress.
I'm also working on rebalancing the stage requirements, and prestige is WAY cheaper now (250,000 and I'll see how that feels.) There will be another big update at some point, but it might take a while to get everything rebuilt.

Can you try again when you get a chance? We've uploaded a new build that will hopefully fix this!

Ah yeah the achievement is on the wrong layer and pops at the wrong time. I think I've seen that bug 10000 times and have stopped noticing it. XD But you're right, that should be fixed!

Random peg max -- this has been fixed on our end already. It now maxed based on how many pegs are in the stage, and someday we'll have stages with different numbers of pegs.

As a UX designer, I agree that we need something to tell you to come back to the main menu! I think a red dot on the home button will do the trick. Good callout, thank you!
---
And prestige... Yes, it is definitely undesigned at this point, which is a big source of stress. We don't have a great plan yet, but it's super helpful to have people playing longer sessions and sharing feedback. Can I ask some questions?:

1 - Do you think it should be cheaper to prestige, and encourage people to prestige long before they hit the later levels?

2 - Achievement sets give a +0.2% multiplier, and prestige gives +1.0%, which validly feels underwhelming for the cost. We could do half the cost, but keep the reward, or we could crank up the reward. We could also add a currency to earn with prestige, which would need a separate shop -- and I'm not opposed to this at all either. I would love to hear your thoughts!

Thank you so much for the amazing feedback. <3 

It sure will! We have a publisher who will be helping us to localize in Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Thai, and we'd also like to do French/Spanish/German and maybe others. It's taking a while to update all the text to be localized strings, but we'll get there someday.

I think we have a fix (pixel perfect setting needed to be turned off) but we still need to test it. Thank you for providing more info! I was having it disappear at certain zoom levels too, and only in chrome for me (not brave or safari).

We think it's an issue with zoom level on certain browsers -- basically if zoomed in or out and not 100%, it will make an error. I think we have a fix and will try to get that in!

Thank you so much!!

Someone else mentioned this too, they're using Chrome. Thank you for the info! We'll take a look and hopefully have a fix very soon.

I see it too!! I am on Stage 1, and I just rolled a disco ball buff, and it's showing as 1%. But in editor it is 0.5. So I will write up that bug. Sorry for the confusion! I think it's a display issue where the number is rounding? Or something like that...

Agh! Are you playing on a mac, windows, or in browser?

ACTUALLY, I found the cause: the Disco Ball buff is a 0.5% chance! So 1% means you've gotten it twice <3

Thank you for letting us know! Sorry about that, I'll write up a bug report and we'll try to get it fixed for our next build.

Oh no!! Did it give you a different buff instead? We had some issues with how the wheel slices line up.

Thank you so much for the thoughtful feedback! I've just put out a dev log where I'm hoping to address some of the issues with a new design. It's been really challenging to try to address the balance/depth issues -- and I agree that they're a big hole in the game. I watched a streamer and our tester basically "beat" the game in about 2 hours, which is such a problem. Adding more stages or making things more expensive won't magically fix it. So here's the dev log if you (or anyone else) wants to check it out. https://black-heart-games-studio.itch.io/plinkidle/devlog/1066207/new-plinkidle-...

I'll check on those and make sure they're hooked up correctly! Thanks so much.
And a couple days ago I think I had a good idea for how to better support different play styles for the game... I'll need to talk to the engineer about it, but if it's feasible, I think it will help a lot. Thank you for playing!