Gave up on floor 37.  Didn't seem to have an end.  Game is fun enough; the incentive to avoid combat and get treasure reminds me of old-school d&d.

Fun, and the card ideas are neat, but the balance is kinda a problem.  Stilettos kill every enemy in the game in one round without any problems if you have 10 of them.  I balanced card draw and mana to keep a short sword and scatter in the deck too just in case, but even the Black Knight just has health and no damage reduction or retaliation or anything.

You can go below 10 cards because food so you could even make an infinite combo of stilettos with just the ones you start with if you can get enough food to pad out the rest of your deck for one batttle.

Other than that, the biggest problems I ran into were:

1) no scrollbars.  I assume this was a time concern because Game Jam, but it was still annoying.  To edit your deck you have to add your collection to it except the cards you want to add, then remove your deck except any cards you want to get rid of, then memorize what card you are at, then move your collection back from the deck to the collection area, then move the top cards into your deck until you reach the cut-off point.  Also Archmages have so much stuff without scrollbars, you maybe can't see the last cards they have for sale.

2) no ending screen.  Again, probably a time constraint.  Annoying to beat the Black Knight and then just be stuck in a glitched state, though.

3) You can't buy the reaper scythe from the reaper shop.  Not sure why.

Seems like the stalactites *eventually* get more attack, but by that point you can have a huge amount of magical shields.  The theoretical limit seem to probably be poison mushrooms plus unlucky ranged enemy spawn.

4X4 should probably be renamed endless.  It's not really that difficult to survive basically indefinitely, it seems to me. You gotta balance ultimate usage for Springsea Water buffing between mana generation and weapon generation, but since one-hit-kills still lose you only 1 attack at higher difficulty levels and since Obsidius's retaliation is blockable and the dude with the ranged attack never gets more than 1 attack unless you let the enemies buff him via death it seems like you can continue on at least far further than my patience and the lack of a save function allow, if not indefinitely.

Yep, I'd give it a shot

The frequency of move forward blocks needs to be, like, doubled at least.  It's very easy not to die, but it's very very hard to move.  

Also it looks like there's a new update that lowered the difficulty.  Now the final room on hard might only have two ghosts.  Sanity is top left number, resolve is top right.  Progress is dots in center times 5.

Patience, mostly.  The basic strat for hard is as follows: Get 10 progress so books start spawning.  This isn't actually necessary for the run, but it saves boatloads of time and makes mistakes less costly.  Avoid gaining any more progress.  Find a room that has a good room layout to use as a base.  That means it has two exits very close together and no long hallways librarians can spawn in that have view of the exits.  You can actually do it with certain hallway-like rooms, but it is harder and more complicated.  Once you have found such a room, take one of those two exits.  If it goes to a hallway or you can't see any  books, leave and use the other exit from your base.  If not, flip back and forth until it is safe, then go check if the books are worth reading, never going far enough out that you aren't guaranteed to be able to get back to your exit if you see the lantern light from a librarian coming.  Get resolve up asap, but don't read sanity lowering books if you are below 80 sanity.  Don't go above ~35 progress until you've maxed your stats-- 100 sanity and 40 resolve.  Then you start grabbing all the progress books you see, which slows things down, until you have enough progress that the book spawns (sometimes I give in to laziness and make a break for progress via catalogues here, which is risky, but usually (i.e. almost always) works out fine because 100 sanity is a lot of L space movement).  You have to go for the catalogue in that room, which, unless you are incredibly lucky, means getting seen by Librarians and using L-space to evade them.  Librarians come over to where they saw you last for a bit after they've seen you but before you enter L-space if you break LoS.  Going one direction and then cutting across bookshelves at the last minute into another section of the Library usually works to clump most of the Librarians together, which gives you the space you need to read the catalogue.  Unlike normal books, there's no penalty to reading your target book in L-space (you're stealing it for a client, not reading it yourself), so do that if it's convenient or just read it normally, whatever.  Then get out of that room, either via your original entrance if you can in which case you win, or (this is much more common for me) out another entrance because getting back to the first one would cost way too much sanity and you are down to like 30-40.  Use more sanity in the next room in that case to get to another exit, and from there the rapidly lowering difficulty should resolve the problem for you pretty quickly.  Remember to go back and forth across screen transitions to refresh Librarian placement in rooms, and that if you find a screen with two exits close to each other, you can just walk back and forth for a while to end the game (well, you have to do one more room with a single Librarian that you can reroll as much as you like, but that hardly counts).

TL;DR: Get a room with two safe exits close together and use it as a base.  Also make sure your stats are maxed, and that you never walk into an intersection where you might have ghosts on two axes.

I win pretty much every time on hard.  I have totally lost due to luck, though, even though I usually die to accidentally pressing the wrong key or just not noticing something obvious most of the time.  I am sure it is possible to get to the book much more than 90% of the time.  If you get the glitch where the book is unreadable then, yeah, you are screwed.  But that has only happened to me once, I think.

Cool idea, hope to see it finished.

Water art magician says it does 5 damage on victory, but it actually only does 1.

all the text is black squares instead of text.

You are not guaranteed to have a route to an exit.  You can't go through walls, so you frequently just have no options but to wait til your torch runs out and die.

Game froze loading level six.  Otherwise pretty good.  Note that Demons have 2 hp, and that kill.exe works on servers and datahavens

Ran into a very unfortunate bug for the first time today.  On hard the book I was searching for was called "The First Month of Druid".  When I found it it required 46 resolve to read.  The max is 40.  I left the room and went elsewhere and then regained the lost progress from despawning the area to respawn the book but the new book also required the same 46 resolve to read.  Never happened before but also the title generator seems to have updated so maybe the update introduced this bug? Is the book name also the random seed?  

Error

gamestates/user_turn.lua:39: gamestates/user_turn.lua:206: attempt to index local 'card' (a nil value)

Traceback

[C]: in function 'assert'
gamestates/user_turn.lua:39: in function '_startTask'
gamestates/user_turn.lua:99: in function 'update'
main.lua:99: in function 'update'
[C]: in function 'xpcall'

Maybe related to trying to use chain energy while an attack animation was still finishing.

I realize this probably isn't updating anymore but just as a heads up leaving Lightman's lnk (the house where he wants you to shut down perimiter defences and the security camera watching people sleep) without doing what he wants bricks the game by putting you in a place where no nodes spawn and you can't enter commands for some reason.

At least one of the level maps has a softlock in the top right that you can never enter and which enemies never leave.  Note also that game is real-time, and that you fight enemies by button mashing into them.

On floor thirty two the amount of money I currently had on my person exceeded the amount of money I had spent in total.  After that, they never swapped back because I couldn't physically spend money fast enough to make a dent in the money I get per floor. I don't know how many floors there are here, but it is too many.  The boss should probably be on floor 20, not 100 or whatever it is on currently.

Maybe there isn't one.  It occurs to me the only reason I thought there was an end was the description.

Well, the game is very good as-is, but I look forward to any improvements :)

Oh, cool!  Thanks.  Yes, complete control would definitely be overpowered, but pushing enter so much was just silly.  Discarding as a turn is much more in line with what makes sense.  

Nice game!  I like the title generator. 

I think there should be some sort of score system for the books (it looks like maybe there is one already half in place?) so you can review your collection and their rarities after a successful escape.  Obviously the primary target is the most important, but picking up some other very rare books along the way shouldn't hurt ;)

I also think being able to choose your target from a list might be good.  I definitely suicided a lot in the first room just to refresh the titles for my main quest target.   I'm a magic thieving specialist; I pick my contracts, thank you very much! XD;

I didn't have any problem with the difficulty-- the game is a bit challenging on hard but not too bad.  I liked that most of the strategy comes from learning how L-space/The Library works, and that the best strategies require a bit of patience.  I think those both fit the theme well. 

For those struggling: 1) Once you've seen part of the Library you can always see what is there.  You've got, like, magic library vision.  This means that peeking around corners and then retreating will create large areas  you will be able to see Librarians approaching from. 2) Librarians reset position and course when you re-enter a room.  You can thus juggle a screen transition to get a spawn that works for you. 3) Librarians will never chase you outside of their room(i.e. through a screen transition).  This means that juggling screen transitions is relatively safe, and that if you are being chased you can move, effectively, one space further in a straight line if that space transitions you. 4) Helpful books (literally and otherwise) may well lie off the beaten path.  If your path from a catalog to its exit takes you past another exit it is probably worth checking for freebies on the side exit before continuing 5) When exiting the library, you can't use catalogs, but *every* transition you didn't just come from gives you the catalog bonus.   This means if you can juggle two screen transitions near each other in a room you will accrue progress extremely quickly and safely and easily be able to exit, even if your targeted book has drained practically all your resolve (it gives you a massive hit on hard).  6) Enlightening means +sanity.  Inspiring means +resolve.  Helpful means +progress. Maddening, Dull, and Confusing are the respective opposites.   

You need Sanity to not die.  Librarians murdering you sets it to zero, obviously, but you also lose 5 sanity for entering L-space by walking into a not-interactive bookshelf and another 1 sanity per move you make after the initial entry. You can also lose tons of sanity by reading a book while in a bookshelf-- don't do this. On hard, once you reach 4 Librarian rooms you will be burning through sanity like crazy even with very friendly spawns, so be sure to conserve it as much as you can and explore side rooms for enlightening books and refresh rooms for good spawns.  You need Resolve to read books.  You need to read books to maintain sanity, which you need to not die.  You also need to read your target book to win, and it can have a really big resolve minimum.  You do not *lose* resolve when reading books, it is just required to be at a certain threshold based on how difficult/rare the book it. You lose resolve every time you pass a turn without doing anything, which you can do with the spacebar.  If you do this in L-space, you lose resolve but *not* sanity.  Resolve numbers are always lower than sanity-- 20-30 is pretty good.  You'll want 40 which might be the max when you read your target on hard, though. Pacing back and forth, when it is safe to do so, can save you resolve when you want to wait.  Obviously waiting is vastly better than pacing when it comes to L-Space almost always-- Sanity is super important!-- but usually if you are in L-Space you are moving somewhere else anyways.  You gain 2 resolve every time you read a catalog, but you can't do that anymore once you have your primary target and are trying to escape.  Progress determines when the target book will spawn and when you can leave the library.  The library is magic so you can leave it from wherever-- you don't need to try to trek back to where you came in.  You make progress by reading helpful books and by taking the indicated exit after reading a catalog.  Note that you do NOT *have* to take the indicated exit-- the library is magic and there are plenty of other catalogues with other routes to the target book.  This is important because not every exit is worth trying to get to.  Some are just too far down a long hallway with nothing to hide behind.  Note also that you will *lose* your catalog progress if you double back through the entrance it indicated after using it.  You can just go back through to regain it, but essentially you have to take a new exit from the linked room to make real progress.  Progress seems also to determine how dangerous the Library is in terms of how high level the books around are and how many there are and how many librarians there are.  Once you get your target book progress resets to 0 and then every exit you take gives you progress as if you used a catalog.  This new progress makes the game get easier, rather than harder, though, and eventually the game will return to the initial levels of difficulty and lighting and you can win by leaving the Library.

Is there a way to cycle cards faster than just pressing enter a lot?  It seems like you should be allowed to freely reorder your cards, at least out of combat.  Currently the only obstacle to doing so is the tedium of it. 

The unique deckbuilder/rpg mechanic is cool, and the game in general is very good for a 7DRL.  In particular, the different abilities possessed by different units carrying over onto a swapped in unit allows (after the annoying card ordering out of combat part) some very effective combos that allow you to make short work of whole groups of enemies without taking damage (but you have to prep said combo before entering each room and usually there's nothing there and then you have to re-prep again for the next room or give up on having your combo).

Note that rats only attack you when *you* move next to them.  Therefore you only take damage should you choose to do so.

The sword stunlocks enemies, including cerberus, so death seems pretty unlikely even without any upgrades

Is fairly self-explanatory.  Not sure you need a tutorial. More different kinds of things would be nice, but it is fun as-is as a short puzzler.

You need borders around the edge of the map, or toroid (wrap-around in two dimensions) mapping.  Falling off the world is :(  Graphics are nice, though.

If you spawn 4 fruit on one tile the game crashes, I think.  On level 3 with a score of 502 I killed a slime on a spot with two pears and it dropped one pear and the game never went to a state where I could walk.  

I like how much being right-handed matters in this game

Lava does not deal damage while waiting in it, nor while teleporting in.  The invisible wall past the endless lava sea seems a bit unnecessary-- if you made the map a little bigger you'd run out of mana and die before too long.  It seems extra unnecessary given the *visible* wall past the endless lava sea that you can't reach because the invisible wall is before it.  Also the visible wall past the invisible wall in the endless lava sea doesn't block LoS so you can see the lava continuing behind it.

Dream costs too much mana to cast.  Maybe you can cast it if you kill every skeleton on the world map but I got pretty up there on mp/levels and I couldn't ever cast it.  The trick, if it is even possible, is to kill all of the skeletons without letting any die to lava.  This is, of course, pretty luck-based but if you get a feel for the generation patterns and stuff you can do pretty okay at it.  I got 16 max mp (I think actually 18 but I'm not sure and I know for sure 16) and I felt like that was probably a bit more than half the skeletons.  It's probably not possible to level up enough to cast Dream.

Dungeons are a death trap.  Once you enter you can't ever leave-- there's no 'up' stairs.  There are also no skeletons, so no xp, so no chance at casting Dream.  There might be something interesting through the walls, but since pickaxes don't stack or possibly don't do anything, cutting through all that solid rock is way too much of a pain for me to check.  Thunderwave's damage is unresisted, though, so if you find a way to regen mana *besides* levelling up that would make it much more feasible.  To avoid dungeons, you have to not step on any entrances (grey triangles)-- you automatically go down if you do.

Trees are fine to cut down, especially once you have a few knives under your belt.  Rocks are okay if it's just one or two, but are a real pain in groups.  Solid rock takes a *long* time to hack through, and knives hardly make much of a difference. Water is safe, lava is 10 damage aka death.

Skeletons basically can't hurt you after 2 shields, and I've never even once been hit at 5+.

Well, cool!  I look forward to learning more of the story whenever the next release is ^^

You need to ghost multiplayer matches when no match is found after some duration.  As-is the wait for a real-time game makes the game feel completely dead.

Because the cards you end a floor with carry over to the next one and because card draw possibilities are contextual, it is pretty simple to figure out the pattern to always win-- at least as far as I played.  Are there any new enemies past floor appx 18?   I died to time out when I scrolled down to read through the comments.  The floors past 11 definitely get very long, also, btw

This game is really, really good.  Excellent blend of genres and narratives. Surprisingly balanced game for a CCG (at least until you get to Wendy's cards).  Banning Heaven's Open Door is a nice touch.  

Yeah, that would certainly be simpler to make less grindy :)

I think it's fine, but it makes your starting cards less important, and makes getting good drops (not so much what cards appear but what card you are allowed to swap out on a given turn) really important.  It also rewards playing a single level as long as possible rather than opting for a quick victory.  This means, for example, that healing abilities are somewhat more valuable in the early game since they help you drag out an easy fight while you wait for the cards you want to spawn.

How do picked up cards work?  Do they enter your deck?  Do they stay for the whole Arena?

Just found this and it is excellent.  I hope more is coming someday.

Some issues:

lever positions reset when you leave/re-enter screens.  This is weird, and a little annoying.

The door in the back of Lauren's house is locked, but the basement door isn't, but the basement door just puts in the normal entrance

Rod's house is called the other people's house (Tara and Lester?) on its title card

You can't talk to Tara in Deep Town, even if you are in the appropriate proximity (e.g. via chain dash jumping left from the ledge near Lauren's house and then double jumping up near the platform)

You are kinda a jerk to people, for no reason I can discern at present.  Like, the first boss you take her core and just have Lauren use it as a power source till it dies-- that's kinda... harsh.  And then you're just like "Oh, Flynn keeps a prismatic in a torture box as a slave for fun.  That's fine, cause they were dumb to let themselves get put in a torture box" which is not great. You also don't react to people not treating you like a person pretty much any of the time, but maybe that is internalized antiprismatic sentiment.  Or maybe you *aren't* sapient?  That would explain everything, but I don't buy it based on the motivations the prismatic characters seem to be expressing.

When the subway spawns, it's solid even before it gets into the station.  Chain-dashing and jumping right off the weather station lets you jump off the subway at high speed while it is in mid-air before you eventually hit the water.  This leads to the command 'relocating to somewhere safe' being printed, but it is actually not safe because then you respawn in the patch of air where the subway was and fall into the water again.  Fortunately, the game then spawned me back on shore or I dashed there from spawn, not sure which.

You don't need to talk with Flynn to pick a fight with Richter.  Val's happy to do it all on her own.

Flynn mentions the sword the notes on the last update say you removed.  It wasn't too jarring, but it should probably be changed.

Not necessarily.  If your goal is for the player to never be stuck, then you have succeeded.  It's just that a consequence of that/this implementation of that is that the game has no natural end.

Because the moves left reset to 8 each score and you can always score within 8 moves, the game never ends unless you choose for it to.