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This was very confusing until I figured out that left and right don't make you turn, they make you sidestep. You always face "forward"/North.

I've always wondered about this concept. It's cool to see it work!

Pretty cool, I like it! Nice idea with the gravity. That makes it more interesting and also brings the ball back to you faster. And somehow it seems easier to control than a lot of brick-breakers.

I second this. I assume there won't be updates for this game, but it's something to remember for future games. It's a simple accessibility feature. There should be an option in the menu for it, and/or auto-detect keyboard vs. controller based on buttons pressed. There should be 3 possible settings actually: Keyboard, Xbox, or Playstation.

Not everyone grew up with consoles. Plenty of people don't own a controller! Plenty more people choose to use the keyboard instead of a controller because they're more comfortable with it. For you a controller may be more enjoyable. For me it's the exact opposite. It's unwieldy and frustrating.

Thanks! Glad it's useful.

Haha, well it would be easier for sure, but then it would be an entirely different genre of game.

If you like that sort of thing, there is also Chiptone: http://sfbgames.com/chiptone/ which is pretty much the same, but with a fancy interface.

You gotta work on that wish-list though. It's not even as long as the game itself!

Nice, small and simple. This fluid stuff is kinda fun. I did have an intermittent issue with it not loading a level. It would say "Loading" and then "Level 1" (or some other number), and then never load. At one point my browser complained that a script was running slow. Maybe there's some weird infinite loop happening or something. It's not every time though, a refresh usually fixed it. The only other thing about the game, is it's hard to tell which tiles you will remove. Sometimes I click and get a whole square, sometimes it's just half. It's kind of neat to have some time-limited levels in this sort of thing.

This is cool. Not bad at all! Some more "feedback" would be good, to show when you actually do things. That would make it much less confusing to pick up. Especially with the guys so small, it's pretty hard to tell if anything happened or not. I like how some of the different monsters do random little things on their own, like the upgraded spiders spawning more, etc. I like the idea of filling up a cave with "essence" and letting stuff grow out of that.

Cool, sounds good! You're welcome.

I forgot to say, I'm not sure if you use the same code for all knockback effects or not, but I think I saw that Ring Gust bug with another ability. I couldn't remember which units I was using that time though, so I could be wrong.

For the damage variance, could you just show the range? 7-9 damage, 12-14 damage, etc. Even if the chance isn't always even, at least then players would know the possibilities.

Yeah, it's a lot nicer now. I think reducing the wait time after abilities made a big difference. Sweet!

Now that I played it more, I have a few bug reports/feature requests:

 • First just a positive comment: Being able to undo movement is awesome! (and canceling abilities) Without it, I would be in big trouble. I found myself using it multiple times per turn to check out different options. Checking if a guy was in range from a certain spot, how much extra damage I got from high ground, etc. I never had to worry about moving a guy into the wrong position by mistake and losing a turn. (In Endless Legend, for example, it's way too easy to make that mistake!)

 • There's a bug with Ring Gust. I think it messes up if you use it when it wouldn't have any effect. You activate it, the UI slides away like it should be animating stuff, but then it never comes back and you have to force-close the game. You should be able to reproduce it. If you start a skirmish playing the Apprentice Trial Team and immediately use Ring Gust (before moving).

 • Sometimes damage numbers seem to be off by +1 or -1 between what the UI tells you and what it actually does. Maybe some rounding issue?

 • Some of the items could use a bit of extra "real" description. Flash and Salts specifically. They don't really tell you what they do.

 • It would be nice to have a subtle indication of the game grid on the floor. Sometimes it's hard to see how things line up for using the straight-line spells and other attacks. Also it would let you count tiles so you could stay out of enemy range, plan next turn's moves, etc.

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Aaaaand then some bigger feature requests. Nothing super difficult I don't think, and things that would increase the replayability a lot.

 • Some random variation in skirmish maps. Having some of the environmental features from the mission battles in skirmishes would make them a lot more interesting. Throw in a couple random obstacles and elevated tiles. Maybe vary the proportion and size of the map a little bit. Just a small variation each time could make a big difference.

 • Squad Customization. The pre-made squads are good, and there's quite a few choices, but if you could hand-pick the units in your squad, that would add a lot of extra play hours messing around with different combinations of units. Also it would let you customize the difficulty—you could simply give the enemy an extra unit or two, or give yourself fewer. (or vice versa to make it easier.)

 • Modding Support. Not sure how you have your units set up, this could be easy or a fair bit of work. If you loaded in the specs for units from a JSON file or some other text format, then you could let people define their own custom units. Then all sorts of new units could be added to the game, through no effort on your part! Maybe some cool things you didn't think of. It seems like the abilities are all simple enough to be defined with a few parameters. Name, cool down, damage (<0 for heal), range, a 2d array for the hit pattern, number of knockback tiles. Forget about allowing custom unit models and textures, just let people hook up to existing ones by name. 

Anyway, that's my two cents. I know it's way easier to dream about game features than to actually make them, hahaha! I'm sure you have your own list.

Ah! OK, yes! Now that I compare the regular movement it is definitely faster in the new version. Haha. I was testing the grappling hook ability because it made the character move the furthest, so I thought it would be easier to tell. Cool, thanks for working on this! If you ever decide to make an options menu with an animation speed setting (or even just a config file), then I will be suuuuper happy. :) But don't let me hijack your priorities, hehe, it's your game.

They are hand-picked, see: https://itch.io/t/161841/how-do-you-get-to-the-front-page

For me your game shows up most of the time in the "On Sale" section of the front page, so at least that's something!

You really shouldn't expect to get a lot of traffic from Itch though, even if you do get on the front page. You gotta do your own marketing. Good luck!

Hum. Somehow I'm not seeing any difference? Is it possible I didn't get the new version somehow? The zip said v0.2.48. Is there any way to tell the version in-game?

Or maybe we were talking about the speed of something else?
This:

. . . takes the same amount of time in both versions I have. (I recorded both to check. The gif is running a bit fast for some reason.)

[Edit] OK, it has the new Muskrat and Muskrat raider portraits, so it must be the new version.

Nice little game! I just tried a quick skirmish. I could think of tons of features to request, but I think the main thing stopping me from playing this much more is the speed. I wish I could hold tab to run the game at 6x speed or be able to configure the animation speeds somehow. It just gets a bit tedious to wait for the guys to slide around. 

The UI/UX is barebones but I think it's already pretty decent. I didn't do the tutorial or anything but I didn't have any trouble playing, and I like how you can cancel and undo things.

Back when I was messing with Skyrim mods, Nexus Mods was the place to go and the Steam Workshop was for suckers (remember that paid mods fiasco, where the mod creators only got 25%?). It looks like the Nexus lets you add any new game you want. It would be cool to see Caves of Qud mods on there.

I'm wondering which store I should buy this from . . .

1. If I buy on Itch does that include a steam key?
2. If I buy on steam is that version DRM free, or is it linked to steam stuff?
3. Does the Itch version auto-update with the Itch app?

I'd rather have a DRM free version without any Steam baggage (and support Itch and you more), buuuut . . . I don't want to miss out on mods, which seem to be mostly steam-only.

Thanks!

Nice! I like it. My only gripe is it doesn't let you use the arrow keys.

Great little game! Somehow I think I had more fun with this than with Endless Legend (fewer hours though :D ).

Ah yeah, I have a 1600x900 monitor. I re-downloaded it and it seems to be the same. It starts up and stays at 1024x1024. I'm on windows 7 with just the integrated HD 4000 graphics chip.

I was curious to try this out, but when I start it up I just get a black window that's taller than my screen, and music. At one point a white square appeared. I'm wondering if I don't meet some system graphics requirement?

Kinda cool, but man it's so slooooow! The movement speed isn't bad, but the mouse sensitivity is really low (better in browser than on win), all the attacks take forever, and there seems to be a delay between actions (though that might just be the ease-out at the end of the animations).

Yeah, I guess I must have pressed the clear save button by mistake, though that's hard to believe. I swear I shut it down normally (pressing escape) then started it up later and the progress was gone. But I've been fiddling around trying to reproduce it and it's been working fine. False alarm I guess, sorry!

It's a great little game. I'll admit I wasn't too impressed at first, but the levels get better and better, and repeating them to go for a high score is a lot of fun. And of course the sounds are awesome, and the "game feel" stuff is spot on. Blowing away hordes of those boomerang things is so satisfying.

Hey. I just got Brute, and it's awesome, but it's losing my progress. Sometimes I can close down the game, restart it, and there's no problem, but twice now when I've started it up again after a while, I'm back to square 1 (literally).

Nice little game. I really like the design idea. It's like an old-school platformer where you can't go back mixed with a scrolling shoot 'em up. I like the little mushroom guys too.

A couple bugs:

1. What's with being able to walk off the screen? There's a bunch of places where you can walk out the side of the level, and I guess you can always walk down out of the screen.
2. I also hit a bug with the boss. I died fighting him, then on the second try it gave me the "Congrats you win!" screen when I was only part way through the fight (where the round shooter guys start spawning).

Thanks, glad you like it!