This game was very hard for me. For someone who knew absolutely nothing about match-3 in general I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to get more than I match at a time. I figured it out by watching the vid you posted in another comment, if I was my own it might have taken me a while. The "strategy" I've figured out so far is that to move orbs I mostly spin my selected orb around a square or rectangle so that the orbs I wanna move shift around the perimeter around like on a conveyor belt until they move over. I also realized that by using diagonal swaps you can do things a lot faster than that, but (playing with a mouse) it wasn't easy to get diagonal swaps consistently, and it made things more difficult to visualize in advance, so I didn't do it much, except in "tangled" mode against the lizard.
Tangled mode was actually even harder for me, even if I had time to think and plan ahead, which makes me think I'm probably still missing some basic strategy.
Anyway using this information in normal timed mode I managed to beat 3 stages for 3 or 4 times but never managed to beat 4.
Most of the time, I wouldn't pay too much attention to which orbs I was popping because popping a decent number was already kind of a challenge so I had to go for the low hanging fruits anyway.
From my point of view, the (?) stages were counterproductive, because it'd make me go against a more difficult enemy sooner. But I guess this doesn't matter to someone skilled enough to beat all the stages.
In terms of visual communication, the fact that only the enemy HP has a bar and the rest is just numbers meant that it'd feel pretty underwhelming whenever I was doing anything other than raw damage, especially because I was mostly focused on actually learning to get matches and not paying too much attention on the stats part.
Overall the difficulty curve was absolutely brutal, I had to learn how basic match-3 works, how to move orbs around the map efficiently, all while being on the timer, and how the turn-based battle system worked at the same time. Infinite mode (and tangled mode) helped me a lot to figure out the basics, but the skills weren't exactly 100% transferable as timed mode kinda required me to come up with new strats to actually get things done in time. Also in general nobody expects to find the tutorial as a special seed. If you want this game to be accessible to normies you'll need to have a way clearer and slower tutorial mode that goes through all these things slowly and one by one, and to have it clearly labeled as a tutorial within the game.
Another thing, I won't pretend I know anything about this, but does *anyone* do this kind of high-speed match-3 gameplay where you're supposed to rearrange many pieces before they combine? From what I knew about match-3 in most cases it's way more casual and you do just a couple swaps then just let it fall.
I will say though, art and visual style, music, UI design, and everything else is amazing. As I said a million times before I had no clue about match-3 games and no real interest in figuring them out, if this game managed to keep me interested it's because of that too.
I'm sorry, this is a very long post and I think I've repeated a lot of stuff in more than one place, but I hope it's helpful somehow. Good luck with the game, I hope to see it again next time.
Duly noted, it has become abundantly clear that a visual tutorial is needed. I will admit that I was trying to avoid making a full fledged tutorial, but, seeing how the video I posted cleared things up, this is one of those cases where showing how matching works gives information that would be too difficult to convey in writing.
>Tangled mode was actually even harder for me
I personally find it harder as well (depending on how many moves you can do), hence why I made it a malus. The reasoning is that, when matching normally, what usually happens is that you plan a route to tidy up a side of the board, and can usually tackle the other side without having planned ahead, because the area is smaller and lets you ad-lib without getting lost. When your amount of moves is fixed however you really want to try and be efficient not only on this large scale, but also locally, because you're rewarded for fixing any combo that's near your held orb (and sometimes as a result you get "caged in" your own combos, forcing you to undo one of them to get out and wasting time). Plus as you said oftentimes the most efficient move to make is a diagonal one, and they're hard to pull off consistently.
>From my point of view, the (?) stages were counterproductive, because it'd make me go against a more difficult enemy sooner.
Well spotted, the fights at the first few depths are pulled from an easier encounter table, so using an event node at the start has this drawback.
>In terms of visual communication, the fact that only the enemy HP has a bar and the rest is just numbers meant that it'd feel pretty underwhelming whenever I was doing anything other than raw damage, especially because I was mostly focused on actually learning to get matches and not paying too much attention on the stats part.
I'm not quite sure what are you referring to, are you talking about block and evasion coming off as less important than damage?
>does *anyone* do this kind of high-speed match-3 gameplay where you're supposed to rearrange many pieces before they combine?
The only other game I know of is Puzzle and Dragons, which I shamelessly took a page from; everything else seems to follow the traditional candy crush single swap. The fact that this latter style of gameplay dominates the genre is probably yet another reason why a hard to play/not casual match-3 game needs a tutorial.
Finally, thanks for the kind words on the UX, it's reassuring to hear that it doesn't feel as cheap/rushed as its creation was.
I tried several runs, died a ton to the first guy and killed the first guy twice. I've never played a match-3 roguelike so I think the idea is fresh and cool. I like that you are not limited to swapping one over like traditional swap 3s, which might need to be explained to the player, and I like the different orbs having different effect which I found out when I gained a new orb (I realize now that inbetween fights you can actually view your orbs so that's good.) However I believe there's a slight balance issue, the first fight of the game should be easy on the player and get progressively harder to the point where if you don't get the right relics you lose. The first monster has a lot of health and does a lot of damage relative to what you the player can block, heal, and deal. It is possible to kill the first monster but very difficult and I never killed the second. If this is a get good scenario please let me know. The only other slight I found is that it didn't seem that matching 4,5, a cross pattern, or comboing increased the effect of the orbs that much. Since these are slightly harder to pull off I, as the player, would expect a bigger payoff. If this is the case then I missed it, and perhaps text onscreen would help players realize this. I think this is a cool idea and looks good and actually has a pretty good story & theme compared to most rogue games. I look forward to seeing this game progress.
I guess that a clip of the intended gameplay can show the current enemy level better than writing about it, so here you go.
>The only other slight I found is that it didn't seem that matching 4,5, a cross pattern, or comboing increased the effect of the orbs that much.
I agree that they should feel special; my approach was, rather than making these reward a power bonus every time you match them, to have them be conditions for activating orb/relic effects. In case you're talking about these latter orbs/relics feeling underpowered, I believe that this sensation is due to the fact that all the bonuses that I currently have in the game are multiplicative, exacerbating the problem of a low amount of combos doing way less damage than a high amount of them. The idea of making some of these bonuses additive sounds excellent because it still rewards every level of skills while being much more useful to new players, which I'm seeing is needed given the consensus on the game being too difficult. Thank you for putting me on this train of thought.
Wow I realized you could move pieces like that but I had to rewatch your first move several times to even process it. I suppose expecting this gameplay might be a problem from the first fight. It might need to be possible to either explain that this kind of gameplay is required to play through several tutorials, or make the first fight possible to win easily with less complex gameplay and make it progressively harder or ideally a mix of both.
In my opinion I think people would react better to flashy bonuses to doing combo things rather than forcing people to do it for some kind of condition. Additive is a great idea to balance out some of the damage while still rewarding higher combos.
the player should be able to tell if an orb is going to heal/damage/block/evade at a glance. just a little 16x16 icon in the bottom right shouldn’t clutter the screen too bad, or maybe change the background orb shape to be spikey, shield-shaped, cross-shaped etc. for the different effects
tapping an orb without moving should show what that orb does
I think for a puzzle game, limiting your player’s abilities by time overrewards skilled players and overpunishes unskilled ones. I think the same would be easier to learn and easier to balance if instead of time being a factor, the amount of spaces you can move an orb is
edit: after playing a little more i see that many of the orbs thematically match what they are supposed to do, but i think many do not
Indeed, I tried to make orb uses as clear as possible from their artwork, when it comes to the orb set you start with I couldn't do any better than this for lore reasons (the starting gear of a salaryman who got isekai'd is just going to be his everyday items used as makeshift weapons).
>tapping an orb without moving should show what that orb does
My fear is that the popup may become annoying once one knows the various orbs' effects but I'm taking note that the current way to look them up is clunky, I'll make that info more accessible.
>I think the same would be easier to learn and easier to balance if instead of time being a factor, the amount of spaces you can move an orb is
There is a status effect that does exactly that, removes time limits and instead introduces a moves limit, it's the first "malus" that I tried because this idea sounded interesting to me too. I personally found the resulting gameplay "once in a while fun" so to speak, it's good in breaking the monotony of the usual puzzles but when it lasts for too long it slows down the pace of the game too much for my tastes.
My fear is that the popup may become annoying once one knows the various orbs’ effects but I’m taking note that the current way to look them up is clunky, I’ll make that info more accessible.
do a long press, like a whole second. you can make it appear over the enemy portraits so it doesn’t cover the grid as well
I tried 7 runs. Died on the first enemy mostly and a couple times on the second one.
Clearly a lot of effort is put in this game. The thoughts behind each part of the game design are noticeable and the art is very good. But I'm having a really hard time telling whats going on while playing and figuring out how to play better.
My first impressions were: sometimes my combos do no damage. Why would I want more orb types? Why did my 8 chain combo do no damage and the word "nimble" appeared on the screen? Why does the first enemy always kill me if I did a combo each turn? These things got a bit clearer by browsing the menus.
So the color of the orb is not important for your action, only the item on it. Since the items are not linked to the color and their effects don't really match their icons (why does a cellphone give evasion?) it is really hard to keep track of things without constantly going to the menu. The intent of the monster on the bottom didnt seem helpful, even by blocking when they attacked they still did a lot of damage. Completing a 4+ combo and then doing less than 10% of the monster's hp feels bad. I don't even know if the game wants me to do long combos or not.
Having to wait for the enemy to make a move before I can make mine is annoying, specially since sometimes it takes 5 seconds or more of waiting. And then the game rushes the player in the orb pick up mode. Clicking an orb and dropping it in the same place counts as a move somehow and ends the turn instead of it cancelling the move altogether. Draging the orb outside the play area should reset the turn.
As a suggestion (take in mind I suck at this game) all combos, regardless of type, should do damage. Then the damage orbs should do even more damage.
I think match-3 with a time limit while swapping orbs around with the goal of making multiple triplets at once is challenging and fun enough already. The other parts of the game with the battle stats/intent/relics on top of the basics pushes difficulty a bit over the edge.
Thanks for having taken the time to lay out your questions. I saw that you found some answers by browsing the help menus, but in case they weren't exhaustive (and on that matter, it would be very useful to know what they failed to explain), and for others who might have similar doubts:
- On matches doing no damage: not every orb deals damage when matched, some instead increase your block, evasion or heal you. You can check what an orb does by holding click/tap on it during a selection menu or in your inventory. The enemy can also influence your damage with stats and abilities of its own (nimble is one such ability, letting the enemy avoid the first instance of damage). You can browse the current modifiers that an enemy has (if any) by holding tap/click on them, under its hp bar, and similarly you can also check out what it intends to do on its next move, after your matching, by holding its text box.
- On the overall difficulty: the game is balanced assuming that the player is very familiar with the matching mechanics. On average a 6x5 board contains a bit more than 8 combos, and making less matches than what is available is penalizing both because the number of combos itself goes into the power formula, and because less items are activated, so your stats output with 4 combos will be noticeably less than half of what it would be with 8. Not only this will result in dealing an unsatisfying amount of damage, but you'll also fail to block attacks that are designed to be fully blockable. I can't do much about making the enemies weaker, because, given the above, enemies are more than twice as weak for someone familiar with the mechanics (in particular the first encounters are all one-shottable): That said, in the game's main page I have provided some special seeds that you can try to make yourself stronger. You're right in pointing out that thinking about stats, relics and the enemy moves while having your hands already full with making sense of the matching can be overwhelming; there's a sandbox mode (seed SANDBOX) that lets you focus exclusively on practicing, but I reckon that it can't be considered a solution to the issue.
>Why would I want more orb types?
There's a lot of answers for this, some subtler than others. Improving your average item quality, mitigating the "overload" attribute on the orbs, removing your bad starting orbs by pushing them out of a color's item slot, skewing your build towards damage/block, synergy with relics, and similar things you can think about, though, admittedly, the demo is much shorter than what would be required for a lot of these considerations to really pull their weight.
>Having to wait for the enemy to make a move before I can make mine is annoying
My goal is to balance waiting times and readability, since the enemy turn can be pretty important when deciding how to match next. Seeing how it was bad enough that you voiced your thoughts about it I will prioritize working on enemies' VFXs, thanks for the pointer.
>As a suggestion (take in mind I suck at this game) all combos, regardless of type, should do damage. Then the damage orbs should do even more damage.
My hunch is that it will add a fixed amount of damage to the player output, so lowering the enemies' hp by a fixed amount would achieve the same effect, but I will experiment with something like this because I would like to avoid some softlock scenarios where a player is accidentally left with no way to do damage.
>On average a 6x5 board contains a bit more than 8 combos, and making less matches than what is available is penalizing both It is optimistic to believe a player that don't know anything about the game will do 4 combos regularly, much less 8. The few times I did more than 2 was by pure chance after all. The balance of the game can become lopsided if the expectation on the player are so high.
>My hunch is that it will add a fixed amount of damage to the player output, so lowering the enemies' hp by a fixed amount would achieve the same effec Guaranteed damage gives the player a sense of progress and that their actions are having an effect on the game.
>It is optimistic to believe a player that don't know anything about the game will do 4 combos regularly, much less 8.
That's very fair, I've been playing this kind of match-3 mechanics for so many years that I can't hope to guess how good an average new player is. If the current custom seeds are doing a poor job as a bridge in difficulty I reckon I will have to think up a more structured one with easier enemy movesets, more movement time and a more generous damage calculation formula.
I was forgetting to reply to this also:
>Clicking an orb and dropping it in the same place counts as a move somehow and ends the turn instead of it cancelling the move altogether.
I haven't been able to reproduce this bug on mobile nor on browser: There's some browser-only unintended behavior caused by the mouse going out of the screen bounds, which I don't intend to address given that the online version is only temporary, for this DD.
Weirdly enough I reloaded the page and the bug stoped happening. I tried the game a few more times to try to get better, beat two enemies in a row and my combos improved a bit. I got bodied by the 3 vs 1 fight but thats to be expected.
If you are going to keep posting in the DDs, I recommend you to still support this html version and keep posting it. This is a fun game and it will be cool to watch your progress.
Comments
This game was very hard for me. For someone who knew absolutely nothing about match-3 in general I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to get more than I match at a time. I figured it out by watching the vid you posted in another comment, if I was my own it might have taken me a while. The "strategy" I've figured out so far is that to move orbs I mostly spin my selected orb around a square or rectangle so that the orbs I wanna move shift around the perimeter around like on a conveyor belt until they move over. I also realized that by using diagonal swaps you can do things a lot faster than that, but (playing with a mouse) it wasn't easy to get diagonal swaps consistently, and it made things more difficult to visualize in advance, so I didn't do it much, except in "tangled" mode against the lizard.
Tangled mode was actually even harder for me, even if I had time to think and plan ahead, which makes me think I'm probably still missing some basic strategy.
Anyway using this information in normal timed mode I managed to beat 3 stages for 3 or 4 times but never managed to beat 4.
Most of the time, I wouldn't pay too much attention to which orbs I was popping because popping a decent number was already kind of a challenge so I had to go for the low hanging fruits anyway.
From my point of view, the (?) stages were counterproductive, because it'd make me go against a more difficult enemy sooner. But I guess this doesn't matter to someone skilled enough to beat all the stages.
In terms of visual communication, the fact that only the enemy HP has a bar and the rest is just numbers meant that it'd feel pretty underwhelming whenever I was doing anything other than raw damage, especially because I was mostly focused on actually learning to get matches and not paying too much attention on the stats part.
Overall the difficulty curve was absolutely brutal, I had to learn how basic match-3 works, how to move orbs around the map efficiently, all while being on the timer, and how the turn-based battle system worked at the same time. Infinite mode (and tangled mode) helped me a lot to figure out the basics, but the skills weren't exactly 100% transferable as timed mode kinda required me to come up with new strats to actually get things done in time. Also in general nobody expects to find the tutorial as a special seed. If you want this game to be accessible to normies you'll need to have a way clearer and slower tutorial mode that goes through all these things slowly and one by one, and to have it clearly labeled as a tutorial within the game.
Another thing, I won't pretend I know anything about this, but does *anyone* do this kind of high-speed match-3 gameplay where you're supposed to rearrange many pieces before they combine? From what I knew about match-3 in most cases it's way more casual and you do just a couple swaps then just let it fall.
I will say though, art and visual style, music, UI design, and everything else is amazing. As I said a million times before I had no clue about match-3 games and no real interest in figuring them out, if this game managed to keep me interested it's because of that too.
I'm sorry, this is a very long post and I think I've repeated a lot of stuff in more than one place, but I hope it's helpful somehow. Good luck with the game, I hope to see it again next time.
Duly noted, it has become abundantly clear that a visual tutorial is needed. I will admit that I was trying to avoid making a full fledged tutorial, but, seeing how the video I posted cleared things up, this is one of those cases where showing how matching works gives information that would be too difficult to convey in writing.
>Tangled mode was actually even harder for me
I personally find it harder as well (depending on how many moves you can do), hence why I made it a malus. The reasoning is that, when matching normally, what usually happens is that you plan a route to tidy up a side of the board, and can usually tackle the other side without having planned ahead, because the area is smaller and lets you ad-lib without getting lost. When your amount of moves is fixed however you really want to try and be efficient not only on this large scale, but also locally, because you're rewarded for fixing any combo that's near your held orb (and sometimes as a result you get "caged in" your own combos, forcing you to undo one of them to get out and wasting time). Plus as you said oftentimes the most efficient move to make is a diagonal one, and they're hard to pull off consistently.
>From my point of view, the (?) stages were counterproductive, because it'd make me go against a more difficult enemy sooner.
Well spotted, the fights at the first few depths are pulled from an easier encounter table, so using an event node at the start has this drawback.
>In terms of visual communication, the fact that only the enemy HP has a bar and the rest is just numbers meant that it'd feel pretty underwhelming whenever I was doing anything other than raw damage, especially because I was mostly focused on actually learning to get matches and not paying too much attention on the stats part.
I'm not quite sure what are you referring to, are you talking about block and evasion coming off as less important than damage?
>does *anyone* do this kind of high-speed match-3 gameplay where you're supposed to rearrange many pieces before they combine?
The only other game I know of is Puzzle and Dragons, which I shamelessly took a page from; everything else seems to follow the traditional candy crush single swap. The fact that this latter style of gameplay dominates the genre is probably yet another reason why a hard to play/not casual match-3 game needs a tutorial.
Finally, thanks for the kind words on the UX, it's reassuring to hear that it doesn't feel as cheap/rushed as its creation was.
I tried several runs, died a ton to the first guy and killed the first guy twice. I've never played a match-3 roguelike so I think the idea is fresh and cool. I like that you are not limited to swapping one over like traditional swap 3s, which might need to be explained to the player, and I like the different orbs having different effect which I found out when I gained a new orb (I realize now that inbetween fights you can actually view your orbs so that's good.) However I believe there's a slight balance issue, the first fight of the game should be easy on the player and get progressively harder to the point where if you don't get the right relics you lose. The first monster has a lot of health and does a lot of damage relative to what you the player can block, heal, and deal. It is possible to kill the first monster but very difficult and I never killed the second. If this is a get good scenario please let me know. The only other slight I found is that it didn't seem that matching 4,5, a cross pattern, or comboing increased the effect of the orbs that much. Since these are slightly harder to pull off I, as the player, would expect a bigger payoff. If this is the case then I missed it, and perhaps text onscreen would help players realize this. I think this is a cool idea and looks good and actually has a pretty good story & theme compared to most rogue games. I look forward to seeing this game progress.
>The only other slight I found is that it didn't seem that matching 4,5, a cross pattern, or comboing increased the effect of the orbs that much.
I agree that they should feel special; my approach was, rather than making these reward a power bonus every time you match them, to have them be conditions for activating orb/relic effects. In case you're talking about these latter orbs/relics feeling underpowered, I believe that this sensation is due to the fact that all the bonuses that I currently have in the game are multiplicative, exacerbating the problem of a low amount of combos doing way less damage than a high amount of them. The idea of making some of these bonuses additive sounds excellent because it still rewards every level of skills while being much more useful to new players, which I'm seeing is needed given the consensus on the game being too difficult. Thank you for putting me on this train of thought.
Wow I realized you could move pieces like that but I had to rewatch your first move several times to even process it. I suppose expecting this gameplay might be a problem from the first fight. It might need to be possible to either explain that this kind of gameplay is required to play through several tutorials, or make the first fight possible to win easily with less complex gameplay and make it progressively harder or ideally a mix of both.
In my opinion I think people would react better to flashy bonuses to doing combo things rather than forcing people to do it for some kind of condition. Additive is a great idea to balance out some of the damage while still rewarding higher combos.
the player should be able to tell if an orb is going to heal/damage/block/evade at a glance. just a little 16x16 icon in the bottom right shouldn’t clutter the screen too bad, or maybe change the background orb shape to be spikey, shield-shaped, cross-shaped etc. for the different effects
tapping an orb without moving should show what that orb does
I think for a puzzle game, limiting your player’s abilities by time overrewards skilled players and overpunishes unskilled ones. I think the same would be easier to learn and easier to balance if instead of time being a factor, the amount of spaces you can move an orb is
edit: after playing a little more i see that many of the orbs thematically match what they are supposed to do, but i think many do not
Indeed, I tried to make orb uses as clear as possible from their artwork, when it comes to the orb set you start with I couldn't do any better than this for lore reasons (the starting gear of a salaryman who got isekai'd is just going to be his everyday items used as makeshift weapons).
>tapping an orb without moving should show what that orb does
My fear is that the popup may become annoying once one knows the various orbs' effects but I'm taking note that the current way to look them up is clunky, I'll make that info more accessible.
>I think the same would be easier to learn and easier to balance if instead of time being a factor, the amount of spaces you can move an orb is
There is a status effect that does exactly that, removes time limits and instead introduces a moves limit, it's the first "malus" that I tried because this idea sounded interesting to me too. I personally found the resulting gameplay "once in a while fun" so to speak, it's good in breaking the monotony of the usual puzzles but when it lasts for too long it slows down the pace of the game too much for my tastes.
do a long press, like a whole second. you can make it appear over the enemy portraits so it doesn’t cover the grid as well
I tried 7 runs. Died on the first enemy mostly and a couple times on the second one.
Clearly a lot of effort is put in this game. The thoughts behind each part of the game design are noticeable and the art is very good. But I'm having a really hard time telling whats going on while playing and figuring out how to play better.
My first impressions were: sometimes my combos do no damage. Why would I want more orb types? Why did my 8 chain combo do no damage and the word "nimble" appeared on the screen? Why does the first enemy always kill me if I did a combo each turn? These things got a bit clearer by browsing the menus.
So the color of the orb is not important for your action, only the item on it. Since the items are not linked to the color and their effects don't really match their icons (why does a cellphone give evasion?) it is really hard to keep track of things without constantly going to the menu. The intent of the monster on the bottom didnt seem helpful, even by blocking when they attacked they still did a lot of damage. Completing a 4+ combo and then doing less than 10% of the monster's hp feels bad. I don't even know if the game wants me to do long combos or not.
Having to wait for the enemy to make a move before I can make mine is annoying, specially since sometimes it takes 5 seconds or more of waiting. And then the game rushes the player in the orb pick up mode. Clicking an orb and dropping it in the same place counts as a move somehow and ends the turn instead of it cancelling the move altogether. Draging the orb outside the play area should reset the turn.
As a suggestion (take in mind I suck at this game) all combos, regardless of type, should do damage. Then the damage orbs should do even more damage.
I think match-3 with a time limit while swapping orbs around with the goal of making multiple triplets at once is challenging and fun enough already. The other parts of the game with the battle stats/intent/relics on top of the basics pushes difficulty a bit over the edge.
Thanks for having taken the time to lay out your questions. I saw that you found some answers by browsing the help menus, but in case they weren't exhaustive (and on that matter, it would be very useful to know what they failed to explain), and for others who might have similar doubts:
- On matches doing no damage: not every orb deals damage when matched, some instead increase your block, evasion or heal you. You can check what an orb does by holding click/tap on it during a selection menu or in your inventory. The enemy can also influence your damage with stats and abilities of its own (nimble is one such ability, letting the enemy avoid the first instance of damage). You can browse the current modifiers that an enemy has (if any) by holding tap/click on them, under its hp bar, and similarly you can also check out what it intends to do on its next move, after your matching, by holding its text box.
- On the overall difficulty: the game is balanced assuming that the player is very familiar with the matching mechanics. On average a 6x5 board contains a bit more than 8 combos, and making less matches than what is available is penalizing both because the number of combos itself goes into the power formula, and because less items are activated, so your stats output with 4 combos will be noticeably less than half of what it would be with 8. Not only this will result in dealing an unsatisfying amount of damage, but you'll also fail to block attacks that are designed to be fully blockable. I can't do much about making the enemies weaker, because, given the above, enemies are more than twice as weak for someone familiar with the mechanics (in particular the first encounters are all one-shottable): That said, in the game's main page I have provided some special seeds that you can try to make yourself stronger. You're right in pointing out that thinking about stats, relics and the enemy moves while having your hands already full with making sense of the matching can be overwhelming; there's a sandbox mode (seed SANDBOX) that lets you focus exclusively on practicing, but I reckon that it can't be considered a solution to the issue.
>Why would I want more orb types?
There's a lot of answers for this, some subtler than others. Improving your average item quality, mitigating the "overload" attribute on the orbs, removing your bad starting orbs by pushing them out of a color's item slot, skewing your build towards damage/block, synergy with relics, and similar things you can think about, though, admittedly, the demo is much shorter than what would be required for a lot of these considerations to really pull their weight.
>Having to wait for the enemy to make a move before I can make mine is annoying
My goal is to balance waiting times and readability, since the enemy turn can be pretty important when deciding how to match next. Seeing how it was bad enough that you voiced your thoughts about it I will prioritize working on enemies' VFXs, thanks for the pointer.
>As a suggestion (take in mind I suck at this game) all combos, regardless of type, should do damage. Then the damage orbs should do even more damage.
My hunch is that it will add a fixed amount of damage to the player output, so lowering the enemies' hp by a fixed amount would achieve the same effect, but I will experiment with something like this because I would like to avoid some softlock scenarios where a player is accidentally left with no way to do damage.
>On average a 6x5 board contains a bit more than 8 combos, and making less matches than what is available is penalizing both
It is optimistic to believe a player that don't know anything about the game will do 4 combos regularly, much less 8. The few times I did more than 2 was by pure chance after all. The balance of the game can become lopsided if the expectation on the player are so high.
>My hunch is that it will add a fixed amount of damage to the player output, so lowering the enemies' hp by a fixed amount would achieve the same effec
Guaranteed damage gives the player a sense of progress and that their actions are having an effect on the game.
>It is optimistic to believe a player that don't know anything about the game will do 4 combos regularly, much less 8.
That's very fair, I've been playing this kind of match-3 mechanics for so many years that I can't hope to guess how good an average new player is. If the current custom seeds are doing a poor job as a bridge in difficulty I reckon I will have to think up a more structured one with easier enemy movesets, more movement time and a more generous damage calculation formula.
I was forgetting to reply to this also:
>Clicking an orb and dropping it in the same place counts as a move somehow and ends the turn instead of it cancelling the move altogether.
I haven't been able to reproduce this bug on mobile nor on browser: There's some browser-only unintended behavior caused by the mouse going out of the screen bounds, which I don't intend to address given that the online version is only temporary, for this DD.
Weirdly enough I reloaded the page and the bug stoped happening. I tried the game a few more times to try to get better, beat two enemies in a row and my combos improved a bit. I got bodied by the 3 vs 1 fight but thats to be expected.
If you are going to keep posting in the DDs, I recommend you to still support this html version and keep posting it. This is a fun game and it will be cool to watch your progress.
just copy ascension from slay the spire