i have to say, after meeing with the files to lower sector costs and pristine light conversion costs by a whole digit, the game feels much better to play!
now i can do things in real time~
i don't mind some waiting but one action every few hours is too much for me.i don't think i will change things back.
i think you get quintessence either when you can make the pchre genesis, ultraviolet nebula and crimson singularity T3 lights, or from a blueprint.
though i can't remember which cache would have it.
i got access to it pretty much by accident.
i messed with the files since i got way too bored waiting for resources to pile up, so i removed a digit from the fractured void sector cost and pristine light conversion cost. so i suddenly had enough light to buy ALL the sectors too rings further and pretty much all caches are in that region.
i think the automation options are nice but still too limited.
i want an option to balance pips by output, not just by equal number. because you can get the most light by making sure all color tanks are full before convergence (as far as i know) and i have to manually adjust all colors each time i get an upgrade or extra pips. i am spending so much time perfecting the ratios that i am usually just about ready to get the next sector or constellation star by the time finished balancing...
it is keeping me so busy that i can't really call this an idle game, half of the time. now if only those sectors in the fractured void were faster to unlock...
i found a bug, or rather a weird behavior that could be a bug and a little change i would like to suggest.
the bug is related to automatic converging and time warp.
i have the downloaded version of the game running in the background and the auto convergence only seems to happen whenever i switch back to the game. since this happened at least five times in a row i am quite sure this counts as a bug.
and second issue, the time warp seems to get interrupted way too easy. often when i come back to see the game progress the time warp that i clearly had running when i left had stopped itself maybe a minute or so after switching windows. meaning i have to babysit the timewarp for a while before i can leave it running, which is getting quite annoying...
so i would like to suggest switching how the time warp works from running normally progression just with multiplied values, to an instant reward related to the null essence paid to progress time. this would fix the babysit issue without you having to sift through all the code to find the issue and allows for a faster progression especially in the second and third phase of the game.
and probably any future phase you will add just as much.
though the third phase does need some adjustment in general. please let players see what a field does or rewards it can give before buying it! i am quite frustrated at not being able to see where the rare and useful caches are hiding and wasting hours of idle waiting time to get the necessary light to progress. seriously, that waiting time is WAY too high! what good is getting a 5% increase in light generation for empty fields when each row of distance cost 100% more than the last and i need to explore very single field to ensure i don't miss on the impoertant rewards? if those 5% rewards would stack multiplicative or exponentially it would break even at some point but a flat bonus is pretty much useless. and i am saying this after spending around 30 hours of idling to buy just 21 fields !
please, Please fix this. and make it faster and easier to properly progress.
i have a suggestion.
can you please add an automation option that balances output instead of pips?
i want to maximize each convergence by having all wells completely filled, but unfortunately i can't efficiently let the current automation function do that for me because i can either only fill the white well or have my pips all over the place and have the wells fill at very uneven rates...
it's surprisingly hard to keep the civilization growth under control.
though as long as you can limited to one half of the map, stalling for good cards is pretty easy. got a win in 120 turns.
it is a fun little game!
i do have some small complains though. it is not possible to deselect a card after you select one, which means ones you clicked a card, you can't use the exclamation marks anymore, since the card click takes priority.
also, the card selection is a bit weird. i always got too many destroy 1X? cards and 1X1 cards, which are pretty useless in most situations since they can only partially delay the expansion by a turn or two without making a real dent in their numbers. you may want to look at the card selection algorithm a bit more.
on another note, i found it strange that the exclamation marks work the opposite of how the cards of the same color work.
the content is a little sparse...
just one tower with no further upgrade options and so few waves in total is quite little. but it is only version 0.21 so that will hopefully change.
everything you got so far seems to be working smoothly, it's a good base for the rest of the game. i'll come back to it in a while.
i like the added special abilities and items. makes the game a lot complexer strategiewise and makes me want to take extra risks.
the new enemie types are appreciated as well.
keep up the good work!
...oh, and i had actually found another minor issue in the previous version i had forgotten to mention. my minions seemed to get confused which item to take when multiple items stacked on the same field.
if there were lets say five coins and a key as the third item, they would grab the coins that were first in line but not switch to the key.
i like your game quite a lot!
it's simple yet fun.
i do have some minor issues though...
first, there is some lag, especially in later levels with more units. looks to me like the game stops a few frames whenever a unit gets hit, which happens a lot. while i do use a pretty low-end machine, lagging on this kind of game should not happen.
second, there seems to be some minor input delay during snake movement. i already figured out that the snake seems to only accepts inputs the frame it completes the moving to a new square and that seems to be the mayority of the issue. i think a change from checking only on that frame to queueing up an input or maybe even two inputs would make moving the snake feel a lot better.
third, sorting units gets kinda difficult once you hit multiple rows. the menu sometimes collapses whenever i move over the border of a unit portrait. i think they don't quite line up borderless.
...could also be a fullscreen issue. if you press alt+enter in this kind of gamemaker programm, you can make the window fullscreen even if that is not actually intended. i use that a lot and some games show some strange issues only in this forced fullscreen mode, so i thought that may also apply here.
forth, the difficulty scales a bit too steep in the late levels. i mean, i didn't even get that golem to beyond halfway to the exit on the most direct path in 1-3.
i think an upgrade system and maybe the ability to sell units would improve the game quite a bit.
i don't mind if you restrict that to only between floor transitions, but it definitely should be added.
so, with that wall of text out of the way, i say it again, i like your game quite a lot and those issues are only minor.
in its current state the game Flipside Kingdom is already a lot of fun!
and i'm looking forward to how this game will devellop!
i have a few little suggestion what i would like to see added/changed.
first the most obvious things: this game needs a main menu and more importantly an options menu. as much as i like the sounds and music, i want to be able to turn them off.
second, please add more new tiles with higher prizes. in my last game i earned about 400 gold per turn and had saved up over 3000 gold, i had nothing noteworthy to spend it on...
also, the towers are too rare to get. that last run had no towers till day four and only a total of maybe 15 towers in the whole game of over 25 days.
i hope you also add some kind of upgrade system, at least for the more important tiles. more interesting synagies would also be very much apprecieted. something like a triangle of towers turning into a big tower with extra range and powers.
another idea is the ability to change already placed tiles. maybe for a hefty prize of 1000 gold or a hard limit per match.
and last but not least, bugs. i encountered three so far: some of the monsters don't start moving from their tile and just disappear instead.not sure if the disappearence is your solution to the not-moving issue but it happened enough times to be worthy of commenting about. second, the mountains didn't spawn any monsters when flipped. and third, at some point the tiles behaved weirdly when holding/dragging them with the mouse around the map. instead of just moving and turning only slightly, they freak out and turn wildly in random directions. once one started, all subsequently dragged tiles also freaked out. luckily, placing them in the hand or on the map stopped the odd behavior, of that specific piece at least.
and while this is not really a bug, i noticed that the income calculation slows down noticeably the longer it needs to calculate, in other words, the more fields and stuff it has to go through, the slower it gets at starting the animation for the next tile.
and now with that wall of text out of the way, only one thing left to say:
keep up the good work! this game is awesome!
