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Wow! These are great! Nice job!

I’m glad you liked it! I’m planning to launch the next version on Steam, hopefully during the June NextFest. If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it!

Thanks for playing! And I'm glad you liked it! It's always fun to see the different team setups.

I'm definitely going to add more. The next update should be a pretty big one! If you have any suggestions, or anything you'd like to see more of/less of, please let me know!

Awesome! I'm glad you like it!

And about the bug you found: It actually required some big changes to fix, so I think I'm going to have to wait until the next big update to implement, since I'll need to make sure the fix didn't break anything else. Thanks again for bringing it up!

Thanks so much for the feedback! I admit I haven’t done a ton of testing with a game pad, especially with the analog stick. I’ll work on getting this patched!

I hope you’re enjoying the game so far!

Yeah, I think that's a good suggestion. I think simply upping the game speed would cause lag, at least for some people. Maybe I could create some upgrades that start you further along in the game. But the downside to this would be fewer apples collected and fewer turrets spawned, since you'd miss the beginning. I'll have to think of a way to compensate for that. If I really wanted to get crazy, I could even create different "levels" that you'd have to beat, but that might totally mess with the balancing.

Wow! Those are some great scores! I appreciate you always pushing this game to its limits. It really helps me figure out the balancing, and it gives me ideas on how to improve things.

I actually just set up a discord, per your recommendation, here: https://discord.gg/Y5VGmHZNCm

Would you be willing to help mod the channel? I know very little about discord, and you probably know more about this game than anyone else at this point (besides me... probably).

haha that makes more sense now… Well you got to really speed run it

Haha yeah, and rock game just spams bombs. Apple game doesn’t do great early on, but someone just pointed out to me that I’ve had a test version of the game live for the past 5 hours… You aren’t supposed to start with 10M everything, so if that’s what happened to you, you got to skip most of that early game haha

haha I'm glad it worked! And thanks so much for bringing it to my attention. If anyone else is reading this, just download the latest version and it should take away those resources (or if you want to start the game like 75% of the way through, I guess keep them!)

Oh man, I'm so  sorry. I was bug fixing an earlier problem and set the starting resources to 10M to test something in the game. I've just uploaded a different file. So sorry for the mix up

lol yeah the auto buying is pretty nuts. And yeah, the counter doesn’t mean much for it, since you can do it infinite times and it’s free. I’ll have to change the code so it doesn’t show the counter for the auto buy and refund upgrades.

Yeah, I set up the auto battling for people that might find the battling tedious. With auto battles, you can over level your party and then just let them blast through the easier fights. That way the exploration is a little less daunting.

I actually have been thinking about how to implement an endless sort of battling, or maybe tougher battles that aren’t tied to revealing the map. They could offer different rewards, or just more talent points. Maybe for next update!

This is great! 10x longer is quite a lot. I’ll have to think about how to speed things up a bit. I wonder if part of the reason is because you’re probably so good at the mining and fish games now. Progress in the apple game is really tied to the upgrades you have, vs the fish game where you can be really skilled (or lucky) and get really deep without a ton of upgrades.

oh wow I never thought about testing auto battles after beating the game. I’ll have to disable it once there’s no more darkness. Thanks again for all the testing you’ve done! It’s really a big help

Awesome! Thanks for the feedback! Yeah apple game is definitely the slowest early on, but hopefully there’s a bit more variety to keep things interesting. By end game, you can get some pretty high scores. Let me know how those last few upgrades go!

You were exactly right about the fish game issue! Basically overlapping red-fish powerups would get messed up. I created a new version a few minutes ago that should fix this. It also won't affect save files or anything. 

Thanks again!

Ok thanks for the heads up! I feel like I saw the same thing with the red to blue to gold power up and I couldn’t figure out what was going on, so I thought I imagined it. I’ll double check the code to see if I can pinpoint it.

And for auto battles, it finds the lowest enemy power level and tries to beat it twice. If it loses twice, it tries the next lowest power level, etc, until 10 losses in a row (I know, none of this is explained, and should be!). I was recently tweaking power levels, so maybe I actually set the boss fight lower than some of the other battles around it, so it’s trying that first? And the wins/losses is only meant to show that particular auto-battle-session’s wins/losses, so it should reset every time you talk to the npc.

Awesome! Thanks for checking back

Hey again!! Thanks for giving this another go! And thanks for posting this! I believe this is the bug I found right after I posted the initial 3.2 file. If you download the latest version, it should be fixed (and because the file names are the same, your save files shouldn’t be affected).

And you’re right, I should get a Discord going. I’ll get on that!

Can’t wait to hear what you think about the new and improved apple game!

Haha those scores are insane! It seems like we came up with very similar strategies for the mining and fishing games, but you obviously executed those strategies much better.

Thanks so much for all this feedback. You don't know how awesome it is as a developer to have someone push your game its limits like this. I hope you'll give it another go in future updates when the game has changed!

dude these high scores are epic! I played for a bit today and gave each a shot a couple times after getting most of the upgrades and I didn't even come close! I had 21.6M for digging, 7.3M for fishing, and 838K for apples. I could maybe grind out a few of the infinitely-upgradable upgrades, but even then I still think I'd need some good RNG on my side to catch you!

Impressive!!

Thanks for these suggestions! They're really great. And sorry for the delayed response.

I know what you mean about the dash. I'm also thinking about making the dash multidirectional, including the dash waves. That should make hitting bad apples easier.

Yeah, not having the turrets destroy bad apples would be good. That should be easy enough. I might also try to find a way to stagger the turret shots so that they don't all shoot at once when a slime appears -- most shots get wasted that way.

I agree about the boss rewards. Maybe defeating them can multiply current apples by a certain amount. First boss is 1.25x, second boss 1.5x, etc. Then those rewards would still scale with current apple frequency upgrades.

I had come to a similar realization with the SSP in the digging game, so I feel like I was trying to avoid them late game because they'd make me drop down. Maybe I'll change them so they never destroy any dirt below you, and maybe I can make the upgrades cheaper to compensate for that change.

And that's interesting about the red fish! I hadn't thought about resetting that upgrade. I've been considering changing the whole red to gold upgrades, just because of how crazy it becomes. It's essentially the only way to get a really high score, so I might play around with some more powerups, or potentially making the game go EVEN DEEPER. If I do go deeper, I think I'll add upgrades that will act as checkpoints, so the hook can start at certain depths.

Thanks again for the feedback! It's definitely really helpful!

Nice! I recently erased my game save while testing, so I'll have to play through again and post mine!

Awesome! You're the second person to beat it!

I'm really excited to hear about the different strategies you used to beat the bosses. I want the battles (especially the boss battles) to feel more like puzzles, where you have to mix and match different characters together to win, and it sounds like you did that!

And you're the second person to mention the apple game being slower during late game. I think I might add a few more upgrades to make it easier, or potentially make some of the existing ones cheaper. A multiplier on remaining time is a great idea!

Would you be interested in seeing more mini games? Or do you think it would be better to keep the 3 games and add more upgrades?

Yes, the auto gathering needs some tweaking. I had originally set the refill speed about 5 times slower, but decided to speed it up for the demo so people didn't get bored. I'm going to balance it better in the next version.

Thanks again for playing! I saw that you streamed some of it, so I'm definitely going to check out the video!

Congrats on being the first to beat it! (At least that I know of). I’m really glad you enjoyed it all the way through, and I appreciate all the feedback!

I know what you mean about not getting to utilize all the characters by the end of the game. My hope is to expand on the battling to add more types of enemies, especially ones that will require different strategies (like tanky guys that have a lot of armor, so Bleedy and BuffBuff would be effective, etc).

And no, bad apple wasn’t an intentional reference, but that’s funny it made you think of that!

And I agree about the apple game becoming the slowest towards the end of the game. Since you accumulate apples linearly, it ends up being a “how long can you survive” type of game, which can be tedious. I still think there’s some room for more upgrades in the apple game. Maybe a multiplier based on how many enemies you kill without getting hit, or maybe enemies will drop temporary power ups, etc.

One of the big questions I have with the game is where to take the mini games. Would you rather have more upgrades with the three main games? Or maybe even completely different mini games with new resources?

And yes, Freeze is definitely very strong. I’ll have to find a way to balance it. I’ll probably have to do a little bit of an overhaul if I end up adding a bunch of new enemies/bosses, so I’ll keep that in mind as I create them.

That’s good to know about Buffbuff. I’ll have to increase the character’s base speed to make sure they’re viable.

And thanks for calling out the window issue. I haven’t had the same problem, but I’ll keep an eye out and see if other people experience it. I’m planning to work on game resolutions and make sure full screen will work in the future.

Thanks again for the incredible feedback! You don’t know how excited I was to hear that someone finally beat it, so I really appreciate you taking the time to write all of this! And I’ll keep you updated with any future versions!

Thanks so much for playing! I really enjoyed the video, and I'm glad you liked it!

If you end up playing more, please let me know! There's still a lot left to unlock ;)

thanks for trying it out!!