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My first word was "Junk"

Thanks for the laugh when Potato dude said "Checking your junk"
I wasn't prepared for that.
And right after his word was "kink"
Oh boy I am dying

Ok I was wondering because it is very laggy on my laptop (I haven't tried on desktop yet) Usually it is fine with 2d games unless there are way too many things on screen like "vampire survivors" and that kind of stuff.

Keep up the good work :-D

Well done ! It is an awesome game, the concept is very interesting and well executed !

As the other players said, it really needs some optimization for the framerate though. I don't know if it would be possible to use 2d isometric tiles instead of 3d rendering but that would probably be much faster !

I would gladly buy a more polished and complete version of this game ! :-D

Hello !

L'idée est assez originale et c'est une manière intéressante de présenter les mini-jeux, par contre j'ai eu plusieurs bugs (version 1.2 windows) qui faisaient que je me retrouvais soft-locked : par exemple si on joue au Simon et que la nonne rentre dans la chambre le jeu se bloque : on ne peut plus lancer de mini-jeux et il faut attendre que la barre se vide pour perdre et pouvoir recommencer. Pour la marelle, le jeu s’interrompt dès que la nonne rentre dans une chambre (n'importe laquelle) donc quasi impossible à faire.

Niveau équilibrage c'est assez aléatoire : la corde à sauter est hyper simple donc il suffit de la spammer pour gagner facilement, et le memory est assez simple aussi. Comme expliqué plus haut la marelle est quasi impossible à faire et le simon peut bloquer le jeu :-p

En l'état le jeu est pas hyper jouable mais s'il est retravaillé suite à la game jam ça peut être vraiment cool ! (Correction de bugs, ajout de mini-jeux, augmenter l'impact de la nonne, etc...)

Not really, but I mainly focused on offense while ignoring "useless" upgrades such as anything for the right click because I never used it.

I really enjoyed the game, nice work ! :-)

After a while I became overpowered (couldn't lose anymore) so I consider that I beat the game, likely blinding everyone on Earth in the process due to frequent explosions way bigger than the planet.

Yup with Azii you have enough time to level up a lot before the champ enemies show up and then you're unstoppable :-p

I think that I leveled up 5times per minute (probably more because I don't think that it took me 10seconds) so I could theoretically get at least 200 lvl before a new wave. Or a lot more if I just put everything in Azii again just to be sure and extend that time pretty much forever, but even without that I would get so much Max HP increase from LVL ups and +600 heal if I just put everything in alchemy that the enemies couldn't possibly keep up.

Hello ! :-D Sorry I broke this game too ^^'

Toss a coin to your immortal Sandwicher ! I cannot lose now, so here is a screenshot I took before I quit :

The most broken upgrades :

- Azii, because at some point the wave meter doesn't even move anymore (or so slowly that it would take hours for dangerous enemies to appear) and you can level up infinitely in the mean time

- Alchemy, because if you heal more than the enemies can hurt you it becomes impossible to die

- Urden, because only enemies with eyepatches can really hurt you after some time (=> making alchemy even more overpowered)

- Ignu, because you can clear, I mean toast the whole board with every jump

-> I never needed Guen or Aarg ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I just upgraded them for visualbalance

Hello ! There is a drag and drop bug where sometimes I cannot equip stuff, and I had some items in my inventory disappear completely :-/

Also on one run there was a bug where there was an impossible grid (like derHinek reported before).

It probably needs some balancing too : when an enemy has armor  it is impossible to hurt it with small numbers, and it doesn't even reset its cooldown so it can be impossible to win (especially when there was no attack buff available) and it is worse with "ignores staggering"

=> sometimes even if you fill the sudoku very fast you take a lot of damages and can only lose, so having a minimum of 1 damage per attack and always resetting the enemies' cooldown when filling a number correctly would be nice (I mean it is no big deal if they are immune to 1 or 2 numbers for example, but you cannot expect players to fill a specific number consistently, it is a bit too reliant on RNG and it makes the game unfair)

Yes the curse pause thing would be really nice :-) in the same way, it would be cool to have a "skill reveal" screen when picking a skill affected by the memory loss curse. (there is no need to penalize the player twice for that either)

I guess the "early game" definition is indeed subjective. I usually die soon after the cockatrice spawn in my recent attempts. (The definition of "soon" is quite subjective too though :-p)

The flood chance nerf did make it slightly better :-)

The game already became much more difficult because of the locked tiles, run-killer enemies, curses, etc... but I figured the main "issue" is that since you added even more skills such as the bows, ESP, etc... that are interesting on the long run but not nearly as necessary the probability to get vital skills was lowered a lot and the RNG part became much more apparent and frustrating. In short, I feel like it is important to balance that back to make the game more fair and appealing again. I honestly don't know what the best solution would be, but I have a few ideas that could help :

- Have more choices when picking skills

- Increase the probability to get vital skills

- Being able to reroll skills once every level by default (just like the gambler's skill)

- Having some other skill by default (a teleport skill or inner demon for example)

- Leveling up faster in the beginning

- introduce the locked tiles with a curse instead of by default (will help a little with the board RNG instead of the skill RNG)

- introduce one of the colors with a curse (same principle, improve the match chance in the beginning to make early game more forgiving)

...

Have a nice day :-D

No worries, you made a great job on the game so it is a pleasure to help you polish it and balance it. ;-)

From a player's perspective, just pausing the timer instead of completely displaying the curse's effect is a bit of a pain in the ass though : I mean the game is already paused when picking skills, so I wouldn't really mind If there was a pause as well for curses (it would feel more consistent too). If the players already know its effect they can just close the popup immediately, which is less bothersome than having to check the skill list every time when they don't. Furthermore, it's especially troublesome with curses that depend on a color and make you check anyway (For example the flood curse already causes a big disadvantage, and having to check which color just make it more frustrating.) Also if at some point someone manage to survive for a very long time, they could theoretically have a very long skill list that goes off-screen and couldn't even check the curse's effect.

Well I do know very well how to deal with the different enemies (I wasn't a top player just thanks to overpowered combos, I still had to survive the early game to have the possibility to build the right synergies :-p), but I often find myself stuck in the early game in its current state :

- Sometimes there is no possible match on the whole board : not often "by default" but it still happened a few times and all it took was a few locked tiles that blocked the few possible matches I could have, and as soon as there is even a single flood curse it happens very easily (and if at some point you get 2 like me it's over almost immediately if it happens early...)

- Sometimes there is just no possible match between the enemy and my character, so I can just wait (or make "useless" matches) and prepare to die as they get closer, which is no fun either.

-> Out of 10 to 20 games I would say (I lost count because of the very short runs but it could be more), I could only pass the early game once or twice because I was very lucky on my skill choices, but on every other run I got stuck as explained before and lost very quickly even with careful skill picks because I had poor possibilities (either on the board, on the skill selection, or both).

There are 2 types of skills that are way too "vital", and necessary to survive and really enjoy the game :

- The most important ones are tile-shuffling skills and match-facilitating skills (such as wildcard), because they're the ones that can prevent you from getting stuck with no possibilities at all.

- After that, teleporting skills are very important too because they can prevent a single monster (that you sometimes don't have the possibility to kill) to hit you an infinite amount of time on the spot, also effectively ending the run.

=> In that sense I can assure you that the early game is more lucked-based and unbalanced than you think : if in the first few minutes you don't have the possibility to pick those you will die very quickly no matter how well you play, unless you are extremely lucky with the board.

Hello there ! I tried the last version of the game a few times and I like it a lot, the curses make it more challenging and impossible to become immortal.

A few issues though :

- It would be nice to pause the game when applying a curse, so that players have the time to read its description and understand what is happening

- The early game still relies heavily on luck, because if you get enemies you can't kill before any useful skill you are doomed to die very quickly no matter how well you play (especially with rats that are very aggressive and reduce you max hp on top of that) . Unless you provide some kind of skill like "Inner Demon" by default to damage unreachable enemies it is bound to be very frustrating, and most players won't take the time to try 10 times or so just to get a good start.

- The "flood" curse is too powerful, especially since it is cumulative. On an unlucky game my first 2 curses were purple flood and red flood, and with some locked tiles on top of that I was completely stuck immediately (no possible match), and could just wait for my death... Even with only 1 flood curse you can quickly get completely stuck (no possible match) if you don't have any tile-shuffling skill yet.
-> A challenging game is fun, but an unfair one isn't.

- With the upgraded chaos skill, I got some useless skills too : for example you can have a reflect that deals 0 damage to the enemy that attacked you

- At some point I could get an upgraded stun trap (same color) does the enemy gets stunned for a longer period of time or is it useless too ?

I agree with you, chaos is really fun ^^ Don't you think that the game would be even more interesting if it was activated by default ? That way each run would feel more unique.

Adding negative effects regularly seems like an excellent idea to keep the game challenging and interesting ! (Maybe after an active duration instead of levels to avoid penalizing people with the "careful study" skill and encourage players to be more aggressive ?)

One thing that I would really enjoy too is a clearer presentation for cumulative skills : for example instead of having "vampire touch" every time, have "vampire touch 2" when you pick it a second time, etc... that way it would be easier to track down if a skill is relevant or not on long runs. Also,  it could also be easier to see on the left column if you present skills in a similar way instead of a never-ending list that continues off-screen. Of course the ideal way would be to get a new icon for each color when there is chaos, but you could have a line for poison skills for example, with a list : green poison 3, blue poison 1, orange poison 2, etc...

When leveling up, having this kind of presentation and screen cards that don't overlap the column on the left could bring a more tactical feel, because you could clearly see what you already have and pick new skills accordingly (it is especially useful on very long runs where you kind of lose track of what you got)

Putting a limit to offensive skills so that they can't appear again when they can already one shot every enemy could be cool too, because there is no need to have green poison 20 if no enemy has more than 10 HP for example. Same thing for healing skills and health upgrades if you put a limit on the max HP players can have.

I think the main issue with the game in its current state is that it has an inverted difficulty curve : at first it is very difficult and you rely mostly on luck, if you are able to deal with enemies it is great, but you are often stuck with enemies that you can't kill because there is no available match nearby. Rats are especially deadly in early games because they are really fast and decrease your max HP, so even if you get a healing skill such as "tap the source" it becomes useless. However, when you survive the early game and manage to have a nice build you become unstoppable.

What will be a pain to balance now is that shuffling tiles became a necessity to survive because of the grey tiles, but in the end even with the miner skill once I started a combo I would clear the board.

Maybe putting a limit on the max HP could also help ? (As you can see in the screenshot, half my screen was filled with hearts, even if I picked offensive skills most of the time)  I also had so much vampire touch that killing any enemy would instantly heal me completely. (not that it mattered at that point because I would clear the board almost every time) so maybe put a limit on the healing skills too.

Skills that deal damages, like poison trap and bows don't have a limit either, so after a while most enemies would die as soon as they moved xD

The second best skill in the game is "Good learner", because twice as many skills means that you get to completely overpowered combinations twice as fast, (careful study is pretty powerful for the same reason) and when you can reroll the skills a few times for each because of a few "gambler" it is really easy to break the game. However, the most game-breaking one is by far "Chaos", because it randomizes the color of skills : with this, any tile can one-shot enemies with a lot of poison, you can fully heal when stepping on any color, etc... It is one of my favorites because it makes most of the other skills more interesting, but it also completely breaks the game's balance at the moment.

As for the score issue, the "patience" skill plays a big part in it, because I could just double my score again and again hundreds of times and it grews exponentially, so maybe replacing it with a fixed amount of points would be a bit better to prevent extreme scores.

Hello ! :-)

I completely broke the game again ^^'

Just like with the jam version, I had to lose on purpose because if I played seriously it was 100% impossible for me to die...

Also when the score exceeds the limit it gets negative (cf screenshot below) then if it exceeds the negative limit it gets positive again, and so on... It is around 2000000000 points so my guess is that the limit is 2³¹ = 2147483648.

To end the game I had to kill myself, but the score wasn't saved to the leaderboard because it was negative at the time :'-)

At some point the game couldn't keep up and the enemies were frozen completely, and even when the combo should have stopped it kept increasing if I made a new valid match instead of resetting. (If i tried to make and invalid match it went back to 1 though).

Now my thoughts about the new skills and enemies : a lot of great ideas and a more difficult start, but with some patience and a bit of luck in the beginning it is still quite easy to become godlike and completely invincible.

- The skill that doubles the score on a 20+ combo is nice, but at the moment still way too easy to obtain (I got a 200+ combo pretty easily with terraforming + trump card + other skills that randomize tiles and can create almost infinite combos, and even the grey tiles couldn't stop it.)

- The ability to reroll skills is interesting but breaks the balance even more especially since it is cumulative : I could reroll skills up to 8 times and just like with the jam version I just had to avoid crappy skills that could kill me to stay immortal. Even without clicking anymore, if an enemy attacks me I get teleported and randomize tiles, start a combo that will heal me and kill most enemies (often clear the board almost completely)

-> The game is challenging and interesting in the beginning, but after that rough start you loose any sense of purpose because the only real threat is yourself. I don't think that players should ever have to penalize themselves on purpose to kill themselves and bring the run to an end.

"The bane of my existence" seems like a fair enough description ! xD I never liked them in any game.

My bad I meant bat but wrote bird !

Anyway, if at some point you need help beta-testing the next versions just let me know and I'll be happy to help you when I have time :-) 

My pleasure ! :-D This game is amazing and has the potential to become a masterpiece if you push it further ! You revisited match-3 games in a very clever way and the rogue-like mechanics work really well.

I know that the skill was named after a trump card and not Donald Trump, but I thought it was funny because the only color with issues is the orange one !

I forgot to mention it, but I am pretty sure every time the queue got stuck there was a bird enemy on the map (that could then run away or kill me if it happened when I am in front of it). Maybe because it moves pretty fast compared to other enemies ?

Inner demon is sooo satisfying, but it also kind of spoils the challenge. However in the current version it became mandatory at some point with so many enemies spawning.

I think locking a skill when you get the other one would probably feel unfair for the player and kind of ruin the fun. That's why I suggested adding more colors, because the more you have the harder it is to make infinite combos even with powerful skill combinations. But the neutral tiles is a good idea too ! They're not incompatible so maybe both then ? I guess with these solutions you will just have to be careful and check that the player cannot get soft-lock with no match possibility at all because that would be very frustrating to clear the board and be punished for it.

30 new skills !? :-D I love this game more and more !

I hate the cocatrix though xD I had around 150 HP at lvl 70, but one spawned on the tile next to mine and one-shot me before I could do anything because I didn't have the possibility to get rid of it immediately. :-p

Do you plan to add new enemies as well ? There are a lot of possibilities with fantasy bestiaries !

Have a nice day.

Hello !

First, let me tell you that this is my new favorite game ! It is simple to understand but very captivating and I absolutely love the music (even when playing for a long time it doesn't get on my nerves at all).

FYI I noticed a few bugs that can completely ruin a run, and also a few broken combo that can just obliterate waves ad waves of enemies (very satisfying but waaaay overpowered)...

Game-Breaking bugs :

- Soft-lock when a tile is destroyed while in queue. You can't match anything and have to let your perks do the work for you

- Sometimes the tiles get stuck in queue for a few seconds before swapping, so the enemies move in the mean time and it can be useless. Also you have to wait for the queue to apply so you are defenseless and can die very easily.

- If you are "too good" with a completely overpowered skill combination the game can't keep up and freezes.  (The music still worked though) For context, my combination was so overpowered that the game was playing itself for more than 20 minutes because new tiles were destroyed again and again, and I am pretty sure I had to be "lucky" for a bad enough layout to happen and stop that.

- There is indeed a big issue with orange tiles. For most games the initial layout isn't affected but after that orange tiles don't spawn at all until you pick the "trump color" perk that seem to fix spawn rates. I must admit that it is pretty amusing that the perk fixing orange tiles could be named after Donald Trump though 😂 it's like a random Easter egg made by coincidence.

Overpowered perks and combos :

-  "Inner demon" is completely overpowered, because with only a x5 combo you can clear the board, and if you have good  perks it is way too easy to do.

- With "Trump color" + "Wildcard" + "Fallout" on the exact same color you can get almost infinite combos where most of the board clears again and again.(until the game crashes of course) Without the "Inner demon" perk that kept resetting the combo I am pretty sure I would have had something like x400 or x500 when it crashed, and I was about to break the current world record by far.

Suggestions :

- Obviously, fix the bugs :-p

- Make the "inner demon" skill deal 1 damage to every enemy on the board instead of killing them instantly, it would still be powerful but not necessarily game breaking.

- Possibly remove the "wildcard" skill and/or the "trump color" skill, because if you combine the two it is way too easy to make long combos

- Add more and more tile colors the longer the game lasts, that way it will become harder to make long combos and break the game. The more colors you have the worst it gets for accessibility and colorblind people, but it probably can't be helped :-/

Keep up the good work ! I can't wait to play the final version of the game ! :-D

Hello and thanks for your quick reply !
- I meant precise values for the settings such as base lightness, chroma, etc... not the generated colors  :-)

- Yep that's what I do,  I'm just a bit lazy and it's already a few screenshots per palette on smaller screens (I usually work on iPad) The quicker for me would be to have png files where each color is only 1 pixel, to import them in documents and compare them :-p

- Thank you so much ! I completely forgot about this one ^^'

Keep up the good work ! When my situation is more stable I'll be glad to support you with a donation :-D

That's an awesome tool, thank you so much ! I use it to create the color palette for my next game :-D

If you don't mind I have a few suggestions to improve it even more :

- It would be nice to be able to pick precise values directly in the generator (instead of exporting, modifying the text and importing back to do so)

- An option to simply export the palette as an image (png ?) would be really handy to compare palettes quickly and that kind of things

Also I could use your help : I'm having a hard time creating a master palette that works fine with both things that have a vibrant color (like a banana or special effects) and duller things. Do you have any advice ?