itch.io

Hello, I think there is a bug where it is not counting tiles in your own discard or hand when calculating the number of tiles that can improve a hand. For example it told me "you discarded X which results in 12 tiles that can improve your hand: 5m, 8m, 4s". However there was a 4s in my hand and a 4s in my discard which would be 10 possible tiles (4, 4, 2) not 12.

This also seems to lead to bugs where having 1s,9s as the only sou in hand will trigger a yellow warning if you discard either of them. Pitch the 1 and it will claim you get 1 more tile of efficiency with pitching the 9 and vice versa. 

It still runs on my version of Android despite the warning.

Playing on Android and I got to the end where you now have a moon on your door. Is there anything else to do or is that it? Tried clicking on everything but nothing does anything, is the only thing left to do is to reset your progress and play again? 

So far I absolutely love the game!  I think one of its greatest strengths is its intuitive and stream-lined interface.  Everything just clicks and flows so easily.  No clutter, no complicated tech trees, everything is intuitive and the next step to take is always clear.  So far progression seems balanced and the pace just right.  Exploring the world and its mechanics is very satisfying.

A few bits of feedback

• It would be nice to be able to delete stacks of items.  As your inventory fills up with higher value items later in the game it would be nice to get rid of some low-value item stacks like berries or fruit.  Another potential option would be to have some kind of chest you could build to store superfluous items in for later access.

• It doesn't seem like there is a way to destroy the market
• Having useless items like seaweed don't make a lot of sense.  I would either add an actual use for seaweed or just have the traps produce a fish instead.
• Later in the game I definitely noticed I ran into some lag.  Part of the issue may have been the mountains full of seaweed I threw back into the sea...
• This may be a potential bug, I noticed that if you quickly spammed a consumable rather than waiting for each piece to finish filling the meter that I got significantly less value from the consumable.  (Ie. way more hunger is filled by slowly/carefully eating fish vs spamming fish)

Having seen some let's plays of the beta...

• I kind of miss the little blocky character sprite.  The new one is not bad but somehow seems less charming for some reason...
• I miss the diamond shaped menus that spread across the screen.  The new tile based menu system for crafting seems a lot less fun/exciting.

Overall, amazing game.  The changes and new features in the beta look amazing and I cant wait to see (and play) the finished product!!  Keep up the good work :)

**EDIT**

So I don't know if I just missed a tool tip for this or what, but i had NO IDEA you could sell stuff to the store by throwing things at it!!  Once I discovered this on accident, most of my critiques above are no longer valid.  Selling allowed me to slim down my inventory, made me not care about useless items/resources since I could sell them,  made sea weed make a lot more sense as it adds an element of suspense every time you harvest a fish trap, ect.   It also eliminated my lag issue since I didn't have a bunch of harvested resources floating around the map.

Its amazing how it's just one small feature, but the ability to sell things literally removed all of the things I didn't like about the game.

Also, I can confirm that lag is occurring only when there are a lot of flashing/shiny things on the screen at once.  Lots of sprites seem to be fine, so it appears to be this effect itself, seems like the gms2 engine doesn't like it very much. 

Update: Turns out I was wrong about wine.  The problem was with wineskin (a wrapper) but not wine itself.  I followed these instructions and they worked fine for me: https://www.reddit.com/r/Forager/comments/999afb/how_to_run_forager_on_mac/

For those interested running the game on Mac, consider giving this a try: https://www.reddit.com/r/Forager/comments/999afb/how_to_run_forager_on_mac/

Oh awesome, any info on the workarounds floating around out there?  I almost got it working myself...

I know several people have mentioned wanting this game on Mac.  I tried to run it via wine and as far as I could tell everything worked fine except for the graphics.

I'm pretty sure if the dev offered a dx9 instead of dx11 version of the alpha that wine could handle it no problem, as unity games on dx11 are currently unplayable with wine.

Is the beta PC only, or also for Mac?

I agree with you here.  I think the lack of card options for the leader deck (at least initially) means little to no fiddling where as the large number of options for the follower deck leads to more need for customization.

The stun is an interesting idea.  I think the best solution really depends on what role you want the regen mechanic to play.  Another possibility would be to increase the mana cost of regeneration so that it is harder to just continuously spawn units. Being able to bring back a buffed unit for just 1 mana tends to be too much value for the cost.

Hey, thanks for taking the time for such a detailed response!!

-Yeah splattercat is the best, super entertaining

It depends on how you view using consumables. In my narrative it's making camp, sharing the items with the convoy and finding a moment to relax to increase your hope. You need a safe place to do this.

Now that you explain it, that makes perfect sense, especially since they are luxury goods.  Don't want to be dropping hallucinogens in the middle of a hostile desert ;)

It's tough to find the right balance between too much and too little help. If you've looked at the UI there's a small "?" icon on almost all screens that should give you context help for the current screen. It isn't supported on all screens and people don't seem to use it at all. I am thinking about adding a sort of lexicon/glossary but there's so many more important things to deal with at the moment.

Yeah the '?' is a little weird since it doesn't work on a lot of views.  Possibly causing it to display a help documentation page for the current view might be better.  Since there are already tool tips for most things I think having additional popups for the '?' button makes things a bit more confusing.  Just my 2 cents.

-No retreat mechanic for the player.

Yeah, I think you have also suggested that in the Bugtracker. I got to say though: No plans for this, at all. There's two main reasons: Firstly I don't want to add any more features right now - but rather focusing on making what's there work well. And secondly being able to flee would mean a lot more narrative content as suddenly every fight needs to have a narrative option for fleeing (or some fights should weirdly not allow you to flee etc.). And that too just isn't in the cards.

Yeah, that's fair. Every developer has to draw the line somewhere in terms of what is/isn't reasonable to include.

- Unit Wounds

Yeah, that is also changed in the new version - each unit can only take one wound. And once they have one, they start play with 1 less health. That makes things a lot clearer and deadlier. Which feels nice.

Woah, only one wound?  Can they still die or is it just a stat penalty?  If they die at just one wound I feel like that might change the game quite a bit...

I could see how stat penalties scaling with wound number would be a pretty cool mechanic that fits a lot with the narrative.

-Unable to edit learned leader deck

Posted my thoughts on the dedicated thread for this.

Good point, hopefully things will become more clear as you balance.

Another thought is to limit the number of regenerations, but again there are a lot of different ways to approach it.

Yeah its a tough call.  I think a good happy medium would be to have a max leader deck size.  Once you hit the size cap, you have to forget/remove a card to add a new one.  This keeps the deck static while still allowing for improvements and modification over time.  This would add the additional decision of not only which card you want, but which one you want to replace.

You could also have the deck cap expand with player level if you wanted to allow for larger decks later in the game.  I will say though, I have played a lot of TCGs and you ALWAYS want the smallest deck allowed.  Going over the minimum cap inevitably leads to inefficiency and lower performance, so theres that to consider too. 

1.Would also love to play this on android.  

2.At first I thought the difficulty was a bit harsh due to lack of food.  However, once I figured out that killing beast enemies drops a considerable amount of food I was fine.  I feel like currently the balance of food is just right in that it evokes that desperate sense of needing to survive early on and also makes having an ample supply that much more satisfying once you get there.

For those that struggle with food.  1. Try to take low cost routes early.  2. Take every battle you can early.  If you run into a beast-type enemy try to defeat them instead of letting them flee whenever possible.  Completely defeating them results in a large drop of food.  3. Get to a store as soon as possible and spend all of your batteries on food.  Once you are over ~70 food things should be smooth sailing from there.   Usually if you can do 2 of the above 3 things you should be set early game.

Does flying go around taunt?  That would also make thematic sense.

I really like them, I think they add a nice dimension to terrain instead of it all just being neutral or dangerous.  I usually pick them up if convenient, but mostly focus on defeating the enemy leader.  

If they rarely gave out large food or luxury good loot they could be a cool comeback mechanic if you are low on resources.

First I just wanted to give a shout out to splattercat, as he was the reason I picked this up in the first place.  Now, for some initial impressions and suggestions.

Pros

- Amazing art

- Great menu design and overall aesthetic,  I especially like the HS deck tracker-like 

-Good card mechanics, nice blend of old standbys from MTG and HS as well as innovative ones

-Excellent Lore, I really like how the game feeds you information about the world and atmosphere piece by piece.  I definitely get a sense of discovery and being on a voyage into the unknown in a very interesting and unique world.

- Grid based battle field mechanics are very nicely done.  Feels a little like a blend of traditional TCG and Duelyst while sticking closer to card-based instead of unit/grid based play. A perfect blend IMHO.

-Deck mechanics, equipment, leveling up, recruiting followers all intuitive and well done

-Great music and competent sfx.  I think the more minimalist approach works great here 

-Good variety of cards/tribes/styles.  I especially like how each enemy type gives specific loot and relies on a characteristic set of mechanics.

Cons

- Poor tool tips for opponents units.  It lets you see their abilities but not what those abilities/keywords mean.  I would recommend giving a full popup for enemy units similar to what happens for cards in your hand.  Alternatively, you could have an in-game glossary of mechanics

-Lack of help in general.  Outside of the tutorial there is no explanation/reference for game mechanics to be found.  An in game glossary and the ability to replay the tutorial would be helpful.  One thing that is still unclear to me is if a larger convoy size causes increased food consumption as you travel.

-You can't use consumables unless you are at certain locations.  It makes a lot more sense to be able to use consumables at any point on the map.

-No sell value displayed for non-battery goods (Eg. cant see how much equipment is worth before you sell it)

-No retreat mechanic for the player.  I feel like being able to retreat for some kind of penalty would make a lot of sense.  I feel like having the slim chance to live to fight another day is preferable to slowly loosing a battle of attrition.

-First battle hangs/crashes which kind of ruins the initial tutorial.  Seems like this is a common problem for most.

-A few mechanics are pretty unbalanced, especially the regeneration mechanic.  I would recommend either a nerf or adding more counterbalancing mechanics.

-Unable to edit which learned leader abilities you wanted in your leader deck.  I feel like  not being able to selectively edit learned cards in your leader deck takes away form some of the customizability 

Misc

- I never really was in danger of any of my units dying.  Perhaps lowering the death threshold from 4 to 3  wounds would make this mechanic a little more relevant.  However, I never felt like the difficulty spiked significantly in the two levels available, so perhaps the wound mechanic is fine and will become relevant more late game.

-Weapons/gear seemed to have a minimal impact on gameplay later in the game.  Only adding 1-3 cards to a large leader card pool ends up diluting out the gear's effect. Either being able to edit (and thus pair down) the leader deck or having gear contribute more cards later game might help solve this.

Overall amazing game!  I absolutely love the whole concept and think it solves a lot of problems that competitive TCGs have while keeping all the fun of building and piloting your own decks.  I especially like the flexibility in being able to experiment with different designs as well as how the card and FTL-like mechanics mesh wonderfully together.  Aside from a few minor tweaks, I think everything so far is phenomenal and can't wait for more!  Seriously, phenomenal concept and top-notch execution!

Is there a reason you cannot use consumables from the map screen?  I understand needing a good camp site to heal but it seems like you should be able to use luxury goods whenever you are not in battle, not just at special camp sites.

I feel like being able to swap cards in and out of the leader deck would be very useful.  I realize you wouldn't be able to move equipment cards in and out without changing equipment, but I feel like being able to edit the learned leader cards would be very useful.  Some of the weak cards you start with just become clutter in your leader deck later in the game.

Another aspect of the regen mechanic that makes it pretty broken is the fact that all attack buffs remain upon regen.  I think if the units attack was reset to its original state every time it regenerated that would make this ability a lot more balanced.  

Another option would be to add units or leader cards that blocked the regen ability.  I could see an ability like 'death touch' or 'fatal blow' where if the unit kills another unit with regeneration it prevents it from regenerating.  Another angle could be an ability that removes the regeneration ability on damage, could call it something like 'fatal wound'.

I feel like a retreat mechanic for the PC is sorely lacking.  Sometimes after pressing the assault against the AI, I get locked into a battle of attrition.  I feel like being able to cut your losses and retreat for some sort of penalty would be a good option to have.