itch.io

Bug report: Clicking the deck before the opening animation completes can freeze the game; I wonder if this is caused by the same issue as the bug another commenter reported on "select next deck" screen.

My game usually crashes from lack of memory before completion :'(

On safari, quickly dragging a card to the center doesn't play it; the card falls back to the hand.  Only dragging it to center and waiting a moment allows cards to be played consistently; this is true whether you drag it to the highlighted center of the board or onto the enemy.

Very fun!

My two cents: I don't think it's an issue.  The risk of over-investing in them and losing early is real, and I wonder if the above pic is from extreme luck.  I've found them neither necessary to win nor a guarantee of winning, even without a limit.

I may return to this concept, but I think I'm done with this pulp implementation.  The process of working around pulp's limits was fun at first, but it got too frustrating.

First, the game has massive slowdown if it isn't converted into Lua, and the fan-made converter sn't updated and has massive bugs.

Second, I think it might be totally infeasible to implement a tutorial, which is really necessary for this game to make any sense to anyone who hasn't played a lot of Inscryption.  I'm currently learning Lua, and I may one day make a Lua-based fan game along the same lines.

Thanks for the update!  I'm guessing something in one of the recent OS updates might have changed how it works.

Yeah, I got frustrated with how hard it was to make this game work in Pulp without a functioning Pulp->Lua converter for efficiency and music/sound effects.  I'm now learning Lua and working on some new games that way, but it's a sloooooow process.

Heavens to betsy is the text crawl slow.  The opening text would fit on one page, but instead I'm watching it screen-by-screen for thirty seconds.  I almost quit, but I made it far enough to jump (smooth), dash (cool), and...hit another 60 seconds of clicking through slow dialogue?  I bounced.

Text needs serious work.

I didn't think the dev would actually do it, but they updated and fixed a *ton* of problems, and updated a lot of content.

Some new balancing issues aside, it's a huge improvement!  Wishlisted.

I think I have finally gotten the most difficult build, and the final build that can possibly beat the game: Vampire + Paladin.

The only other maybe-possible buildsI can think of is Rat-King + Rats + Darrr/Paramedics

Builds I think are impossible include:

Gold Dragon + Alchemist (the GD increases damage too slowly)

Phoenix + Hydra (probably not because the phoenix and hydra wouldn't be next to each other often enough to consistently increase hydra's damage)

Mechanical spiders seems impossible to get even close to the 40 damage/square you need to beat the final boss.  Cockatrice eggs also seems to increase damage too slowly.

Other builds I've already beaten the game with include:

Hell Hounds

Ascetic

Tinkerer + Soldiers (Mecha)

Darrr + Beasts (esp. Ferret) + Diversity Demon

Grey Goo + Gold Goo

Tax Accountant + 3x Paramedics + something above

Any I've missed?

Oh my god, that is so ass.  If I had spent the hours necessary to get the Djinn, and wound up with that, I might scream.  It makes mutant colony look like a great combo reward.

Just beat it with Darrrrr and Goo

What is Monk build?  In your darr+librarian build, did the librarian actually add value?

I just beat it with Darrrrr build, but I got rid of everything else to maximize beast multipliers.  I also ended up with 2 Darrrrrs and 2 Flags, lol.

I've never summoned the Djinn (water+fire->steam; steamx4->Djinn), and I doubt anyone has.
That's despite the steam being broken so that it doesn't actually evaporate

I’m jealous.  I kept taking sheep and never getting Darr.  I finally managed to get him after like, three hours, cloned him twice…and lost because he never ended up next to quite enough beasts on the final boss.

Every piece of webbing touching another creates a chain, with total bonus to adjacent Arack of 2^(number of webbing in the chain).

I got lucky because all of my webbing was touching, and all three Arack were touching the massive web.

Suggestion for the dev:  The probabilities for the pieces seem pretty unbalanced now.  It's not that it's too hard or easy, but there are too many pieces that are essentially non-viable because they only work in combination with other extremely rare pieces.

For example, there are at least three common/uncommon pieces that explicitly work together with Daaaar, who is "very rare." There are other pieces (rat, sheep, dire wolf) that are only viable with Daaar.  I have not seen Daaar in the last two hours of playing.

Other examples of statistically nonviable pairings include librarian/author, mecha (tinkerer/soldier/scrap), vampires (succubus/...paladin?), Djinn (Whale/Sheep/Red Dragon?).

You might consider weighting the probability of certain pieces appearing based on the pieces that are on the board.  Increasing the likelihood of scrap if you have tinkerer or alchemist, for example, or increasing the likelihood of red dragon based on the number of sheep or weredragons.

I've only beaten the game (10th boss) with Hellhounds and now Arack:

Is the endgame sequence another text scroll? It's possible I just didn't read carefully enough to realize it's different text.
I'd suggest no skipping for the end game sequence.  It happens rarely enough that it's probably worth making sure the player sees it.

It seems like one of the only builds that can do the 1000 dp/turn that you need to beat the 10th boss.  If you got enough webbing you could theoretically do it with the Arakh, but I think your damage would accelerate too fast and you would  end up facing the final boss without enough webbing to consistently deal 1000+ (you need 10 contiguous webs+arakh), or you would accelerate too slow and die on an earlier boss.

PSA: This game is actually 10 levels long.

If you beat the final boss it gives you the same transition as if you died, so it's easy to think you lost on the 10th level of 50.

What build did you finish the game with?  As far as I can tell there are only 2 or 3 pieces that can possibly beat the game, because only those pieces scale exponentially.  Grey goo+Gold Goo, Hellhound...???

With Hellhound alone I eventually had almost every space filled with hellhounds, and still couldn't get past level 10.  That makes every other "good" piece look worthless.

Really amazing project.

The gameplay is fundamentally fun, but I found it somehow unbalanced once I started trying to actually guide the missiles.  Maybe I just suck at it!

Very glad I clicked.

YJGY

Jesus Christ that second stage was hard.  For future players: it is beatable.

This game is pretty much unplayable right now.  After you collect the first batch of rocks, you have barely enough to upgrade one function...then rocks stop showing up in any significant number.  Then you eventually die.

Some serious fixes are needed for this to be a game in the traditional sense.

YESSSS
Thank you.  I don't know how I missed this after searching HTML5 Tower Defense + 2D, but this was the one.

Sometime in the last three months, I played a great tower-defense game that was pixelated, maybe pico-8.

It was unique and popular enough to have a wiki.  Its unique features were:

• The player could place a tower, and its type would be randomly selected.
• Two towers of the same type could be merged. Like, two mushrooms could be merged into a potion bottle, two bottles could form a cauldron, and two cauldrons could form a wizard.
  • Merging towers repeatedly ended in a "legendary" humanoid tower, like a Siren, Wizard, Necromancer, etc.
  • Towers could be sold for a bounty that changed each turn; bounty sales returned more than the cost of building the tower.
• Enemies were food; each turn, a "challenge" could be selected that would either give enemies a permanent bonus and the player a different bonus, or make all towers the same for one turn and all enemies the same for one turn.
  • For example, if you chose the "water towers only this turn" bonus, the enemies would all be watermelons.
  • Choosing "all enemies give 1 more gold" might make the next turn all strawberries.

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

No updates as yet.  I'm still planning on building this out, but life stuff has gotten in the way.  I'm mostly working on some design issues in my head with some distance from the project (like, fixing the awful music which I was mostly ignoring as I got the game elements to work).  I doubt the full-demake I originally planned will happen, but I will eventually finish making this into a full game experience.

Think game-boy spin-off versus SNES original level of completeness.

I'm also considering experimenting with AI pixel art for the cards, we'll see how that goes.

Sorry I don't have more now, but paying the bills comes first!

The game works great, and it's a good idea, but the game itself is missing something.

Right now, there's no real conflict between the players.  You can easily build your own fiefdom of property, and there's no reason for the other player to enter it.  You might say "well, you can buy the other player's property," but it costs just as much for you to buy it (1rent+1price) as it costs the other player to buy it back, so you don't really get an advantage.

This game needs either 1. an underlying game taking place within the property to incentivize movement, or 2. an element of change that naturally occurs in the point totals, like inflation, deflation, or something like that.

For 1, you could imagine something like being able to take your opponent's piece (if there were more pieces), or being able to earn income if you move to the other side of the board and back, or an ai monster hunting both players.

For 2, the value of the property should probably change, so buying another player's property has meaning.  You might also consider a postive/negative element sucking money out of the system.  For example, if "rent" was 2, and only 1 point went to the other player, the other just disappeared.  Or if "rent" was 1, but the other player actually got 2.   Or you get x points each turn.  Getting x points each turn (like passing go in Monopoly) would mean that, depending on how players invested, the total amount of money would increase but one player would get richer and richer, eventually buying up all the property and cornering the other player.

Actually, I think you could potentially make the game fun just by adding 2 coins to each player each turn.  It would still leave the first player with a massive advantage, but it would prevent either player from turtleing, which is the optimal strategy right now.

This is an incredible achievement.  You've not only recreated superhot in Pico-8 in the technical sense (nice job on the camera pan when you die), you've also found a way to make gameplay fun despite the gameplay limitations imposed by the platform.

I wouldn't paly a full-length version of this, but this feels like what you would really be playing if Superhot was on DOS.

one of the first games I reviewed was an incomplete pornographic demo where a maid slowly walks across three screens to find a tentacle monster to sit on.  One place above me in the rankings.

I feel you man.

Thanks, that's really helpful!  Based on that error report, it may be that no-one has actually had all the children die since we released the "full" version of the game, lol.  Perhaps the whole ending is broken.

EDIT: Ugh, looks like a recent update which enabled easy save-games causes a crash when converted using Pulpmill like this game is.  I'll look into a fix.

Thanks for the report! I don't know what caused it, but you're the first person to do that, including the dev team, so I'll have to check it out.

Sadly the PDX only works with the simulator (which comes with the free Playdate SDK), or on an actual PlayDate.

Yeah...at about 1am I said to the designer, "did you notice that the mother never eats," but it was way too late for that lol.

Can I ask if you played the .json or .pdx version?  The music issue is related to the .json version, because you can't upload music assets to the Pulp web-player unless they're programmed in Pulp's midi interface, and the game uses an MP3 soundtrack.  It sounds like I may also have forgotten to update the .json version with bugfixes that are in the newest pdx. [Edit: yeah, the .json and pdx versions are basically different branches now, it looks like I never got the "ignore player input so you can't make the same choice twice" code to work in the .json, sorry about that!]

Thanks, I'll pass that along to the artist!  We'll hopefully double the resolution after the gamejam and get some more detail.  It was really hard not to make the pitchfork for the farm look like some kind of marital aid, so we settled on the current "alien torture device" look and wrote "Farm" on top of it, lol.

Glad to hear it! I contacted Panic about the server error, hopefully I can get that fixed soon.

Did you use play.date/account/sideload? For some reason I get a server error with this PDX in particular using that method.

It should work if you unzip the zip file and either

• Put your playdate in data disk mode and copy the entire .PDX folder into the games folder of your playdate, OR
• Use the Playdate simulator  with your playdate connected to your computer, choose the option from the device menu to transfer the game to device.

Thanks for going through the trouble, and thanks for the heads-up!

I included a note about using playdate in the game listing, but I didn't realize you could download the game directly from the LowRezJam submission page, which doesn't mention Playdate at all.  I changed the download title so it should be clear to new players.

Yeah, I get that.  My submission is a choice-based game ala "Reigns," and after running the game dozens of times I knew exactly when the game would unlock input for the next choice, and I hit A to make my decision almost exactly when that window opened. It ran pretty great and I sent it to the team for playtesting at like, 1am.

It never occurred to me that a new player would spam the A button trying to see when the input window opens, and when my teammate ran the game it was just glitch after glitch because of  tiny windows of time when the game wasn't properly ignoring the A button.  I guess this jam taught me how important lengthy playtesting is to understand how an actual player interacts with the game.

The screencap gifs look really cool! I wasn't able to figure out how to get past the snake, sadly.

Oh yeah, I forgot about the finicky controller.  You can click to get focus and use arrows+a+s instead of mouse, but you can't click the mock game screen to get focus (the most natural place to click) because that's used for pausing emulation and pauses the game till you click again.