Finally beat it! Fun game, but it ended kinda early-- Herman the Merman makes a strange final boss XD
xyncht
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A member registered Apr 25, 2018
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Game engine and combat system are great, but the implementation is crippling.
The game does not pause when you open menus to upgrade stats or read what your items/abilities do. There are no safe areas, except those achieved via spawn manipulation. Enemies appear from nowhere in huge hordes constantly all of the time starting from about two seconds after a run starts.
Nevertheless, the way to play the game successfully, presently, is to camp a torch in a corner with a ceiling, thus maximally limiting enemy spawns, and grab whatever items come your way from the trickle of enemies quickly buying up your stats to absurd levels in between waves, then rushing the torches rapidly killing all the bosses in sequence via your absurdly powerful attacks, spells, and items. That camping and super-cautious play requirement kinda conflicts with the no-holds-barred constant enemy spam insane rush the game seems to otherwise be going for. But you can't have non-stop brutally difficult combat and require players to try and read what their abilities do and manage an inventory while simultaneously doing that.
What I would recommend is to disable item configuration and stat leveling most of the time (let players still pick up items and spells, and cycle spells the same way they do currently) but give the player periodic rest stops to configure equipment and spells and stat points and what not in. Perhaps the player can initiate a rest manually at lit torches as long as there's no boss active, or perhaps killing enough enemies in a short enough time could spawn a miniboss which when slain makes the enemies flee to regroup and gives you the rest opportunity, or perhaps you could create makeshift bonfires to keep the enemies away with light temporarily while you rest or something. In any case, explicitly separating menus and reading from the fast-paced combat would massively improve this game, I think.
Beat the game with just removing and upgrading the starting dice (I added a boost partway through and removed a lower level starting boost but that turned out to be a mistake). One attack, one defense, the starting heal die, and two boosts. Every turn you play the attack and defense dice and the highest boost. When you have enough defense you get both boosts to three and then play them on the heal die to heal back any health you lost. Worked fine, though I was losing health rather than gaining it on the boss and the last two fights before it, just not enough to matter.
What's the weird black shadow after you beat the boss? It just appeared with hollow wind music and then the end screen played...
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Beat the game after several attempts, I think the difficulty scaling and general gameplay right now are excellent as-is and look forward to seeing whatever else you add to the game :) There are a couple of minor suggestions I've already posted separately, but in general everything seems pretty awesome.
Awesome game so far in terms of graphics and core combat mechanics-- chaining together teleports to fight the ranged enemies while cutting swaths through the small enemies is pretty fun. The level graphics are super pretty, and the M.C. Escher-like juxtaposition between the always-flat world and apparent depth and elevation changes is much more fun than frustrating or confusing.
Unfortunately, the game is currently extremely short and furthermore, really needs character interactions (and preferably imho at least a plot) to back up the environmental storytelling. I see you are working on adding a boss fight after what's currently the last room, and that will definitely be cool and more of those are of course an important addition to this sort of game, but I hope that the world will be more fleshed out and populated in the future as well.
Bright Lancer 1.02 - Flowers are now Crystals comments · Posted in Bright Lancer 1.02 - Flowers are now Crystals comments
Another freeze after inspecting the idol through the secret door near the dungeon entrance via the forest a second time (after the vision cut scene played). Dialogue remarking that you no longer feel pressure approaching the idol plays, but then the game is unresponsive as usual. Also all of the shops in town-- smith, market, inn-- freeze the game so I'm relying on foraged rations to stay alive. It's... going okay so far. Good thing the ranger is so good at dodging.
I believe the best possible score is 60 but it's a 1/4 to get it instead of 54 even if you wait the eons to get perfect RNG to put the stations down on, since you need the planet that comes in to move one of the scores from 54 to 60. Conveniently, if you achieve this, all of your scores will be exactly 60 ^^
Math:
Let us characterize the score for each color as the sum of the scores obtained on planets of that color. There are 18 planets, 5 of which will be bordered by 16 stations, 5 by 14, 7 by 12, and 1, the top central planet on which we can have no stations, by 6.
The formula 16A_n+14B_n+12C_n+6D_n gives us the score for the nth color, where A_n,B_n,etc correspond to the number of planets with the appropriate number of stations (16 for A, 14 for B, etc) in that color.
Fiddling with a matrix of the relevant equations, we can arrive at:
2 Class-A and 2 Class-B planets for two colors,
1 Class-A and 1 Class-B and 2 Class-C and the 1 Class-D for one color
5 Class-C for the final color
or an equivalent configuration with each color scoring 60. In order for any color to score higher, points would have to be removed from one of the other colors, meaning that the score of the lowest scoring color can't be above 60, so 60 is the maximum high score. However, it requires the planets to be in only a handful of possible positions out of ~69 billion (4^18). Good luck if you decide to go for it, I haven't calculated the actual exact odds yet but I bet the expected number of turns required to achieve it is very high.
Healing from doom was a cool mechanic and I'm sad that it's gone. Also sad about the renaming, but probably just because I'm already used to the names; the new version will certainly be more beginner-friendly. (now, if the bug where reloading the game randomly gets rid of all your boss passives, the backstory abilities other than keeper of secrets and multi-archetype options, and changes the color of fused cards was removed, that would be pretty sweet)
The Tree That Touched The Moon comments · Replied to xyncht in The Tree That Touched The Moon comments
Beat the game after a few attempts. It's pretty fun and the writing is very good. I wish there were more lore events even if they didn't directly provide upgrades, but it's certainly not a serious obstacle to the game being fun.
My first run-through I assumed there would be some benefit to going into the portal room earlier instead of grinding, and since I had started with the water spell and rothearts are resistant to water and common I figured the boss was likely weak to water as a game balance thing which turned out to be correct. I entered the portal room immediately and killed the boss in a pretty near fight. It was pretty disappointing when, after barely beating the second boss in a similar fashion, I died to a breath-taker on level 3 and found out when starting over there's actually no reason to ever enter any portal room early and a lot of reason not to.
Merging spells is a neat mechanic, though at first it was a little annoying you can't ever merge your last spell slot, I think it's actually kind of a neat mechanic since it garuntees the basic spells also see some use. If the game continues development, the current final boss's smelt move is nuts and adds a hefty dose of rng to the game since presumably the next floor with have exponentially more ridiculous enemies as always and losing the wrong two spells could definitely ruin your whole run. Plus I think it bypasses standard accuracy checks (i.e. light doesn't effect it) but idk for sure.
Finding out what merges do through play is a fine and quite traditional take for that mechanic, but I do wish they were a little more balanced. Freeze's damage and accuracy nerf makes it more of a (unreliable and short-lived) control spell than a truly offensive one so you'll really stuggle until you replace your lost offensive spells there, whereas Fireball is a straightforward upgrade to Fire and the accuracy drop is much simpler to play around than all of Freeze's baggage. Ray of Hope is super good so maybe it makes sense that it's hard to recover from losing a Light spell for a pure offensive option, but it's still kinda weird. Water+Mend=Imbue is still probably the most difficult to recover from I think. When I first did it it was frustrating because Imbue seemed useless compared to my main damage spell and the ability to heal, but now I recognize that it can be one of the strongest spells in the game. There are easier ways to get it, though, so it's still a little weird.
The enemy on floor three that eats your shards is really annoying. It+Breath Takers just seems like a much more brutal combination than anywhere else in the game, even if the stats on those enemies themselves aren't actually that high. I guess it's probably just to reward fast combat builds and punish buffing, which is a good idea, but it still is a pretty steep jump in tactics even compared to between floors 3 and 4 (Forgelings seem like they should be a bigger deal, but I've not had too much trouble with them).
If you use Imbue on the Void Master it seems like absorption and weakness should probably cancel out but they in fact do not, presently. Also I'm sure glad I had two attack spells, dang.
Is Light the only significant debuff in the game? I feel like it's pretty much mandatory past floor 2, since even a single use is generally enough to put Cure's healing/round above the enemy's DPR. I guess Cure is also mandatory, though, past floor 1.
Are items set? I got Luna's Sash of Healing on my victorious run through which was also the first time I didn't go to the boss ASAP and that item is both hugely useful and, if items are set, paired with a ring that seemed hugely not. The shops aren't really very helpful nor expensive in this game, so the extra money would I guess be nice for score maybe but not really contribute to beating the game.
Anyways I had a lot of fun with it and I hope you continue to work on it so I can see the whole story fleshed out and find out what happened to the two Sages.
Game is fun. Most difficulty can be avoided by dodging checkpoints (e.g. in the castle in the sky) and then dying after collecting a powerup to return to the big open area on top of the map. Wall run still has to be obtained normally, which has a couple hard jumps, and there's some difficulty on the way to one of the other powerups I don't quite remember which.
Also walljumping is fun and lets you access areas early and get out of areas you aren't supposed to get out of yet and zoom up elevator shafts. To wall jump, after collecting the jump power-up jump into a wall and then hit both the movement key to go into the wall and the jump key alternatingly very quickly. It works much more easily in elevator shafts and other one-tile gaps where you can just button mash.
Super Mario Bros. S: Road To Infinity comments · Posted in Super Mario Bros. S: Road To Infinity comments
Rogue Jones and the Hourglass of Time comments · Posted in Rogue Jones and the Hourglass of Time comments
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.
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.