itch.io

Thank you for playing!

I'm glad you enjoyed experimenting with the combat system and offhand equipment. Spinning is definitely a valid early strategy, but the weight of mid-late game armor and weapons impact stamina a bit and make continuous spinning less viable without specific skill builds.

I appreciate you taking the time to leave feedback, and I'd be interested to hear what you think next time you play too!

Thank you for taking the time to play and write such detailed feedback!

I'm glad you noticed things like the input remapping, controller support, and mouse calibration. 

The town navigation, tutorial progression, shop flow, dialogue readability during combat, and ESC behavior are all things that could be improved. Well, the browser makes the escape key hard, but I can make it more obvious that middle mouse button is the default "menu" key so you can play the entire game mouse-only if you like.

The comments about combat are helpful. I'll add a separate keybind for sheathing/unsheathing the weapon from abilities.

The next update should have nicer looking terrain and updated sound/music.

Thanks for the heads up on the speech bubbles.  I can make the contrast a bit better, all you missed was that the trainer and beast master give tips and strategies based on current equipment and pet.

The VFX setting mainly effects max number of decals light footsteps and blood (I'll have to separate these, I agree that blood is higher priority lol), max number of flavor physics objects like limbs and fragments, particle lifetime and number, shadows on/off, lights on/off.  Also it scales the intensity of the prediction/smoothing function when connected as a client.

Nice relaxing game!

I had a similar UI bug where the cafe was smaller in the top left and the menu items were on the bottom right.

Suggestions:

Make the Upgrade and Cafes button functional, at least to a level where it tells you the feature is not implemented so you know it's not a bug.

The customers should leave after some time.

The customers should increase the cat's comfort when interacting with them, unless it's a kid or something where it makes the cat need you to increase their comfort after interacting.

Customers should be able to adopt the cats from the cafe.  Maybe a bonus to adopt chance on receiving a cat interaction.

Periodically refresh cats available to bring in to the cafe. 

Great work, I had fun!

Thank you for the feedback!

I'm glad you enjoyed it overall, especially the arena fights and discovering everything that's packed into the game.

The combat definitely has a learning curve, and you're not alone in mentioning that the sword can feel difficult to control at first. I'll keep working on improving the onboarding and controls so players can get to the satisfying part more quickly.

If you happened to try any of the other weapons, do you think one of them would make a better starter weapon than the sword?

I appreciate you giving it a try and sharing your thoughts!

Thank you for taking the time to write such a thorough report!

The Training Hall showing up with a Stage 0 message and getting stuck in that state through multiple match starts sounds super annoying, I'm going to try to recreate that!

You mentioned thinking about adjusting mouse sensitivity.  Did you happen to do the auto-calibrate that pops up on first launch?  If it was still hard to swing after that, I'll take another look at the baseline target for mouse sensitivity (the calibration is because OS, hardware, and browser all seem to require a different setting).

Thanks again for taking the time to play and document everything so carefully.  It's a huge help for improving the game!

That start surprised me, straight in with no frills! Since the itch game page is gone when I click play, it would be good to show the controls again somewhere, but it was intuitive enough.

I had fun playing! These are my notes:

I didn't notice the shake effects. 

The sounds on destroying an enemy seemed unusually loud.

Enemy projectiles despawn when they are destroyed.

Based on the setup, I was expecting to be able to exit the screen and pop out on the other side like asteroids.  Also, I was expecting some inertia instead of stopping immediately.

My suggestions:

Pickups or something to change the player weapon, similar to geometry wars.

More noticeable difficulty ramp up and prominent score display.

Great work on this, combat felt satisfying!

Thank you for taking the time to play it and write such detailed feedback!

It's especially helpful hearing from someone who hasn't played games with this style of combat before. I was glad to hear the momentum-based combat ended up feeling intuitive despite the learning curve, that's something I've been hoping for.

The slideshow performance during the bandit encounter is definitely something I'll investigate. Thanks for mentioning your setup and when it happened, that will help reproduce it.

The tutorial feedback is also really useful. The tips replacing each other too quickly wasn't intentional, I'll space out the scrolls on the pillars that display those tips when you get close. I'll probably need to take a fully new approach onboarding, to clarify the spare mechanic and other aspects I'd like players to understand without needing to guess.

Making hits and their effects easier to read is something I'll keep iterating on, good to know the body part hit is not that important.

Thanks again for the feedback and for following the project!

I enjoyed the combat!

I found myself skipping through the story, and not doing anything at each town besides rest at the inn (unclear if that did anything).  I enabled inventory management, which started getting tedious.

I think the endless or rouguelike setup would be a fun way to experiment with more challenging encounters.

Nice work!

Self destruct feels a bit overpowered for the enemies, like a 1 hit KO.

I gave the yellow tank all the big damage cards and distributed healing and energy buffs to the other two, and the blue one got sniper shot.

I didn't really use the 5 energy cards or the damage-dealing 0/1 energy cards.  Never used the aiming buff cards, and didn't think the flower pattern attacks were that useful.

I did notice lag spikes sometimes on hitting an enemy with cards like the Blast Gun, and the raining heal card won't reach your ships that are below another one, which seemed odd in space but may be intentional.

I played Windows 11 Firefox and it worked great!

Good difficulty balance for a first mission, I thought movement felt like piloting a mech, with some snappy QOL aiming.  I would prefer limited mobility instead of completely stopping when completing a jump.  Combat felt great, man those chainguns are satisfying!

Only bug I noticed is that one of the mechs was shooting flak through the hill at me from the other side.

Thanks for letting me try it out!

I wasn't able to get past the tutorial after several tries, so take this as first-time player feedback rather than feedback on the full game.

My biggest issue was understanding what I was supposed to be thinking about. It felt like the tutorial assumed I already knew several of the game's core concepts. For example, I could see things like enemy cards, threat areas, regeneration, and different ground patterns around units, but I never really understood what those mechanics meant or how they should influence my decisions.

The tutorial encounter also felt more like a difficult puzzle or boss fight than an introduction. My character seemed to have very limited options while the enemy had many actions each turn, so I wasn't sure whether I was making mistakes or simply missing an intended mechanic. I think a simpler first encounter that teaches one concept at a time would have helped me build a mental model before combining everything together.

Presentation-wise, I also struggled a bit. The zoomed-in, low-resolution art made it difficult for me to quickly read the battlefield, and without sound or music the game felt harder to stay engaged with during repeated attempts.

That said, I do think there's an interesting idea underneath it. My impression was that you're aiming for something closer to a tactical board game or chess variant where positioning and predicting enemy movement matters much more than raw stats. If that's the intention, I think the tutorial should spend more time teaching players how to "read the board" before expecting them to solve difficult encounters.

Hopefully that's helpful, and good luck with development!

Great work, top marks for this!

Yes it is fun and the story, while catchy, should have the cutscenes be skippable to add replay value.

I played all available levels, and would have played more if it was available.

Some visual glitches with rewinding time and warping to the next stage:

Thank you for taking the time to come back on a second machine and play several hours, that's very helpful!

I like the gameplay suggestions for abilities interacting directly with weapon physics and smarter AI reacting to different fighting styles.

Thanks as well for the detailed bug list, I'll work through reproducing and fixing them.

The PVP mode is "versus" in the arena, where if there are no other players available you just start fighting a "ghost" team of some other player's party being controlled by ai (instead of queuing).  This party is removed when the first human opponent drops in, and the mode supports 4 player controlled party FFA.  I'll look at how Dark Souls did PVP to compare.

Thanks again for putting so much time into testing!

Nice job, this feels very fleshed out!

I had a Warrior, eventually bought all the tier 1 gear and got halfway towards level 2.  The only dungeon I was able to fight in was the left one, and couldn't take on the bat enemy successfully yet.  Best I could do was 2-3 slimes or 2 rats.

My feedback is to make it more visually obvious which character is attacking for those who don't read the battle log.  

Also, the king's speech bubble about jobs, quests and dungeons has those words highlighted in a way that I expected a tooltip when I hovered over them.

The effects landing on the target are good, the information on the screen is clear, and it performs well!

It's still a good suggestion because it shows I didn't communicate that to new players!

Thanks for pointing out the text brightness, I'll tweak the contrast with the background.

Thanks again for the feedback!

Thank you for you detailed feedback!  I'll take another look at the tutorial skipping already-accomplished steps, I thought it was working but I didn't try every combination yet.

Good point on the delivery quest.  No quest can fail by waiting too long to turn it in after accomplishing the required task, I should hide the time left at that step for all quests, and have the deliver cargo option just give you the reward without needing to turn it in.

All POIs flash on initial load, I'll just need to turn that off if it's distracting.  They also flash on mouse-hover.  The towns are POIs for Town-defense and delivery quests, but I haven't added anything to do there if you don't have a quest for that location.

Good idea on the "how far away is this."  I use that info to calculate the quest rewards so it can be inferred to a point, but revealing it directly would be helpful.

Thanks for letting me know about the party menu being annoying, I'll try to refine that!

Sorry about the lag, it should auto-scale the graphics down if framerate is hitting like 30fps, but I haven't seen lag at the lowest graphics setting before.  I might be able to find something else to optimize- are you able to provide information on your computer specs/OS/browser?

I really like the countdown mechanic for retreating from battle!  The popup is mainly a holdover from leaving a town location.  That crash-zoom/lag spike was supposed to happen while the loading screen was blocking your view of all the particles initializing! Thanks for letting me know that's not happening, I'll need to figure out how to recreate that. 

I wasn't trying to make it silly or a parody, is it the programmer art that makes it that way or something else?

Thanks again for the really detailed feedback, it's extremely helpful!

Thank you for the feedback!

That sounds frustrating, which text was difficult to read (menu, tooltips, callouts over characters heads, HUD popups)? 

The mouse movement combat is inspired by Hammerfight, where you transfer momentum from movement into your weapon for melee strikes.  So if you don't like that game, this one isn't going to be fun to play either.  But if you did, I'd love to hear how to improve the controls to get closer to that level!

This is really wonderful art!  I see you've provided a great number of road variations, does this work for each possible number/direction of roads connecting to the hex's neighbors?  

I've got a project that produces roads dynamically depending on where certain POIs are at map generation, and I think your asset packs would really elevate the presentation.

This was so much fun!

The only thing I desperately wanted was to know how many ships I sank, must have been at least 30.

The core is really fun, I think this could be fleshed out to be a full product.

Things in the end-result I would appreciate include a soundtrack, objective progress, and managing number of torpedoes versus fuel (could be used passively to avoid close-in vessels).

Great work!

I mean the first round I was safe, and then the second round I lost and started over.  I just replayed and realized I should have been clicking the gun when the thing lights up, for some reason I was clicking the thing that was lighting up.  That changed it, I didn't realize if you didn't click it you're dead, I thought it was random since I lived through the first round without clicking it.

I just won, hurrah for beating inflation by .2%!

This was really cool, felt a bit like playing Luftrausers!

Maybe it was because it was endless space in all directions, but I didn't notice much of a difference in the non-health upgrades.

I had fun, great work!

Really cool concept!

I think I need a hint to get through the second round, it came to me like 14 times in a row before I posted this, is it scripted to do that?

Ooh I see! That's a cool spin(oops) on the pass/fail nature of these kind of minigames, but an oaf like me will never realize it unless there is an obvious hint.

I was going to say it's pretty steep, but I went back to check your itch page and found this gem: 

I really enjoyed trying to talk to coworkers and the art style!

I couldn't keep at the minigames after day 2, sadly.  For me peronally, filling up the green portion of the wheel was not very engaging.

I recommend leaning into the coworkers and their stories, that part was very interesting!

Nice job on the music, definitely made this more engaging!

Top score for seriousness with that opening!

The artwork here is just incredible!

Good work on the funny story, fitting music, and theme incorporation!

This mechanic was pretty cool!

It was a bit frustrating when my block was green or some color where I couldn't play any cards from my hand, but I managed to beat the first 2 opponents, and lost to the hard one, barely.

I recommend adding some more audio/visual cues, but the core seems to be very playable!

Very creative application of the theme!

I didn't notice I had health until the first time I died, definitely adds to the challenge.

It was a little unclear how to unlock the doors, so I was just jumping at the locks and clicking on them, sometimes it worked.

Very tight controls, cohesive aesthetic, exciting gameplay, and catchy music!

Gosh this was difficult, I recommend easing the player in just a little bit!

Very satisfying visuals and sounds for the contact the bayblades make, great work!

Very satisfying homage to hotline miami!

It was tricky for me to aim rather than just flying around spinning constantly, but it helped once I started getting the hang of it it got easier.  I did end up running out of ammo at one point and was doomed.

Really cool aesthetic, music, story, sfx the whole package worked really well together!

Good work, this felt quite polished!

I would recommend having reload start automatically at 0 ammo remaining.

The level of challenge was nicely tuned, the music and sounds were satisfying, and the art was super readable, nice job!

Nice work, I thought the mechanic was creative!

The game was pretty hard for me to survive longer than a couple minutes, but I think adding some upgrades or something to give the player advantages would help with that.

The music was very catchy, and the art and sound were nice and satisfying, great job!

The ai drivers are so good I never caught up after like 7 or 8 laps!

The driving felt good, but I just kept hitting a wall here or there.

Nice entry!