No updates are planned as the game is pretty complete.

As you do more runs, you will find that the game is hard, but not impossible :-)

Yeah I understand, sorry :-(

Hello and thanks for the kind words 🙏

Unfortunately it is impossible to change the keybindings :-(

Thanks for your reminder.. Because it was easy, I changed my itch username to smelc3...

Yes, but unfortunately I learnt it long after having chosen my itch handle :-)

Yes indeed the Next button is unplugged for now. I am adding the next levels these days. Here is one: 



And another one fresh from my tile fondry:

Ah permanently telepathic... Here's a hint: you need to drink many potions to obtain this achievement 🙂

Where did you find the psychic achievement? There is no pyschic achievement in the Achievement screen.

If I remember correctly, the scores are stored on the GameJolt version: https://gamejolt.com/games/dungeon-mercenary/151692 because GameJolt provides a persistent state API.

Or alternatively you can use the desktop version.

Thanks for the nice words 🙏

I'm not surprised there are bugs, because this is still a prototype. Before the first true release I will thoroughly test all interactions. If you have further details on how you did this, please give them to me; because - at first glance - I can't reproduce it.

Did you witness some bug, like you could play this card while you had no mana?

Thanks for the report.

I'm changing the text to All enemies lose 1 HP 👍

I pushed a new version (31cfb5f) that should fix usage of Plague. Can you confirm?

Regarding 1. what do you have when you hover on the Plague card like shown below. Is the green "target" rectangle showing the enemy's part? (like on my screenshot). Or is it showing your part (the one with blue backgrounds)?

That's a cool idea 👍

Hi Flowershirt, thanks for your kind comment 🙏 No update is planned for the moment.

The desktop version of the game features saving progress. At the time I wrote this game, I don't think itch was providing a way to store data for the browser version. I could have done it with browser-storage but it's a bit cumbersome for technical reason; that's why I didn't do it.

Thanks for the report.

Yes I have such cards in the back of my mind. It's a bit more complex to implement because it makes the stats of a card depends on other cards, which is doable, but a bit more complex than Discipline. That is why I started with Discipline. As the decks grow, the kind of card that you describe will likely be introduced 👍

2. Got it 👍 Can you tell me: the operation system you are using? as well as the browser you use (Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome, etc.)?

3. I see. I had planned to add "move" cards to move units around to mitigate this, but.. hum I don't know. Either I need to make these new cards clickable (so that you can choose in which direction the affected unit will move), or I need a lot of these cards (each one moving a unit in a specific direction). None of these two options for these tentative new cards is appealing.

What you suggest avoids the need for these "move" cards which is nice. I will think about the different options and come up with a change. Thanks for the suggestion 🙏

Hey Ulgrash, thanks for the report, very much appreciated 🙏

1. Indeed, that's a bug I will fix

2. I dont' understand. When there are many cards, the rightmost is the only one that is entirely visible. Did you mean the leftmost card? In any case, this should be mitigated by the card under the cursor to be shown in its entirety. See example: https://imgur.com/zPku7Oz.

3. Yes this is intended, although this is not explained yet (I want to add a "Fill the frontline!" fading text when this happens). This is to make Ranged cards less strong. This forces the player to protect these creatures by putting other creatures in the frontline (top row). If you don't, the Ranged creatures will move from the backline (bottom row) to the frontline when  your turn begins (avoiding them to "camp"). What do you think of this mechanic?

Hi Xevion888x, thanks for your nice feedback ❤️ No update is planned for the moment, I feel this version is pretty mature.

Thanks for your kind feedback 🙏 Indeed the chaos fairy is one of the most annoying monster, but the game makes sure you have something to defeat them easily :-)

Thanks for the report 💯 I basically agree with everything you say.

1. Yes I have considered this, and you are likely right. Most card games have a mana system, and there's a good reason for it. I'm considering adding it. Currently I'm automatizing checking that the game is balanced. Once I have this, I can go on complexifying the game, being sure my automated tests will tell me if I break the balance.
   
   Regarding used cards, I like having them going to the "Discarded" stack and then going to the "Stack" stack (the one from which cards are drawn), as in Slay the Spire. This may not have been obvious because the decks are small for the moment.
2. Yup I could do that, it's just that I didn't do it yet :-)
3. If you hover on the skills (like Discipline, Long Reach, etc.) it should show the description in an hover. Sometimes you need to click on the game's background for it to work (a focus issue likely).
4. At the moment you draw the same amount of cards every game, 3 IIRC. It seems right, I don't want too low (because cards die quickly) and not too much (so that the hand stays understandable) either.

Hey ulgrash, I uploaded a new build. Let me know how it goes! Items are not yet completely finished, a creature's items will get discarded when the creature dies. This is not the final behavior: ultimately creatures will keep items they received. Hope you like this WIP version! ❤️

Thanks for your feedback 🙏, I'll upload a new build next week (I'm implementing items right now and it's a bit of a mess, I need some days to have a publishable build) which will fix most of your observations (the current build is 2 months old 🤦‍♀️)

1. bug fixed in next build
2. maybe fixed in next build? will check it out
3. yes indeed it wasn't implemented at the time of the current build. Note that you can use it on damaged creatures and intact ones.
4. yes agreed, fixed in next build. I will also add a custom widget with documentation at some points.
5. yeah interactions (clicking on buttons) are a bit brittle if you click at unexpected times. I know I need to fix that. For the moment, don't click too much when it's the opponent's turn!

6. no the game doesn't save, it's a bit tricky to do for html games. Don't click that refresh button :-)

7. a match will end when a number of turns is reached, circa 7 I envision. But this is not done yet, the game rolls on forever.

8. "stack" is the list of cards from which your hand is refilled at the beginning of your turn. When the stack is empty, it is refilled with the "discarded" heap. The "discarded" heap is filled when creatures die.

I'll let you know when the new build is up. I'm unsure if you're notified of new versions? Maybe you are if you follow the game?

Added a devlog to show what I've been up to 😎 https://hgames.itch.io/pixel-card-wars/devlog/225841/how-gamedev-proceeds-hand-d...

The point of the game is to maximize your score (which you augment when your cards attack and have no opponent in the corresponding column) much like in magic the gathering. There'll be deck building in the future, I'm working on it.

Yeah instructions are non-existant for the moment :-)

You should select "Single Player" then choose a team and click "Start". You arrive then in the "match" view. Then you should drag and drop cards from your hand (at the bottom) onto the blue spots. Once you're done, press "End Turn" for the game to resolve attacks and make the AI play (on the red spots)

When you hover on a card of your hand, it shows you where you can play it. When you hover on a card on the board, it shows which spots it attacks.

Feel free to comment here, I have updates ready but I'm not updating the itch version at every dev iteration yet.

Thanks for having written this. Balancing a roguelike game is indeed difficult. The point you raise about giving players the will to play is interesting. For roguelikes, however, there's no way around needing to play a lot of games to start appreciating it. It's a sophisticated pleasure :-)

Nice gameplay, simple but addictive :-)

Could you do that also: open a terminal (lookup on the internet how to do that on Windows) and type java -version and then copy paste me the result.

Thanks for the bug reports Numbers! Indeed all things look like bugs. Regarding bug 3 I suppose it has to do with the inventory's capacity. If the inventory is nearly full, runics created won't get added to it; without warning the player.. doh not very nice. Regarding bug 1, the fix should be easy.

Onto bug 4, I suppose it has to do with the version of java shipped with Dungeon Mercenary. Dungeon Mercenary's desktop version embeds a Java 8 virtual machine, but Java 8 is now circa 5 years old and your system may refuse running it. Can you tell me your operating system details? A very-likely-to-work solution would be to install Java 8 on your system and launch Dungeon Mercenary using the file named dm-18-04-30.jar in the downloads (which is flagged Linux but can actually work on all three OSes) by executing java -jar dm-18-04-30.jar in Windows' terminal.

You're experiencing the game's true balance here! The point of runics is that you should try to go as deep as possible without using them, so that you can use them on a powerful item that will make you reach the endgame. The point of this mechanic is that new players can burn their runics early on, so that they go a little bit further that they would do without runics. Experienced players, on the other hand, should try to keep the runics as deep as possible.

Regarding forges, there's a 1/8 chance to have a forge at a given level; except for the first level where there's always a forge. I believe it's the past it was 1/6.

Thank you blightor for leaving a comment! I bought the tiles to this artist: https://www.oryxdesignlab.com

That is why you can find a number of games with these tiles.

Rogue vs Evil is kind of Dungeon Mercenary with tiles :-) although I simplified some mechanics (I removed runes combination for example) which were too hard to describe with text.

Thank you for the nice words xyncht! It's always nice to hear from players!

Well there's a way to avoid getting killed, don't get adjacent to it :-) Upon generating a death mage, the game will have made sure you have the tooling to kill an enemy from a distance (such as a bomb). Of course you can use this tooling before and then you'll be in the doo-doo; but roguelikes in general are about experience. After a few run, you'll learn where the death mage (if any) spawns approximately. In your screenshot you indeed seemed well equipped to deal with it. Did you think of using your dash move to get away?
Anyway, thanks for your comment. I'll take it into account for a future release (if any).

Haha that's cool, I suppose I don't check whether teleportation's destination cell contains a monster. If yes, my code records the player's position to be the monsters' position, that's why you take control of the orc. It's actually pretty nice to see that this works, in a weird way, it means the code shares well the algorithms that are common to monsters and the player!

Thanks for the detailed comment Numbers! It's the kind of comment that would make me go back to my code editor and continue developing Dungeon Mercenary ^^

Doors... yeah doors are tricky, to mitigate the issue you can burn doors down using (if I recall correctly) all fire-based spells (dragon breath, firebolt). Regardings rats, they don't have super powers, it's weird you witness a difference between rats and other monsters.

Regarding the loot, the game is intentionally giving a bit more loot in the beginning, to be "more" noob-friendly. Later on the game makes sure you'll get sufficient loot (if the random generation is too scarce for a few levels, it'll get corrected deep down the dungeon).

Regarding the Force runic, what you're expecting is correct. The more powerful the Force runic, the longer the distance you can push things with, and damage is correlated with the distance; so you should observe that a more powerful Force runic should do more damage. If not there's a bug.

Regarding teleport, thanks for the report; I've never heard this bug before.

Regarding spells being a bit too powerful, that's true. It's really difficult to balance correctly a game like Dungeon Mercenary. Given that I did not do that many iterations, I'm quite happy with the balance. You can think of the spells builds being the "easy" mode while closed-combat builds being more difficult.

Once again, thank you very for your thorough analysis! That's comments like yours that keep small indie devs like me going.

Hey cool, you've battled and liked some of the most powerful monsters (and so the most untested ones!), that's nice to hear. I guess the popups are about achievements and maybe suggestions (likedrink your health potion, you're in danger). I suppose going to the main menu (escape) and going back (resume) would get rid of those.

I'll reply here also then :-) I'm happy you could play it, in the browser I guess ? I developed the game with Java 8 and a few players experienced difficulties with more recent versions (on desktop); just to let you - and others - know.

I'm happy you had a good experience, indeed I believe the game requires the player to test and try, to know what to do; and then the experience starts becoming appealing. Try the class conjuror of cheap tricks, it's the most fun one I believe :-)