ahhh, that tracks! g happy to hear you kept with it!
shitfist the unflinching
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A member registered Aug 13, 2018
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This review will be harsh. I leave this warning here because while I don't mean it in any sort of mean spirit, I feel you may be able to wring this into something excellent if reworked. Still, some do not cotton to in-depth criticism, so if that may hurt you, I suggest you not read my words. This is meant in earnest.
to be frank, this feels underbaked. The moral lesson being taught is both fortune-cookie level wisdom, and the struggle to get there isn't so much that it even clicks.
Further, the scenario puts the child in the right to call Maddi a fraud. BECAUSE the lesson is so low-value, it comes off as a cheap excuse, and perhaps malicious in nature. For all I know, I just foolishly helped a god undo the arcane trappings of some curse laid upon her, freeing all manner of awfulness.
To solve this, you could tie the lore into the cards themselves, have each pathway brimming with stories to complete. This could also tie into gameplay in some way, making the theme of goal-building more interesting. To illustrate, say you have a story of someone forming a bakery.
One path tile details their dream, their efforts to learn to cook, the next their efforts to build funding, to get approval for their business, the pitfalls they fall into (fires, food spoilage, etc) for the negative tiles... building on the theme and making the lesson more clear, perhaps even tying into the gameplay management by encouraging players to MAKE these stories.
As for the gameplay, it really feels like it's lacking features. The music quickly gets grating, the entire loop is just about playing a slightly less interesting version of Pipe Dream, and there's a shocking lack of real obstacles and hazards that I came across in my playthrough. why not have tiles that change the direction of other tiles, or move in sequence with your pathing, or are unstable and disappear after a while? To say nothing of enemies, of having to find alternate paths because an ogre blocked your thoroughfare to your next flower.
There's POTENTIAL in this concept, but as it stands it's not THERE yet. It lacks crucial fun-factor and has some elements that outright discourage playing more than one game, which feels at odds with the moral being taught.
nice game, I got all three endings in just three plays. Tied, Lost, and finally Won! Felt right to order it that way. I like that death never actually seems to cheat too, I wound up keeping tally of cards as I played to test that. Fascinating game, and I like that all of the endings feel like they could in fact be THE SAME ending if you read them a certain way. A darker prospect, but certainly intriguing.
Suggestion: two seperate hands, one for attack and one for movement, would benefit this system greatly.
I would also suggest adding "ghost motions" to bullet paths when planning your routing, as bullet paths are currently somewhat hard to understand right now.
To elaborate on that, I mean have a ghost of the action you're about to take loop in front of you, and if it intersects a bullet that will hit on that path, it plays an animation of your ghost dying.
This wouldn't reduce the difficulty much besides providing more feedback on planning, since the core difficulty here is more based around foresight and not getting yourself trapped in corners. Fights like the final boss are a fantastic showcase of this, since that fight is both chaotic enough to need such a feature and one of the better designed dodge-loops in the game.
Designing around pathing puzzles like that will be an excellent way to flesh this game out.
If you need design help or pixel art consider me enthused with the project, I'm more than willing to contribute.