Dude, did you even playtest this?
Do you seriously expect me to sit here manually drawing 100+ pentagrams?
not that I suggest wasting time on this.... but....
you can churn through the bosses by grinding gear - if get the item drop & rarity rate up, fill up on items with good boosts (learn which boosts are good and which are crap, some start bad and get good later, or vice versa),
manually set a higher level to grind higher and higher, if the drop rate is tuned you can double your target level in a very short time, and just keep doing it
you get there by grinding gear
it's a slog
Damn, that last battle was seriously sweaty. Those big nasties that grow stronger whenever you do anything almost got me. Then I got lucky with a frogger from the portal, took one of the bastards out, and then managed to grind my way into turning the tide. Won with 1 hp left, and no more cards to draw.
Improvement suggestions:
1. If the text log was less verbose (ie fit on a single line) it would be easier to follow what happens. 2. Totally-not-an-ambull threw a dude so hard his hit-box broke. Couldn't click him to make him move. Buggy indeed. 3. At times I felt like the arena was too large. But then again, with that final battle being such a nail biter, maybe you have it just right.
Well done dev!
I feel like it has a lot of potential. But it needs a lot more polish. The UI is not good, and fights you all the time. The progress is not very elegant. The combination of the tight map, how unlocks invalidate previous set-ups, and the UI being against you constantly, it's rather punishing.
Devs should playtest for themselves a few times before publishing.
As is par for the course with vibe coded projects you get a thick layer of features, but minimal substance, and a generous smattering of bizarre issues.
Just to mention two:
How do you get into furniture?
How do you get lvl 4 pickaxe, when you need a level 4 pickaxe to mine the alloy you need to make a level 4 pickaxe.
It is still kind of fun, even though the bugs are somewhat baffling.
Being able to speed up the game is good. But it does interact with targeting in some way.
Smart targeting is a good idea. Though there is def something fishy about how it works with many weapons and fast targets.
It might take more than a three weapons to trigger the bug.
I don't know if "conquering" places in the world map does anything, but being able to filter or sort by difficulty would be useful.
Maybe the ability to set up a queue.
When upgrading the type of a weapon, it doesn't lock out the other options. You could switch back and forth, but that would of course be worse than useless, as it eats the "upgrade".
Vibe-coded bugs galore.
Game speed has a large impact on survivability.
With upgraded launchers in play, lasers and guns barely even fire at all.
Not sure if target selection actually works. Hard to tell.
Fast enemies seem to be the only real threat. And that's because your guns don't seem to target them fast enough to even fire at them.
* Each time you die, look at the board, see if you spot a hint or pattern. There are plenty.
* You can count the time until you need a heart scroll by comparing xp row to heart row.
* Save the scrolls as long as possible. A late game scroll is worth a lot more than an early game scroll.
* Bashing walls is an absolute last resort
* Look at squares, do simple math, check the book to see what monsters are still around.