itch.io

7/10, excellent game prototype. I look forwards to where this heads, it could easily become 9/10 with more polish.

Color choices, UI design, game mechanics, are well done. Would recommend a less-bright off-white so that some boxes/icons aren't too harsh on the eyes, OR surrounding them in a gray box to lighten the contrast of near-black with white.

Overall very fun, and scaling's decently balanced. Lack of a passive income upgrade is very mildly annoying (it'd be nice as a simple way to resolve softlocks where the base gets instakilled so you can't even farm materials). Perhaps always generate 0.1% of max storage of each material?

Lack of minor QoL is probably due to how new the game is. Assuming that is all fleshed out, then this game is worth a 9/10 imho.

Feedback:

Adding anti-aliasing to a game with graphics like this would be great.

Factories need to automatically bounce apart when colliding with the base or other factories, so their menus don't become inaccessible. 

Add map-scrolling, either via minimap click/drag, arrow keys, or right-click-drag (or all 3, toggleable in settings, etc.)

Be able to reset or undo upgrades (i.e. by selling a factory, so I can replace it with a new one without upgrades that are weaker in endgame, like factory-health, or unit-range).

I personally dislike the choice of pentagon units, there's aliasing issues from the awkward angles especially when the unit turns. I'd personally use circles, and perhaps change the bases into hexagons, since the bases never rotate (so they will always look okay).

Button click feedback (darkening + impressing) is subtle and nice.

Scrolling around with arrow keys or right-click-drag would be very nice, if you have any factories in unreachable positions (would be nice if factories "bounced" out if they are placed/collide with the base too, a factory placed in the base by accident is permanently unreachable).

I very much like the specializing stats system. The only downside is if you misclick anything, it's absolutely devastating. Factory health is useless, for example. And range turns into a downgrade when enemies can AOE your factories if your units are ranged and dont move away from the factories as a result.

It's really nice the sliders are added now!!!

About the upgrades: switch the unit your factory produces. You get materials on ally death, to farm free $$$ too.

It's an incremental, so yeah, the enemy always gets stronger the more you play. Eventually you fight on multiple fronts, at around lvl 6.2, and eventually the enemy can shoot at your base from the start of the fight around lvl 15 or so.

Movement speed just makes your units weaker. Stop using it.

At first, have a factory that has 700 range (+200 over normal), and ONLY UPGRADE AOE SIZE, don't even bother upgrading damage. Don't upgrade range after around 800 range, more is useless (and makes your base vulnerable to enemy AOE if your units don't move away from the base)

The second factory, ONLY UPGRADE HEALTH AND PRODUCTION SPEED.

Figure things out from there, should be pretty easy/obvious.

al;sdjfaisefj;asefij 

upgrading factory health by accident instead of base health is the worst feeling

Feedback:

Changing pentagon units into circles will probably look better, at least without aliasing artifacts.

Anti-aliasing might be nice to make it look better.

PLEASE LET US GO BACK DOWN LEVELS, clearing a level doesn't necessarily mean we get money faster on the next one. I make the most amount of money pumping out units and fighting equally with the opponent's factories to farm unit kills/deaths. IT IS VERY PAINFUL to try and recover or get money if I do something like, put all factories on one side to blitzkrieg while stalling the other side.

PLEASE LET US RESET FACTORY UPGRADES (i don't even mind if I lose all money invested into upgrades). It's very painful to deal with upgrades that just make it weaker. Especially when I have a tank factory that spams HP-only units, and I misclick ranged or something by accident.

TL;DR: It's best to grind $$$ on a level you beat easily, and not the hardest level you can barely beat after a large amount of suffering and dragging factories around to micromanage blitzkriegs. Please let us go "down" levels for the purpose of grinding.

Generally every single level past lvl 6.2 or so, I get softlocked where I get curbstomped initially, grind like 2x the amount of time, and then win easily, often by having a factory with only HP/cooldown stall one side while the other has 3 factories to rush a win, before i move all the factories to fight left side again.

If I don't manually reset the level before winning, I end up going to a level that I'm just wayyyyyy too weak to win against. 

One is 2.7/5.2, the other is 3.8/5.10, of course the stats are different?

Also, upgrades taken later on give bigger amounts.

Game was surprisingly shorter than I had expected. Incredibly well made puzzles, though.

One and only complaint is that selecting options before everything has fully printed, messes up the lines of text.

Can't wait for the next Shirou Day, it's almost here!!!

Found this from your bio on kongregate

Just want to say your Temple of Four Serpents game is AMAZIIIIIING

edit: nevermind, no glitch, I didn't read correctly.

There is some sort of logic glitch involving assigning attribute points in character creation, making it very prone to getting (-1) unassigned.

edit: online build on itch

An infinite mode, or option to just endlessly loop maps instead of ending the game, would be nice.

Very fun. Well designed and everything. The charge-jump and dash seem basically manditory. Wish it was more obvious dash DIDN'T include invulnerability, I was so confused why sometimes I didn't die and sometimes I did, until I saw the upgrade.

Yeah the issue with Baker is it REMOVES information from the board. so now all the evils can just chill there and you lose.

Very fun game. Wish there was a leaderboard per level or something, though.

Seconded, food is scarcer for the knight. I think food should be a guaranteed choice, perhaps, for those floors where you pick between 3 cards like weapon/armor/spell?

ngl bakers should be an evil character, they make the game SOOOOOOO much harder.

Maybe baker turns the characters evil, too. So they can be attacked.

yup! corruption makes knights immortality ability not work.

basically how corruption affects most villagers anyways.

Very cool story, thank you for sharing!

Just went on a wikipedia rabbithole and learned about Decamark. Fun stuff.

btw put a space between the link and the following sentence period (or the hyperlink fails)

Agreed.

Poisoner can poison itself, get cured by Alchemist, then bluff as a Confessor, 

resulting in it still saying "I am Dizzy"

Is it a glitch that Poisoner can poison itself? I had assumed the Confessor showed the Poisoner was adjacent, but no, it was the Poisoner itself.

Oh wow, new update! 

It'd be really nice if the flavor text of enemies hints whether they're living or undead (since both knight and vampire abilities care about that), OR they had some sort of icon indicator, say a skull or leaf in the bottom left of the card.

Been trying to optimize the Adaptive Duelist + Familiar combo. Some things:

Charging Dancers stack exponentially. A conga-line of Charging Dancers to the left of the Adaptive Duelist is awesome. The left-most Dancer can be a Mirroring Dancer with no downside (all the others should/want Charging Aspect).

Adaptive Duelist scales faster if the difference between DMG and HP is "wider" so making it have very unbalanced high HP (since HP is easier to increase) makes it much, much stronger. So getting Growth onto the Duelist for several Depths, before you get Adaptive on it, is great.

Maze enemies in Endless are brutal. Having two Adaptive Duelists is a good move, and use Fractured Prospector (Fractured Aspect to let Prospector copy Familiar's combat trait).

It's best to have an Incarnator on the left-most side, then the Prospector 2nd-left most, the Dancer conga-line, two Adaptive Duelists, then a Hoarder (replaced by a Botanist every so often), so the Duelists scale even faster (not that it's needed to)

Kinda wish you could recruit/buy more than one follower/aspect at once. Mildly annoying that buying even a 1-cost thing ends the shopping. Makes it a lot more RNG-vulnerable.

Then yeah, feel free to get Power to save time on clicking!

Does Charging Aspect stack with Adaptive Duelist (and/or Dancers) to make it even more exponential?

I... what the... JEEZE. Nicely done.

Pickup Range is nice to just save time collecting gold. Power makes AoE increasingly more dangerous to the mines, so the faster clicking isn't that nice. 

There is a 2x / 3x speed option in the bottom right, might be newly added. Game does feel a little slow EVEN with that on though.

Luckily there's also the fast-forwards.

There is a 2x / 3x speed option in the bottom right, not sure if that was newly added. (and fast-forwards)

I mean, we do have the impatience passive upgrades now, probably due to your suggestion, they're excellent. I think they cost a little too much, but are otherwise great!

I personally go straight for:

money-making passives, 

cursor blockade (very strong) (just move mouse everywhere randomly and runes hit everything with no cooldown) (earlygame, keep in mind cursor shoots faster when aiming higher in the screen)

seeker explosive

sword defense

defense shield

rune sine

EMP instakill

thorns, HP-up, impatient passives, Explosive passive

You can skip upgrades for most long-range stuff. (seeker, multishot, bouncer, to name a few)

pierce passive might actually even be bad, it makes seeker explosions activate less quickly (and aoe sooner/closer to tower is better)

You don't really need any of the other things, imho.

I didn't have performance issues for whatever reasons. Funny game and ending, sadly accurate to life.