itch.io

Nice demo. Took me about 5 hours or so to get everything unlocked, but I'm sure I could have done it faster if I were being more efficient. The tech tree gave me enough to think about in terms of the order I unlocked things that it felt like there were meaningful choices, instead of just buying whatever the next cheapest thing was. So, a surprising amount of depth for people who feel like optimizing.

It was a little confusing why I had negative money sometimes, but I eventually figured that out. Maybe that could be explained somewhere?

Overall, cool game. 

Cool game. I had fun playing. Upgrades for most of the game felt cool and useful and interesting.

I got pretty confused once I got to the final area, though. Here's my reaction to that portion of the game:

• The lava flows were super confusing. I couldn't tell if I was causing them, or if they were random, or if the little spider monsters were summoning them perhaps? I still don't really know.
• The scene is so zoomed out by that point that it's kind of hard to tell what's going on. Having 1000 items on the screen at a time adds to this confusion. Sometimes I'm getting killed by a little spider monster just because he's so small and I don't see him amount the 1000 items.
• The whole "Collector" upgrade confused me. I honestly have no idea, still, what that did. I didn't feel like I could see it working. I felt like 99% of the items I picked up were just from my normal magnet behavior.
• The whole "Tesla" concept also didn't make any sense to me. I couldn't tell if that was doing anything. 

Anyway, other than that, good progression and I had fun. Thanks.

Some reactions after finishing the demo:

• Cool concept. I mostly enjoyed it, and wanted to keep playing to see what happened next.
• Starting off, things were straightforward enough. First couple of minutes nothing seemed out of place.
• I didn't love the layout of the tech "tree". It's not clear that things are connected to other things, they just kind of show up eventually. I didn't like that the items moved around, instead of having a fixed layout. It made it confusing to know whether I was looking a new upgrade, or just a stronger version of one I'd already gotten. I'd consider a more traditional tech tree that clearly shows the hierarchy.
• Money scaling feels off balanced. It seems like they were increasing money earned by 2-3x, which kind of throws the rest of the tree out of balance. I think it would feel better if the money costs and earning was a bit toned down.
• Electric is too powerful, to the point that it didn't seem to make sense to ever get explosions. Pretty early on, electrics just clear the whole screen, no matter how many logs I'm creating. This means there's no reason to need have explosions (everything's already dead), and it almost means that pretty early on the game has no other gameplay to offer. Every round is identical: I just click one electric to get it started, and everything chain reacts and dies on its own. I'd suggest toning down how quickly you scale up the range and jumps on the electric. 
• The upgrade on the fireworks that lets them spawn other fireworks? Maybe if I'd been able to see it coming I would have gotten it sooner. But that kind of broke the game, and started giving me just huge multiples of the money I was getting before. Maybe that upgrade is only a chance to chain spawn another firework. Currently it feels way too strong.
• Okay, now the big one: I strongly disliked the whole "rain" mechanic, and the tech tree improvements for dealing with the rain. Starting off, it felt like there would be rain storms periodically, but as long as I had enough fire, I'd make it through the rain, and have to face a stronger rain a little while later. But here you've got a rain storm that just ends the round pretty much instantly, no matter how big the fire gets. There's absolutely no benefit to buy the Shield improvements for pretty much 99% of the game: You're just going to get killed by the rain instantly whether you have it or not. Delaying the rain doesn't really do anything useful either until the very end, when it lets you build up enough fire to survive. I'd argue that there shouldn't be Shield upgrades early on if they don't do anything useful. Or consider splitting the rain concept into several storms over the course of the round, at 10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, etc, so that you can get further and further, but still need to keep up with those upgrades.

Really well done. The visuals are interesting and different, and the concept of the light and shadows works well as a gameplay mechanic.

By far the most interesting, and distinct, concept is being unable to bank your essences between days. The other comment complained about this, but I really feel like it sets this game apart, and makes progression require either skill, or careful skill selection, rather than just "rinse and repeat" until you get enough to buy some expensive upgrade. Having to stay alive long enough to reach certain essence requirements adds a lot to the feel of progression. Remove that, and it's just grinding. 

I like the introduction of new enemies as a consequence of unlocking pieces of the skill tree.

My only real complaint is that there are times I just have no idea where the Essence of Light is on the map, usually when it spawns way off in a corner. I kept thinking there must me something I was missing in terms of being able to track the essences when I couldn't quickly find them. It's not very fun to feel like I've checked the whole map, and still not finding an essence, because it was so far off in a corner. Perhaps some approach to showing the direction to the next essence would make sense, perhaps only if it's been sitting there for long enough? 

And a couple of minor things you might improve:

• Every time the skill tree opens, the middle item pops up, and I need to hover it to get it to go away. Maybe just a bug.
• I don't know why the magician asks if I want to create a new soul when I don't have enough to create one. 

Hmm. I'm not sure the math is way off. But please correct me if that's the case. 

I calculated it out a bit. First, the coin value itself doesn't factor into the decision of whether to cash out or not, unless getting more would cause you to hit the cap. But just by the straight math of it, if you're considering how much money you get per toss, I think you definitely make more money by banking immediately until you start getting the multiplier up to around 1.5, and the luck up to around 0.7. Below that, it just always seems better to cash out immediately, rather than risk another clip.

The other really important thing to consider is that even if going for two-in-a-row has a slight mathematical edge at a certain point, it's probably still better to bank immediately in order to get enough money to afford the next upgrade ASAP. For example, if I only need $4 to afford an upgrade, and I have $5 I can bank, I should immediately bank it and buy the upgrade, rather than go for a $10 payout. 

I didn't factor in insurance into this. But the whole point is, these numeric values feel kind of lousy for a game like this. 

I found this to be very tedious. Maybe the thing that put me off the most was the feeling that it seem mathematically optimal not to ever try for more than one-in-a-row until the multiplier gets to at least 2ish. I haven't done the math here, but when the first Multiplier upgrade only gives a 10% bonus, but a 50% chance to lose everything, there's no sense in taking the risk. The result is that you just cash out after every win for... a long time. 

Part of the "fun" of incremental games is also the curiosity of what's coming up in the game. Like when there's tech tree that's gradually revealed. You want to keep playing just to discover what's next. But here, everything's on the table right from the start. That feels like it could use some work.

The "problem" is that clicking chooses whatever bean is currently selected. You need to press A/D left/right to select the bean first, then click (or press enter). I'd highly recommend the dev change that, since I had this happen a dozen times until I figured out why I wasn't getting the bean I clicked on.

One minor gripe: The game is oddly GPU heavy for what's effectively a graphically simple game. (I suspect it's due to the background particle system.) Maybe give an option to turn that off so I don't need to hear my fans spin up to run the game?

I'm a bit confused about the progression once you get to the point of buying planetary systems. Up until that point, there was always something to "do". Now, it seems I'm just supposed to leave the game sitting there untouched for hours as resources accumulate? Since there's no offline progress as in other games in the genre, that really does mean just leaving the game sitting there.

I've unlocked 6 planetary system, and spent all GPs. I'll need 3 more GPs to buy another useful upgrade. Given how slowly Stellar Nursery are to increase, I imagine that will take something like 6 hours of being idle maybe?

Mind Level is exactly 50. Given how fast I get AI points (36k/s), it looks like it will be several hours before mind even gets to level 51. 

So, the game basically came to a screeching halt here. I don't see anything else for me to fiddle with. Really the only way to make any progress right now is to let PP accumulate, so that more Stellar Nursery can be purchased. That specifically means not buying any more humans, otherwise PP resets, and that's what takes forever to increase.

This is coming from someone who played to the end of Phase 2, then came back when Phase 3 was out. I had everything unlocked up to that point.

Coming back, I'm mostly struck by how there really isn't anything active to do in Phase 3. Maybe I'm missing something. But there's the whole empty Fractured Void, where it costs 1 Million to unlock one of the hexes. That takes maybe an hour to accumulate. Then the reward is just 5% bonus? After unlocking a couple of those immediate 1 Million hexes, I thought maybe the 2 Million hexes would really start to be useful, but those are also only 5% bonus? So maybe once per hour at this point I can do something in the game. I don't remember the earlier phases being so idle. It's quite dull, knowing there are maybe hours/days to come of just unlocking these hexes for meager 5% bonuses? I don't get it.

Bug report: Offline gains are pretty messed up. If Auto-Converge is turned on, I will never get offline gains. I'll close and reopen the game later, and it will be as if the game had been paused the whole time, and no state change occurs. If I turn off Auto-Converge, the game applies offline gains as expected. This means I can't set the game to Auto-Converge at 2 Million, then come back tomorrow, because the game won't do offline gains if Auto-Converge is on. I think maybe it kind of works offline if you set the Auto-Converge amount to something very low, but it definitely doesn't work at all at higher values.

Anyway, I thought the first two phases were kind of interesting, but Phase 3 just slammed on the brakes and puts me off completely. I keep feeling like there must be some skill I'm not seeing that would make the start of Phase 3 not be a total slog.

I tried this out for 2 games. Here's some quick feedback:

1. I found the rules/explanation kind of confusing before playing it. It turned out to be simpler than I initially thought, so maybe you can clean up the rules a bit. One confusing thing was you didn't say what the player does. Instead, you say things like, "One of the three bottom cards is played", and I couldn't tell if that meant I would play the card, or the game would do so automatically. 
2. Overall, once I played a few rounds, I understood what was happening, and I could start making strategic choices.
3. I felt things were pretty slow most of the time, and I wanted the system to count up my score a lot faster. It takes quite a long time to show each of the conditions, and the score. 
4. After two games, I still didn't have enough to buy anything. And the "vanilla" version isn't really interesting enough to make me want to play a 3rd game with just the base rules. I imagine 50K score comes easier later, which is why those points are so expensive. But maybe consider making the first few points cheaper, so I can get an upgrade after one or two games, assuming I play reasonably well.

I think the main issue I have with aiming is that the projectile seems to collide when I would have expected it had enough room to make it over/through. If you put more work into this, one potentially simple way to improve this would be to interrupt the aiming arm at the point where the projectile would collide if thrown at the current trajectory. That's a bit of work to compute the collision along the entire arc constantly, but it would definitely mean I know whether or not my shot is about to hit something unintended. Another approach would be to trim down the hitbox of the projectile so it doesn't clip so many corners.

As for the level design, I think the only major no-no I felt was when things would happen that I could not have predicted in any way. Like pushing a button and finding that an obstacle appeared and blocked my path, without me having any way to predict that this would happen. That design approach basically means you're forcing every player to restart at that point, and replay the level. A lot of people will feel that's cheap, and get frustrated. Better would be if the red obstacles that will appear are already visible in some way, so you could have predicted this might happen when pressing a button. 

I'm also not sure if I've just really unlucky, but coming back since sometime under version 0.8, I don't think I've been able to get further than night 5 or 6 with the Archer. Max level, and Mastery is at 19. I've tried different load-outs, but the outcome is pretty much the same thing each time. No matter what skills I pick up, even under best-case scenario talent trees, there just end up being too many enemies around day 5 to keep up with. The best run I've had gave me piercing shots and 3-hit mechanic on about the 3rd day, but even that wasn't enough. 

I'm not sure what else to try with the Archer. The only thing that really seems to matter early on is attack speed, and unless the talent tree is loaded with it, I just die.

The orbiting arrows mechanic on the Archer is feels frustrating because it essentially "misses" the enemy I was trying to hit. For example, try shooting an enemy that's getting close. If the arrow orbits instead of being a standard shot, it's very likely the enemy will get through and hit you. (Orbiting arrows seem to be very unlikely to hit a target in the direction you're facing.) This has resulted in many cases where enemies get through.

Not sure what the best approach would be here, but that skill should definitely not negate my normal shot when it randomly goes off. I've had it go off a couple of times in a row, and that's pretty devastating. Maybe the orbiting arrow can be an extra arrow in addition to the normal one you fire?

Really enjoy the game. One thing I wish the game did a better job with is showing the Event impact that any card has. I realize that's pretty overwhelming initially, so maybe it's a setting to show extra details about the card, which is turned off by default? I'd like to see the +/- for various events, to avoid needing to go look in the encyclopedia each time I forget what a card's effects are. 

A couple of reactions:

 - Longer nights (by 15%) seems to be really beneficial. More enemies to kill means more XP per level, so you stay ahead of the difficulty curve more easily. No real downside?

 - The blue sword ability (+25% speed after a special attack) seems to stack too well when using many abilities at once. Use all four abilities at once, and you're a machine gun. Maybe some wrong calculation here?

 - Wizards get trivially easy as soon as they unlock a bit of lifedrain plus the skill that turns it into magic drain. You basically don't run of out mana anymore, and just get as many +Cooldown skills as possible to spam attacks. Seems that damage done by magic spells triggers lifedrain, which is maybe too strong?

 - Summoner's basic attack feels pretty boring and incentivizes just spinning in a circle sending snails in each direction to kill enemies off screen. Maybe a different play style, where you can rapidly send out several snails at once, but only so many per second? For example, imagine a progress bar that goes from 0 to 100. Sending a snail costs 25, but the attack speed is 0.1 instead of 1.5. Send 4 really fast if you want, but then wait for the progress bar to refill. Means you can address sudden big attacks from one direction. Anyway, I felt the summer felt dull, like I wasn't reacting, just preparing.

Did this get fixed already? When I try the warrior, their sword doesn't do anything. Enemies just kind of die when they get in the middle square, but not always. Maybe I don't understand how the warrior works...