itch.io

Great start! I have a number of things to mention here as a veteran game tester.

I dig the original idea being a fusion of RPS+TTT but it needs a bunch of animations. People go nuts over animations, so they're extremely important, such as the graphic actually moving when using the Move card (with acceleration and deceleration, too, not just at a fixed speed), and kicking out the old one (make the beaten graphic rotate and fall off or fade or something).

Make the game include its own built-in tips so you don't need a tutorial: put a check box in the settings to optionally show or hide guidance text that is always there, such as "Tap a card," "Tap an empty space to summon the card's monster," "Pick a monster," and "Move the monster to an empty space" (with a glowing and fading selection border to indicate which monster you've picked; there is currently no indicator for monster selection).

Don't score the TTT condition right away; I was first confused by how the enemy just immediately landed a point with everything on the board vanishing. Have it first draw a line explaining how they won, animate a victory point that then flies to the corresponding side's point bar, and then smoothly dissolve-or-whatever-you'd-like the board's creatures; never just show or remove elements with no animation, ever! This is what makes games appealing as much as their mechanics.

There are more things for me to mention such as the upper-left gear icon getting slightly cut off on my Galaxy S23's screen. If you're open to a joint endeavor, I'd also be interested in potentially supplying sound and music if I can find time.

Also consider "Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock" from the popular TV show The Big Bang Theory, though that would probably require a 5x5 board!

Also add the ability to hold and drag a card to a cell. I thought I was supposed to do that at first and got confused until I realized you must tap a card and then tap a space. Many games involving cards and their targets allow both options, like in Slay the Spire, Monster Train, etc.

This game is awesome. Will you do any updates? We thought it was a bit unfair that "Kyiv" was required vs. "Kiev" for Ukraine and think that the game should be able to be flexible with either spelling.

Additionally, the Aral Sea had "the the" in its description text. If you ever plan to update one last time, I have some more similar stuff to send, too. Thanks for considering!

Bug report: I just tried playing from the AppImage and the gravestone piece always crashes the game when performing alchemy next to it; I have no idea of what it does.

The AppImage did the trick, thanks! What a curious game; it's like Dr. Mario meets 2048's exponential stacking! I think more sound effects like when a contract is achieved or fails would be great.

./alchimix yielded:

src/module.c(374) : FATAL ERROR : Failed to load library fmt.hdll

I'll try your other solution...

So I'm a new Linux convert from Win10 to https://Bazzite.gg and opening the executable does absolutely nothing; it doesn't even briefly flash a self-closing window. I don't know what's going on; can anyone else reproduce this issue? I'm using KDE Plasma and it doesn't seem to recognize apt-get as a command; I don't know what the non-Ubuntu equivalent would be.

Oh, no wonder; I was playing the browser version, haha.

Great, little game! FYI, the Codex tutorial page has a typo in its first sentence: "Some enemies like have special properties."

Also, dang, the end of the graveyard level is a great processor test... my FPS went <1, haha.

Okay, I rage-quit and uninstalled it because enemies dealt +1 more damage than their sum was going to be, causing me to die when I had intended to go to 1 HP to maximize a health-restoring tome. I didn't understand what caused them to deal greater damage. I wish the game would preview how much damage you'll receive if you just ignore enemies and keep unveiling cards.

The Weakness rebuff doesn't say exactly how much weaker you get; it should be clear that it causes -1 ATK with everything, or actually reduce your cards' values accordingly. The game really needs quality-of-life features and clearer wording in its descriptions.

Well-made although the Android version could use a redesign that'd let it take up all that blank space on the left and right sides for bigger font. Additionally, it should have a confirm-card accidental-selection-guarding feature the way Slay the Spire does, because sometimes I just wanted to read a card's description but upon lifting up my finger, I'd take the card because I forgot to move my finger off the card before lifting. Could you please add this and larger buttons (especially "SKIP" at the bottom of the shop, the accept/decline tutorial and menu buttons, etc.)?

Can't seem to upload screenshot but I got a high score of 139, keeping a steady pace. None of those was "B," which I found to be odd. I was unable to type "B" unless I let go of shift.

I'm pretty sure the cutscenes were always fuzzy even in the original game, and that the intro is probably the creepiest it ever gets.

Got any gameplay videos?

Is there a gameplay video of maybe one or two levels from start to finish?

Any gameplay videos?

It's never too late! Link to it now if the rules allow it...

This is the ultimate /r/birdsarentreal simulator.

Wow, incredible; I just learned about this through the /r/CaveStory subreddit and will try it out sometime. Looks great!

Huh, the Android version is gone from the Play Store. Will the .APK be uploaded here?

Long-term: I think the biggest killer of the potential of everything you've sunk into here is simply its arcade format. What I envision is a great title like this going beyond the confines of the screen and having a scrolling space map of a roguelite, with increasingly difficult, complex enemies in a campaign, perhaps even with multiplayer. Have a home base with different types of missions to take on: politicians to escort and convoys to protect, enemy superpowers to assassinate, and armed-to-the-teeth space stations or helpless colonies to defend or take down. Your payments for completion of such missions are what you'd use to buy power-ups, and maybe even upgrade from ship to ship. You should be able to lose drones in combat or even have power-ups damaged and destroyed over the course of a lengthy interstellar conflict. And having one monster boss at the end would be glorious to see and overcome.

Oh, and it needs tons of asteroids.

There is SO much potential here!!!

As a veteran hobbyist beta tester of indie games, I've been mulling over what holds back this title from greatness. The sound effects are okay, the music is excellent, the graphics are well-thought-out... but how is it foiling itself?

I replayed this and am trying to think further about what prevents this game from becoming incredible. There is clearly a ton of potential for this sort of game to be a hit, but I think its design as an arcade game fundamentally harms its chances at FTL-level capability.

Using the second ship, I willingly died at level 21, loop 4, because by loop 2 I was so overpowered that I basically didn't even need any more power-ups to trash any enemy within seconds of its appearance on-screen. Even 3 drones were able to make mincemeat of most enemies. For balance, this kind of ship should make its weapon accuracy go terrible the more you move.

Short-term:

• Graphical Effects could go further:
  • It would be more emotionally satisfying for bosses to give a tremendous explosion that pushes away the player ship.
  • The double-damage critical-hit power-up shots could be colored a different color for visual feedback.
  • The shield-generating enemies in the later stages  (and your own ship, when you get a shield power-up) could see a more interesting shield collapse electrical fizzle than the graphic simply disappearing.
• Power-up balance is totally off:
  • The Overclock power-up should slightly debuff the strength of each individual projectile to compensate, and there should also be an overheating mechanic that forces cool-down to punish players who just keep spamming it. Once this is unlocked, then there could be a Heat Sink power-up to reduce the cool-down, which would then scale with more Overclocking.
  • The Cannon should also make each missile a bit weaker at higher launch rates. Increased range should also slightly weaken your shots, as well as the Radio's individual zaps.
• Enemies should scale with your power. I was disappointed to see that the only noticeable change was the final-stage green enemy with circulating smaller drones being literally the only one to change by adopting +1 drone per loop. There is so much more that could be done!
  
  • All enemies could incrementally move and shoot faster, especially the mines.
  • The Gauss sniper ship could charge faster, and maybe instead become a cruiser with multiple independent turrets per loop; it could fire off 2 or 3 shots in rapid succession instead of just 1.
  • The purple beam ships could extend their beams so that by loop 3 they could reach across the map.
  • There could be bullet-sponge enemies that require flanking to hit weak spots to defeat.
  • There could be enemy battleships with point-defense that shoot down some of your missiles. Or they could even launch chaff grenades that throw off their heat-seeking. That would be a sight to see!

I have... mixed feelings about this title. The presentation is probably the greatest aspect; the music is awesome (I had never heard of Nomyn before but now I have!), the art is gorgeous, the effects are smooth (or at least as smooth as they can be on my current potato), and the menu is attractively stylish, even if the fonts and buttons could be way bigger and scale according to screen resolution.

The biggest problem, though, is the gameplay. Nowhere does it say in any description or help menu that you exclusively lay down blocks by pressing the space bar; even left-clicking does nothing. The instructions also didn't say anything about the next block forming exclusively from the sides of the last-placed block; at first, I thought it would randomly pick a joint from all parts of your structure. Another issue is the lack of an exit button; making gamers have to physically press Alt+F4 to close the game feels... unnatural.

But the core issue is just understanding weight distribution. I have no idea of how my structure was able to stay as long as it could, as I basically made an upwards spiral with no visible leaning until its sudden end. So it was confusing for me to see it finally fall when I was simply mashing the space bar immediately upon spawn almost half the time as I got irritated by the lack of predictability of the structure's sway, especially since the yellow blocks are effectively a trap that is simply better off being avoided, because you would ideally want to use a bomb to destroy an accidental outcropping that could topple the tower, yet it might drop a bunch of blocks there instead and cause the very thing you intended to avoid—and there's no way to know which it'll be, so it would be way better to not make it guesswork and simply color bomb blocks red or something, if not show an actual bomb icon.

Given the description, I thought it would be a truly zen, fully turn-based, not real-time, quick-reaction, block-builder. I feel like a better implementation of this kind of concept would be to turn it into some kind of card-based roguelite with tower cards of different weights and types: like, when you place and are restricted to the last placed block, it could show you 3 out of 30 possible types of cards of different weight and you'd be forced to pick between them. Roguelikes are all the rage these years so this would probably be exponentially more popular.

This game is also falsely tagged "tower defense," but it would be interesting if, say, there were machine-gun blocks that would actually fight off flying invaders which would add way more sophistication and strategy to the card selection pool: see how many waves you can last defending your tower (which would just be on flat ground or atop a mountain, not suspended in mid-air), or something like that, like maybe a space station that you could modularly build out, where gravity doesn't matter too much, with shield generators, oxygen levels, possibly even crew and passageways for them to easily reach turrets, etc.

All in all, while the presentation is solid, I think the simplistic and aggravatingly unpredictable one-button gameplay does a great disservice relative to what a game like this could magnificently be—and I'd be very interested in trying that, if it were ever to be realized.

Absolutely incredible arena wave shooter the more I got into it.

I would say the biggest detractor is how small projectiles are. I wish they were even just 1 pixel wider, although I understand that you were probably going for a highly specific strike zone.

I wish the relics could be moused over for descriptions in the pause menu.

I wish shields changed color depending on how many impacts they had taken. This wasn't clear, nor was it clear that recharging your shield as the police cruiser when you already have a shield up doesn't "supercharge" it or anything like that, so it's effectively wasted. I sorta wish it wouldn't let you reactivate the shield if you already have a fully charged one going, just to prevent player-vs.-UI mistakes.

Man, wave 14+ is suuuper-interesting, but that's where I picked up the relic Backshot that says "Fires behind you" but as the police cruiser, it ended up instead firing 3 shots still in front of me, but at a slower pace that expired closer to my ship than my default buckshot. Is the description misworded, or is it not supposed to do that?

I understand that the long time before waves is to allow the ability to cooldown to run its course, but it's kind of awkward. Why not just have the cooldown insta-reset instead and just summon the next wave, or at least make it somewhat faster?

Man, the boss at wave 21 is extremely unfair against the police cruiser because all of its shots are shield-piercing. What gives? There's no warning of such a massive debuff like that. Is this a bug?

Anyway, clearly I love it and want it to be even better. Great work!

The game appears to occasionally glitch, allowing the client to take 3 turns in a row. Great, smooth implementation, though, otherwise. I would also say it would be nice if the Local - Host - Join options were clearer in a drop-down list to immediately find "Join" because "Host" is otherwise visually in the way which makes it a bit odd to find.

The instructions also don't say that a triangle can hit two enemy targets in a row, nor do they say that it can shoot over an allied piece. Lastly, the turning mechanism is also problematic for users on a laptop with a touchpad who don't have access to a scroll wheel.

Interesting. I think there is a lot of potential to this concept, like a whole campaign with supply runs, convoy escorts, heists, and more. I think graphically speaking it would look better if you were controlling individual, rotating turrets on a ship that is otherwise facing the same direction.

More variance than the kamikaze butterfly enemies would be very helpful, too.

If you want more player involvement and longevity to the game, I would definitely recommend some sort of upgrade-able shield system instead of 1 HP/sudden death for the player. Upgrading turret rotation speed, etc.

The game could use way better music which I may be willing to write!

How do we download this game? I'd love to be able to play it offline! This would be an excellent Android game, by the way!!

I have no idea of how to play. I just put the flag around a few times because I couldn't seem to build anything else until I finally managed to accidentally lay down a couple of Barracks, and by then I was at $0 and could do nothing. Shouldn't that sort of scenario be prevented from happening? Could you add a tutorial?

Does this game have a level editor in the works? That'd be awesome and is the absolute best way to sustain long-term interest in a title such as this!

Why is the Windows build so massive in file size relative to the Mac and Linux builds?

Dang, the browser version crashed on week 8!

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Great roguelite concept, but the enemies become just so immensely strong by waves 6-7 that I just don't see how anyone could possibly keep up. A video tutorial of someone beating any level would be great. It would also be nice to see a fancier, serif font.

Other than these matters, I'd say the biggest remaining problem is that once you buy a tower into your bottom bar, you can't reread what it does before deploying it (my memory sucks!) So instead of clicking to read, I would suggest popup boxes to appear on mouse-over, to much more quickly access info as needed.

I think some ways to build a lasting community around this game would be to add a map editor, or even a seed-based random maze generator!

For some reason, index.html doesn't do anything...

I envision a sequel with horizontally scrolling, marathon-size levels whose result plays an entire actual piece of electronic music. I would LOVE this.

Please release a 2D version of this for Android!!

Totally forgot to upload this earlier, which was done before the more recent updates:

Interesting design! It would be awesome if there was a longer campaign with a far wider variety of shipments whose successful delivery determines which turrets and upgrades you can use for future deliveries. Great, smooth programming!

This giveaway is set as download-only, though. There is no way to claim it.

No way, do not feed EA any more money than they already have!

What I disliked about it is that there is no ending. Objects simply repeat. I thought there'd be an ending.

Any chance of a web or Android version?