I came in with little to no expectations aside an impression from the colorful visuals you've got going. I didn't expect the depth there would be to the game. I was very surprised in a good way. I played on 0.4.0 Windows. At first, gameplay felt straightforward and simple. I can attack, however I can't defend on the enemy's turn if I do. That makes sense. Turns out Warrior always starts out with a card that has Relentless. I think that is a really good feature for new players since learning when to not attack and when to defend is a tricky thing in the first few runs. Especially since that card also has other abilities such as gaining 1 life and has 4 Resistance power. It's a card I almost always played when I drew it. That's without including all the other card synergies I discovered after playing the Warrior deck.
I did try out the other decks a few times. Mainly, I tried out Adventurer to try and get a grasp on the stats system. Luck and fortune are still foggy to me. Their influence seems to pale in comparison to whether or not I make keen decisions over the entire run since even without pumping luck, there's still a lot of chance involved with the cards and equipment I got. I never used intelligence since my strategy was to hit up merchants when I could if I had a handy sum of gold. For example, when I did my first few runs I skipped merchants and tried to aim for treasure and luck events. The rewards weren't enough to keep me winning though and I could even lose for messing with treasure and luck events. Merchants on the other hand were at least more consistent in that at worst, I could get something on the side like a card pack or scroll of experience. At best, really good cards since the shop rolls 8 cards for me of varying quality. On that point, the only part I understand from the merchant is that the cards seem to scale with either the amount of events I passed through, my level or perhaps something like the average strength of current cards I have. The one consistent aspect I noticed in each run is that the cards get better the further in I am and are almost never that good on a first merchant. Back to stats, I hard focused strength and dexterity. Strength is awesome for more than one reason. As a beginning player, health is at all times great to have more of. At a more advanced level of play, health points are key to stalling for growing the mana pool or getting the cards that I need to make a comeback. Dexterity is similar. The ability to go first or second isn't vital to me since it's dependent on the cards and equipment I have that run. However, the more cards I have at the beginning of the round is crucial. I would say it's even crucial for the enemy. One run, I got an equipment called the "Weakness Warhorn." I don't know if equipment names are unique since card names aren't. Anyways, the equipment's effect is "Champions draw 2 fewer cards at the start of every battle." It's a unique equipment, so I know that's a good tier, although I'm not sure if that's higher or lower than legendary. The gist is that this equipment didn't seem that impressive at first sight until I entered combat. There's a certain kind of comedy in watching the enemy not play anything for multiple turns. Especially when the early turns may be where huge plays happen and dominate the rest of the battle. One of my favorite equipment even if I only got it once. For the most part, I picked up the equipment to see what it meant in action and it concluded in something a lot better.
To a large extent, the Warrior deck hits home for me. I got very familiar with every card in the deck. For a moment in the first twenty runs or so, I had a misconception that I might have to stick with the deck because changing out the core cards can be expensive. The truth is more in tune with the idea that every card in the deck acts as a jumping off point. That one minion-beast that is able to Reinforce I on summon and on death is a quick 2 Attack power hitter for only 1 mana or to buff up another card since Reinforce I is not restricted to the end of turn. That is unless there's also the minion-celestial that's able to draw 1 card on summon and give +1/+0 to all Beast minions then it's a quick 3 Attack power for 1 mana cost. Play two or three of the minion-beast with Reinforce I and I can practically one-shot the early game. Sometimes it's even beneficial to buff the minion-celestial with draw 1 card on summon effect considering that minion has 2 Resistance power and anything with Resistance power is more likely to stay on my field. The minion-beast only has a Resistance power of 1 or 2 with Reinforce I and don't have a field buff effect like the minion-celestial for Beast minions. In that sense, the minion-beasts are more like throwaway blocks since even the strongest attack can be blocked if there's no special effects. That plus the persistence of Reinforce I means I can continually buff the minion-celestial to even become an offensive unit or stay as a defensive unit with 3+ Resistance power. All of that for a 1 mana-cost minion-celestial and 1 mana-cost minion-beast.
The 2 mana-cost minion-celestial with Relentless and life gain has 4 Resistance power is great later on in a battle when my mana pool is bigger because the minion isn't highly viable on its own. In the first few turns, gaining life can sometimes turn around a victory. That's not usually the case though. The 2 mana-cost minion-celestial pairs super well with the 3 mana-cost minion-beast with piercing and +2/+2 when it procs continually. This is a mana-cost of 5 for 2 minions whereas the mana-cost of 2 for 2 minions as seen previously works better as a shield to hold off attacks until I can build an offense. All those 0-cost and 1-cost spell-celestials that give life gain in addition to the 1-cost +3/+3 spell-beasts can carry me quite far in runs. Usually this strategy is enough to carry me up to the last champion of the first floor(?). The last card which is the 1 mana-cost no-effect minion-beast with 3 Resistance power is like a low budget Relentless minion-celestial is the best way I can put it. 3 Resistance power is quite strong for early turns since I rarely see anything that can hit that hard until mid-game.
All in all, the early runs were simple and fun. A sense of naivety. I would say everything completely shifts once you begin to understand what effects exist and how the battlefield is dominated after the first floor. A surprise on every corner is the way the real game feels. A whole lot of "Wait, that's a 0 mana-cost card?", "10 Resistance power at 1 mana-cost? I can't break that with attacks on the first turn or even the third turn.", and "Hold up, you can exhaust on main-2 and during an attack?" The enjoyment of the game goes up a multitude here along with the usual roguelike frustration of chance. It's a really good learning experience. Especially with crafting, I wasn't sure what was going to last over time rather than a battle or two then get replaced by card packs or the merchant. By simply being observant of how the enemy plays, I was able to copy and hone their tactics and become one with the card. Perhaps even what you call, a card artisan.
I'm probably not going to be able to recall all the exciting moments I saw. It is a "short" game in terms of being about a half-hour to an hour in length for me on runs. Of course, it's actually a long game because I'll replay it more times after that. I definitely think there's at least a few hundred more hours to go before I full internalize everything and what the most optimal strategies are. I think I've only scratched the surface and other players are bound to find more creative ways of playing. All the variables from stat choices, event choices, merchant purchase choices, crafting choices (itself which contains many factors like active and passive effects with effects and timing), minion type choices and variant choices. From my point of view, the game has got a nice sense of complexity to it and maybe the game is a lot simpler than I think it is as I have yet to discover it all and see it as a whole.
A rough rundown of the interesting builds I saw with enemies or did myself would be:
Milling me to zero either through spell effects or simply holding such a strong defense that I'm stalled until I draw all my cards
Getting me stuck in an Exhaust-Repeal loop where I summon a minion, I block from the minion with that Exhaust-Repeal, my minion gets slapped back onto the top of my deck and I can't draw a single other card because I need the minion to defend my health
Stacking Life like it's boxes in a warehouse against me and I realize that my damage isn't going to outpace how fast I'm drawing cards every turn
Being one-shot by +1/+1 for cards in graveyard minions
Thinking everything is going on my field until the enemy starts blasting me with cost of discarded card direct damage that makes me realize the purpose of those 6+ mana-cost cards
The chaos that is random effects and understanding to never play such a build ever again and to ensure a quick victory against an enemy that does it too. The Dice of Doom is one thing. Equipment, minion, and more was mind-boggling.
The mind game that is stalling for mana pool growth and to not attack, just hold a defensive line
The annoyance that is Bounce I
How useful direct damage to any target cards are. These cards seemed at first to be a waste to pick up, until I get kept getting destroyed by them. Turns out one of the best ways to deal with an annoying minion on the field that I can never block is to carry a ton of direct damage to any target cards that can deal with those pests and hit the enemy's health too.
The worry that is seeing an Exhume effect and realizing defeating a minion once isn't enough
Casual wipe of my field with Deal 1 damage to any target 6 times
Destroy up to x target minions that are the perfect counter spells in a pinch
x then, x cards where I get a 2-for-1 deal that feels completely ridiculous and too good to be true like Repeal 1, then Repeal 1
The counter play that is gaining control of target minion
Underestimating the power of piercing and the enemy's willingness to block, full stack Attack power and I get a home run
The mistake that is playing an effect that has to target a minion and I inevitably have to target my own field
Some rare things I did see that makes me want to play again were: card packs with 4 cards with a blue outline, Doll of a Dog, Rabbit Rear, the mystery of what Renewed Rucksack is, trying to get 5 Suspicious Scales, the mystery of what the Chromatic Cuirass really does, the difference between average, strong and very strong cards, the secret requirement for the heavy gate, the locked metal door, the dojo, the throne, the disappearing floor, and the abandoned forge (I presume it has to do with equipment), whether the enemy AI is always playing optimally or if it can play dumb at lower levels, and what difference Artificer's Artifact really makes. Also a little curious if minion-types actually have some impact on cards. I can't confirm they do, however the starter decks seem to indicate minion-types have some aspects tied to them. I have plans to make more X-tier cards too. That was unexpected after seeing UR and thinking that was the end tier.
A minor bug I did see or I misunderstood is "When this minion blocks, give target minion -3/-3 until the end of the turn." This card didn't block. I blocked against the card with this effect and it weakened my minion. The other stuff is simple things that you probably have on your todo list like the "all all" in text and the blinking cursor behind the "Character Name" text. There might have been another where if I have the exact amount of experience, I don't level. I can't confirm that one as I only saw it once. It's probably a simple < and <= mix up. Another small issue is that music will stop playing in main phase which might be the result of spending a few minutes in that phase.
Overall, Card Artisan was a really fun experience to the point of mild addiction. I only managed to win the dungeon/castle raid once, so I haven't experienced all there is to in the game. I've barely reached level ten on the meta-progression stuff (I do wonder if I have to do meta-progression or if I can do a zero run all the time too, it's hard for me to know with enemy growth). There might be a bunch of information that flew over my head and I didn't realize it here. It was a bit sad to part ways with my deck after the first win. I wanted to see how well it could last against more threats. I did have a slight expectation that the dungeon would go endlessly or at least ten floors. I understand that scaling is difficult though (as it does scale tremendously when you get to the second floor), so for what the experience was, the execution was done well. The visuals are nice and clean. The particles look a little weird sometimes like when battle ends and it fades or on health damage. Navigating a large hand of cards (10+) is a slight pain and likely not a common occurrence anyways. I don't know if you have plans for the top UI to be unfolded indefinitely. A couple times, I did want have the timer visible to see what my average time was and I wouldn't mind having it open at all moments for that. On my part, I forgot to look and so there is no record that I have on my times which is fine. I should remind myself more often. Similarly, I know there isn't saves yet, however have you thought about keeping a history of decks from run to run? I'm often curious what I played in different runs. Maybe other players don't care for that kind of thing though. I know it's a minor thing. I enjoyed the bits of writing that you did have with events and choices. They paired well with the art and it did feel immersive like a real dungeon crawl except you're a looter who fights with the power of cards made in a magic forge (or is it really all just an abstraction for bringing in a party?). Whatever it is, I look forward to what's next in terms of development, whether it be new card effects, that adventure mode or something else altogether.
Well, where to begin... This is the nicest, most thoughtful piece of feedback I've ever seen! I spend the entire read rooting for you throughout your journey, joyfully laughing as you discovered new mechanics and figured out how to overcome challenges!
I'm so happy to see a player that chose the Warrior as its preferred class and went with a predominantly STR/DEX build. Up until now, most dedicated players that I got feedback from went the combo route so they dumped all into INT/LUK with either the Rogue or the Wizard, so seeing that you can have a good time with these more traditional builds is really nice.
Allow me to clarify some of the doubts you expressed:
-Luck and fortune: This stat is very easy to underestimate, especially as a new player. While it has no direct impact on your combat abilities, it influences many factors such as the number of items dropped in combat and in chests, the quality of cards opened in packs, the quality of cards found in merchants, the likeliness of getting better equipment, and the quality of rewards at some luck events. Most important of all might be the number of drops you get in combat and chests since that:s the most consistent way of amassing high-quality crafting gems, which are vital to creating a powerful deck.
-Intelligence; The other stat that also doesn't directly affect combat, but is likely to be the most important of all for later runs since this stat determines both your crafting ability and the prices you find at merchants. (With some added secret bonuses). Cheaper merchants are very nice, especially on later runs when prices start getting steep. But the most important is the access to more crafting options at the forge. This makes Intelligence key for combo decks since finding the piece you are looking for on a random pack is not very likely.
The merchant is definitely one of the strongest and most fun rooms in the game. Luck events can be pretty good, but unless you are out of gold, going for a merchant is probably the better idea, yeah.
Again, your describing your journey discovering the power of certain mechanics such as making Champions start with -2 cards is really exciting to read because that's exactly what I envisioned a new player's experience to be! (Unique is the tier below Legendary, btw)
Your description of the warrior deck also makes me very happy, it feels like I was able to hit some sort of balance in the starter deck where you can appreciate every piece and play around with them. While there are always better and worse cards at an objective level, every piece in chess plays a role! Sometimes testing these kinds of design points is hard as the designer, so hearing such a detailed opinion on what your impressions of the deck were is very reassuring!
The game difficulty goes up considerably after the first boss and the shenanigans begin much as you described with cards that traditionally would be crazy, but that's kind of the charm of the game, I think. Your enemies have crazy cards, so you'll have to match their might and get crazy cards of your own to beat them!
I'm not gonna lie, you had me hollering with the " Perhaps even what you call, a card artisan. " line, I wish I could have a review this charming on my Steam page once the game goes up there.
I'm going to dispel *some* of the doubts you outlined since some fo them shouldn't be mysteries and might be a bit unclear due to poor explaining on my side.
-Blue online on items: This just means that it's a more powerful item (Comparatively to what you would've got with a regular frame item in that same situation)
-Rabbit's Rear: Ensures that you get at least one SR or UR card in your packs. So basically makes card packs stronger.
-Suspicious Scale: This only makes the number of cards you open in packs go up by 1. (For example if your card pack says "A pouch containing 1 card..." you'll open 2 cards. The "Max 5" refers to the max amount of cards a pack can contain, so if your pack already has 5 cards in it, this equipment will have no effect. Unfortunately, you can only get 1 copy of each piece of equipment.
-The AI is playing the best it can, sometimes it isn't optimal because it isn't intelligent enough, sometimes it makes a suboptimal play that won't kill the player but will damage you so your next enemy takes you out. At any rate, AI will be improved down the line.
-Minion types are relevant mostly for effects and costs such as "Give +1/+1 to all Elemental Minions you control" or "You must control 2 Beast Minions to play this card". Although each color has affinities for certain types of effects. This means that certain card effects are more commonly found with certain colors. For example, Celestial cards have a higher chance of getting "Heal" abilities.
-Rarity: The chart goes C Common, U Uncommon, R Rare, SR Super Rare, UR Ultra Rare, and X for custom cards such as the ones you forge.
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Thanks for the bug reports, some of those are on the laundry list, but some others I haven't encountered, so I'll try to replicate and fix them!
Regarding your comments/wishlist of features, here are some of the planned upcoming features:
-Saving of runs.
-Stats such as best time, playtime, minions killed, card packs opened, etc. Some of these are already being logged, so your best time is saved and will be viewable when Card Artisan 0.5 hits the shelves!
-Run history is *not* currently in the plans but honestly I should add that.
-New effects. ("Destroy all minions", "Shuffle your graveyard into your deck", and "Destroy your opponent's graveyard" are all already in the works).
-New trigger times. ("When this card is discarded..." and "When this card is milled..." are both ready in the dev build).
-Improvements to the modding capabilities.
-A Quest/Achievement system with a bit of meta-progression of its own.
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Lastly, just to clarify the "lore", it is supposed to be just one hero going into a castle dungeon and creating powerful spells by using rare materials on magical forges.
Once again, I deeply appreciate your detailed feedback and it makes me extremely happy to see people enjoying my game enough to feel compelled to leave such a review. These are the kind of comments that make me wanna keep going and keep pumping features and updates as soon as I can. I really hope to see you around in the future, fren!
I sunk way too much time into this game. Only thing that still sort of confuses me is the center row and the order of events as they unfold, I kind of just blindly choose cards and click clackity click.
I'm sorry I don't have a proper tutorial to explain basic stuff like the phases in the center row but at least I'm happy you felt compelled to sink a couple of hours into the game even without knowing exactly what was going on with those things!
Make a black border on your sword icon exe it seems invisible for some settings.
Great juice overall, very nice music.
I love the moddability for card images, this should be a focal point for your marketing "you can REALLY design your card here!" (make some bullshit card with goku, john wick etc, go nuts). I dunno if this mod also goes to card border and table, but it should.
I'm not a card game guy (and never player slay of the spire), so take everything with salt:
My brother made me play magic arena once, so I understand something of this, and everything is clear, but tutorial asap. Stupid example: an angel has relentless, but in the explanation on the left side of the screen you say "does not get exhausted when attacking". I know because my brother talks only about magic, but I don't really know. Maybe it would be helpful to know where your game differs from magic, and maybe this is a super niche game FOR magic players, but a newbie needs everything explained.
tldr, copy and implement a magic and heartstone tutorial. "how to play" is not enough for a noob.
card design type needs to be more obvious (see yu-gi-oh). Multiple times I mistook a creature for a spell card.
Make lvlup standout more (also told u in stream, su dunno if it's already noted). Right now it seems a common notification.
I like your events, they remind me of hands of fate.
I don't like the damage to player/enemy sound effect, but I assume it's placeholder
It's nice you can access your menù from the battlefield, but the icon it's too hidden.
I played vs elemantal wind mage "make a random effect". At first glance those random effects seemed out of nowhere, then I noticed dice of doom. Tip, you need a log of what happens during the game, think of digital tabletops like neverwinter/mmos (dunno if other games already do this, or I'm asking too much).
I don't have the skills to have an opinion on card crafting.
Got to final boss of raid but got wiped out.
Only bug: after I lost I choose 'go to menu'. In the menu cursor was invisible and couldn't click anything. I had to reastart.
Not my kind of game, but I think it's cool. GL next DD.
First of all, thank you very much for your feedback, fren!
-The sword icon will be replaced soon enough, but thanks for letting me know.
-I don't know to what extent I can include images like "Goku" in my Steam page/trailer, but I'll keep the message in mind! I agree on modding being important and it will be expanded soon enough to include things like borders and whatnot.
-I have no excuse for the lack of a tutorial other than it being a pain to make, but it will be there. The relentless Minion should also display the Exhausted remainder text, I'll make sure that's fixed.
-I'm glad to inform you that everything below this point has been addressed and will be up next update (Different card frame for Minions, Event log, cursor disappearing bug).
I hope you like the improvements, and thanks again for the feedback!
Shit got real when I realized that enemy can have gain health cards too.
I'm not a card game player so I can only give superficial opinions, for the record.
The game is intuitive enough that I missed the tutorial page and still managed to get through the first set of encounters while getting a grasp of the mechanics and guessing the card stats. Starting with relentless cards didn't help with learning attack/block thing though. I like the mana increasing by turn flow so far. Does non-utilized mana have any uses or does it incentivize using all of it each turn?
Hover on cards has some weird z sorting right now, it should put the card on top instantly (I know the pain). I'm not sure about having my hand cards cut off at the bottom. I'd rather see the entire cards whenever it's time to play them if possible, but it's easy to memorize cards by pictures so far, so it's not a big deal.
After game over and returning to main menu the cursor is not there, and not even just invisible. I had to alt f4.
I'm glad you made it without a tutorial, because even though there's the how to play page, a proper tutorial should be in place, and it will be sooner rather than later (hopefully).
The point of saving mana is to use it during your opponent's turn, but saving it any further has no point since it regenerates at the start of your turn.
Hovering on cards and the sorting you mention is set on a timer on purpose, I found that having it change instantly felt janky to me, but some people have complained that it takes too long right now, so I'll tweak that.
Only seeing a the top part of your cards is also designed that way on purpose (sort of) because having your entire hand up all the time is a bit too clutter-y and I rather have a cleaner field of view and then check cards when I have to rather than not having the option to have them tucked away. I said sort of because due to how big I made everything I have way less visual real state to spare, so yeah, that's a design flaw that I have to address at some point but that I'm dreading. So yeah, I'm counting on the memorization of cards that you mentioned for now.
The cursor error is there because right before uploading the latest available update I did some major code cleanup and with the unnecessary stuff I also removed that cursor.visible=true, it will of course be fixed for the next update (A big one, btw)
Again, thanks for playing and thanks again for the feedback!
I'm not sure if I'd just been doing something wrong, but when I tried to make a mod, the identities I tried to set to certain colors were shuffled around. Is there some way to edit the mods, or is that something in the works? Either way! I'm loving the game, but I may start cursing you for how addicting the game is coming.
I've fixed the traits shuffling around with today's update (0.3.13), have you had a chance to download it?
I think there's no fixing the mod you've already created, but what you could do is create the mod again (just the distribution of the traits) and then dropping the previous mod's images as they are in the new mod's folder. Sorry that there's no better way to fix it, but that feature is definitely coming down the road alongside a bunch of other modding capabilities!
Also, I'm stoked to hear you are liking the game! Please let me know if you find any other issues so I can fix them right away!
Ah! Awesome, I'll download it in a bit once i get a few things taken care of. Thanks!
And yeah I'll let you know if there's anything else weird that I notice. I'm not sure if this was fully a bug, but when I went against a boss, they got into a endless loop of two zero cost cards that both had exhume, along with their own abilities but that's not the issue. Maybe you can increase the probable cost of the exhume ability?
It wasn't a bug per se, it was just the AI not having a real reason to stop doing that infinite loop since it was a strong "combo".
With the 0.3.13 update I also included a limiter to tell the AI to chill it with the infinite combos. I also made exhaust cards a bit more expensive in the last patch, but maybe it wasn't enough hahaha.
- when you first launch the game, clicking on the left on difficulty to lower it will make it drop to 0 instantly and play the "error" animation as if I'm trying to go below 0 or above max
- I often alt-tab out of games, currently hitting any key will skip the new cards after opening a pack, I'd prefer it not to be the case
- just had this issue where new cards are tilted to the right, no idea why : imgur.com/a/J9Nyoal
- I'd really like the vault to be or be able to be sorted by last obtained
I love it, been playing for several days. There are bugs blah blah blah, you know.
I'd really like :
- a full reset option (does difficulty increase after beating it? I've been having a hard time restarting without my upgrades. a lot of games have a profile system, could be that) *edit* my bad, I just saw that it does. I didn't notice the message before.
- being able to close without quitting the run (that's just me but my graphics card is *really* bad, and starts heating up even with this. it's always been like that, it's not the game. the blood effect literally slows down the game. is it particles? maybe it could be a prerecorded animation? I realize I'm in a minority though)
- some patch notes, even short. once again, just personal preference
I'll try to be more technical if I encounter actual bugs.
First of all, thank you very much for the comment and suggestions!
Regarding the difficulty, aren't you in luck?! New version with Difficulty modulation just went up!
Saving runs will definitely be coming, a lot of people have been asking for this feature, so I'll make sure to add it soon enough.
The current graphics settings are virtually useless, and a proper "high performance" mode is something I want to tackle but have been putting aside in order to focus on more flashy features. Still, I will have to work on it at some point because the current PC required to play this is definitely not in line with how the game looks.
At some point I'll add in patch notes, they aren't in place at the moment because up until last week my player base was basically 0, so there was no point in having them. Even if it's just 4 people instead of 0, now I don't have that excuse anymore, so I'll have to add them soon enough.
I'll keep doing minor updates whenever I find and fix more gameplay bugs, but the next big thing coming is the achievement/quest system that should give the roguelite gameplay loop a much more rewarding zing to it.
At any rate, thanks again for your feedback, and do let me know if you find any bugs!
I implemented some small changes that should help with your situation. The "Lowest" graphics settings in the options menu now disables most particle effects, so that might help out a bit.
I'll make a new build and upload it tomorrow (0.3.12) if you wanna give that a try when it's up, that'd be great!
Great stuff man, love it. I've been playing MtG and roguelikes for like 20 years, so this is perfect for me. Your UI work is top notch. I really need to crib some notes from you on making a satisfying UI. The card art looks great, very nice use of AI. I've thought for a while that a card game would be a good candidate for such a thing, because you don't need, or even want, perfect coherence with each piece.
I have a display issue. My monitor is 1920x1200 by default, and that causes the left and right side of the screen to clip. I know monitor resolution stuff is a huge pain in the ass, but you might want to sort that out. In my last game, I got dinged so many times in reviews because I didn't handle different resolutions very well.
Overall, it's an excellent fusion of slay the spire and MtG, both games I really love. You've got something really nice here, it's fun and very well polished. Just get your Steam page up hahah.
Thanks, man! You are always very supportive and I really appreciate that.
I'm always relieved that people don't hate the UI because I'm not very confident when it comes to UI, if anything I was thinking about how much nicer YOUR UI is and how I needed to take some notes!
Regarding resolutions, you are 100% correct, it is a little gremlin staring at me from outside my window, I know I have to take care of it relatively soon or it's gonna get worse.
The Steam page is coming soon (TM). Jokes aside, I'll focus on polishing the logo and getting the main track of the final soundtrack going very soon. With that ready, I'll publish the Steam page.
You saw me play this on stream, so I don't think I need to say too much. But I would like to reiterate point that the game really needs a tutorial, especially for players like me who don't play card games at all. I liked the card art, even if it's AI generated.
Keep at it dude! I had a good time playing (Once I played the most recent build that didn't break).
I played the new version. It went a lot better, but I still deadlocked at a champion battle. Not sure how many levels there are but this one looked like the last one of a run.
This one here is just a small one
I triggered an effect that got the attacker bounced and they had their guard icons after wards.
I have a very pressing question about your screenshot. Do you remember the effect of the blue card being played?
Also, the AI is paying the card cost of sacrificing Minions, do you remember if the game locked before or after the minions were sent to the graveyard?
Shield bug is an easy fix.
One day auradev, one day you'll be able to complete a run where the game doesn't die on you...
It's okay, I should be able to replicate this regardless, it seems to be an "AI paying cardcosts" bug. Btw you can zoom cards by right-clicking or by scrolling them, so if there's something on top of it and you want to read the card below you can try those two options.
At any rate, I just fixed a major issue with the AI activating Exhaust effects and them not resolving.
I'll try to tackle your issue and add a difficulty reset that another anon requested. Hopefully, I can upload another fix today.
I have finally cleared a run! The only bug I encountered was sometimes none of my spells were resolving, which was kind of annoying since I invested a lot into the cheap 6 dmg spell and crafted cards to recycle it.
I've been chasing that "nothing of my spells are resolving" bug. I've encountered it but can't reproduce it. It solves itself after a turn or after you play some spells, right? (Just trying to see if the behavior was the same for you).
I don't know if you've been doing it thus far, but remember you can use the gems you get during the run to power your character on the main menu.
Also, I just realized I can recreate the card's effect just by looking at the name. That blue card from the crash should read "As an additional cost to playing this card, sacrifice 1 Minion. Draw 3 cards; then, deal 3 damage to any target."
So yeah, the screenshot once again being super helpful! Thanks!
>I don't know if you've been doing it thus far, but remember you can use the gems you get during the run to power your character on the main menu.
Yeah I've been using the gems, mostly to get the Deal 1 damage 6 times spell to 1 Mana so I can loop it with Exhume, and raise Dex to better find my good cards.
>It solves itself after a turn or after you play some spells, right? (Just trying to see if the behavior was the same for you).
Not after a turn. However, it's not always "not resolving" sometimes it seems to also be just defining less targets. In one game, the Deal 1 damage 6 times spell only allowed me to give 1 target so I looped it until I burned my enemy to 0. The other time I couldn't specify any targets and I saw it, without any animation or other feedback, reduce the life of an opponent's minion. So actually something did sometimes resolve.
Having played the game for a bit now, I also have two pieces of balancing feedback:
- 0 Mana is undervalued. The difference between a 0 and a 1 Mana card seems to be just 1 Mana, but being able to play things for free and turning the game into Yugioh is a huge difference. Imo getting a card to 0 should cost a significant amount of additional gems.
- Exhume is undervalued. Exhume is basically Draw 1/2 from your discard pile, allowing you to recur or potentially even loop your wincon. In this game I had a 0 Discard 2 opponent cards and I also had a card that allowed me to Bounce 1 whenever a card is played. This allowed me to loop my opponents hand to 0 and then recur my damage spell. It costs like 2 gems to make 0 Mana 0/1 Exhaust: Exume dudes and using powered up starting cards you can run wincons that are worthwhile to loop.
Dang, for a moment there I thought this post wasn't gonna have a deadlock waiting for me. Just one quick question, do you remember if your enemy discard the card as a part of its cost or did it lock before that? Also did he only had the 0 cost card in hand when he played it, or did he also had that 2 cost blue card? (Don't worry if you don't remember any of these details, the screenshot is plenty either way).
I also appreciate the balance feedback, you might be right about exhume, I'll probably rebalance that! Although keep in mind that the game goes up in difficulty up to the 50th successful run you complete, so while you are overpowered now, you are eventually gonna need to be very overpowered.
This said, it might be boring if it's too trivial to win on the early runs. Balancing is very undertested at the moment, so your comments are much appreciated and will be taken into account!
- Just when I had a really good setup it deadlocked on the life gain equipment. It kept playing the life gain sound effect so I assume it was somehow triggering infinitely.
- I still find it weird how Exhaust works. Usually in Magic, etc. you tap when you attack. That you can use an Exhaust Ability after attack but not after turn end because then your monster is tapped seems weird to me. - If a card is taken control of and then sent to the graveyard, it should go back to the owner's graveyard. Very important when someone has grave recycle. - Floor boss level difficulty can vary a bit too much. Sometimes he opens 3 0 Mana UR and turn one kills you and sometimes he plays some strong minion and sacs it immediately and you just win.
After some testing it seems like the equipment has nothing to do with the infinite loop situation, it's the AI getting tangled with its own feet. I've applied some very heavy handed fixes to prevent these kind of issues and it seems to be working, but to be completely hones I just might have broken 20 different things, so I need to do a lot of testing. I uploaded the 0.3.07 windows version for the streamer to try out, but feel free to skip it if you are fed up with the deadlocks for now.
Regarding exhausting. The idea is to either allow you to attack and exhaust within the same turn, or NOT attack, and both block and exhaust on the same turn. It is a bit weird if you are used to MTG but I wanted to try something a bit different.
Regarding stole Minions, yes, this is a known bug that I haven't addressed, was left in this long because of how it's usually not relevant but I will definitely address it soon.
Lastly with boss difficulty, it is noted. With everything being so random it's hard to finely tune balance, but I will try to make it more consistent.
>Lastly with boss difficulty, it is noted. With everything being so random it's hard to finely tune balance, but I will try to make it more consistent.
I think bosses having some unfair cards is cool but when they have too many U/URs directly at the start it feels a bit unfair. Here for example opponent starts turn 1 by playing an effectively 1 Mana 5/7 and while also playing a 0 Mana ramp 2 that also increases life. I didn't screenshot the next turn but he dropped another crazy 3 or 4 Mana U or UR that removed everything I played.
Also I noticed one more thing:
This minion here says that when it blocks; mill 3. However, it also milled 3 when I attacked and I blocked it.
The linux export has no sound and runs a bit too poorly on my laptop, even with the lowest quality settings, to the point where I sadly couldn't try the game
Sorry to hear that, another dev tested the Linux build and the sound worked fine. Maybe the sound breaks because of the low specs.
Either way I apologize for the severe lack of optimization, this SHOULD be able to run on low spec computers, but alas, I haven't done a good job on that end.
I hope you get to test the game on a different computer at some point.
Tried the newest build. Immediately got a deadlock on the first level boss.
Opponent's Exaust: -4/-2 to target minion acticated and the game just halted. I heard some weird buzz sound effect playing in an endless loop in the background.
Another weird thing
Opponent targeted my monsters which were at 0/2 and 1/4 with his spell Firestorm (in grave) that had an effect to deal 6 damage to any targest. In terms of UI, I couldn't see how the damage was split. I chained a +1/+1 spell to save my 1/4 minion but somehow then my opponent's damage spell resolved without effect.
Right from the get-go, the game looks nice. The music is pretty, the menu is nice, the logo looks great, background environment looks pleasing. Real good.
The in-game UI looks great. Very clean and readable. The older I get the more trouble I have parsing game UIs, and I don't know if it's just because I'm old or if games these days just tend to have really dense, awful UIs, so it's nice to see one that I can understand at a glance.
I'm not really familiar with card games outside of oldschool Yu-Gi-Oh, so the battle interface took me a second to grasp, but it's pretty intuitive overall. The animations, sound effects, card art and everything else are all nice and fit well. Opening card packs is really satisfying. I don't have any complaints. It's very fun and feels intuitive enough for someone with only a little card battler experience to pick up and get going very quickly.
I can't say much but thank you since it was such a positive review, but I'll keep trying to improve the UI to make it better looking while also being easy parse c:
Also since you are here, I streamed your game and got a pretty funny clip of my dying, if you haven't seen that already you can find the vods here https://www.twitch.tv/fullenmelee.
- The time it takes for a card to go into focus when you hover it during gameplay feels too long
- It would be nice for Keywords and trigger conditions to not just be bold, but to also have a different color and for them to have a tooltip on how they work exactly.
- Tooltips sometimes pass through cards (happened during hovering over cards obtained from a pack while the menu in the back was still open)
- Had a weird thing with a card saying that target minion gains +2/+2, implying it to only have one target, however it somehow affected two minions.
- Likewise an opponents minion chained the ability to tap for -3/-3 and I couldn't figure out the target
- Seeing chainlinks would be nice
- Am I understanding correctly that "Timer" based items really refer to the playtime timer? That feels kind of bad in a game about designing your own cards where can invest a lot of time.
- Seeing your max life during battle would be nice so I know I healed back up to full at the end
- What does Scrap Equipment do?
- On level 1 boss my opponent somehow played at 6 mana a card that deals 6 to any target 3 times, i didn't quite understand it but I got insta nuked
- Game hung up when the starter card that gives +2/+2 whenever you heal triggered 3 times. Not sure why it triggered 3 times when i got 2 heals from the heal starter card
- A log would be helpful. Sometimes I don't understand what happens at all in level when various trigger effects quickly discard my hand and mill my deck.
- What happens when you accidentally forget to click Take Equipment? Would I ever not want to take it?
- Replaying the first level repeatedly due to getting sacked before you even draw your OC cards feels kind of bad since it's only after the first level that you get to craft something.
Overall very fun.
In general I believe there is some sort of bug that causes effects to go twice on chain.
Opponents minion generated the random effect to discard two cards, proceeded to discard my hand and then repeat in an infinite loop. I believe that's also what happened when I got one-shot by a card that should only deal 6 damage.
-I have tinkered with keyword colors but haven't been happy with the results, will look more into it. Keyworded cards have tooltips on every screen EXCEPT the pack opening screen, which is a new addition, I will add tooltip to that screen in time.
-The tooltips passing through cards you saw was just the tooltips for the items underneath the card pack cards, which is why it was covered by the pack cards, I forgot to block them from appearing when opening the packs but will be fixed soon.
-You bring up a VERY annoying bug twice which is the multiple target bug. I've been chasing this goose for a while but due to how inconsistently it occurs I'm having a hard time reproducing and fixing it but I will definitely work hard to squish the bug soon. For now just think about it as the AI cheating since you know, they are the bad guys, and bad guys cheat.
-The not seeing the target bug is related to the above mentioned bug, hopefully they will both be fixed by fixing the core problem. Still, you should always be able to see the target for a card if you hover it before it resolves, but maybe that's also bugged when interacting with the bugged multitarget shenanigans.
-Originally in my mind a chain order marker shouldn't be necessary due to you only being able to play 1 card or effect before playing another of your own, but with multiple effects triggering at once, I can understand how having everything numbered might be best.
-The timer is the playtime timer, only one equipment interacts with the time, and it is balanced that way due to having a VERY strong effect. Additionally, even if you go beyond the 12 minute mark, that equipment has related Luck events that allow you to make it into a permanent +1 mana instead of just being tied to the timer.
-During combat you can see your full health by expanding the HUD on the top right, or by opening your inventory with C (or by clicking the button in the HUD) . You can also use potions mid combat.
-The take equipment button is there because a handful of equipments have both positive and negative effects to them, so you might not want to take it if that negative would fuck with your current strategy. Scrap gives you gold based on the item's rarity so you get some sort of reward either way. The scraping mechanic was added 4 hours before the DD so that's why it has no tooltip indicating what it does. Also I will make it the default action, so if you forget to take the equipment you still get the gold no matter what.
-Sorry to hear about that bug, I'll look into it. I'm pretty sure it isn't tied to how many times you healed and rather some weird interaction might have happen to happen when you used the third heal.
-People have been asking for a log and I'm working on it, hopefully will be ready soon.
-I mentioned before but yeah, right now if you don't take or scrap, you just skip it. But will make it into scrap as default if you leave without clicking either of them.
-Even if you are getting trouble getting through the first set of floors, you should be getting EXP to use outside of the run to improve future runs, making them easier. Also you can craft before the first boss if you find a forge behind a door, but even if you do you shouldn't have many High quality crafting gems, so you wouldn't really be able to craft much. (Unless you have a lot of levels in the starting gem skill, but if that's the case you are likely doing well and not getting stuck in the early levels).
-Lastly, the bug with the discarding is likely due to it coming from a Random Effect, some last minute changes I did seem to have heavily disrupted the "Create a random effect" effect and I didn't get to test all the scenarios in time, hopefully I'll get them fixed soon, but seeing that the discard2 effect specifically is misbehaving is very helpful, thanks for the screencap!
In general I'm sorry you encountered so many bugs, but I really appreciate your feedback and comments! Thank you very much for your time!
Here's also a screenshot where the game deadlocked upon triggering the heal from the white unit and then the green unit suddenly triggering 3 times off it.
If you implement a log and fix the bugs you could easily release the game EA. Although since I read in the thread that just made the steam page it's probably better to let it collect some wishlists.
Hey man, I'm debugging right now and I would like to ask a quick question. Do you remember if you changed the autoclip speed in settings menu before this bug happened?
I love MTG and this seems right up my alley. Runs very poorly on my laptop, but it’s bearable. I noticed when crafting cards, that the text saying “You can’t use this effect as an Active Effect” displays when I’m trying to set a PASSIVE, and likewise with “You can’t use this effect as a Passive Effect” when I’m trying to set an ACTIVE. Seems the words just got switched.
I’ve been playing for maybe 20 minutes and I’m not gonna stop for a while. I like this a lot. The art is nice and the controls are pretty intuitive. It’s nice to see the phases laid out explicitly.
I just ran into a bug. I found a ring that makes each player generate a random effect each main phase or something. My opponent got the effect “Gain 5 life.” Well, my opponent is just gaining and gaining and gaining 5 life over and over again. It’s up to about 2000 now. See the screenshot I took:
Oof, I'm very sorry to hear that you encountered such an annoying bug, I'll try to take care of it asap!
The equips are a very fresh addition to the game and I couldn't test every possibility, this seems like a very silly and easy to fix bug. I will also fix the active and passive mishap.
I'm glad to hear that you are otherwise enjoying it!
Beautiful art and smooth gameplay that's fairly intuitive after a short period of getting familiar with it. Had a crash when I tried to restart the run mid-fight, but other than that only encountered some oddities (like one enemy after the first boss only ever summoned one minion, never attacked and otherwise kept healing itself, making it kind of a pushover). The "Resistance" stat was confusing at first before figuring out it's basically just the HP of the card.
Card crafting mechanic seems interesting, seemed fairly balanced at first glance though not sure how broken it could be with more experience with the game. At the moment class and stat balance seems a little odd to me: Wizard's special ability seems fairly worse compared to Warrior's for example. as skipping fights not only skips the actual gameplay but prevents you from getting rewards as well, which I'd imagine could bite you in the long run. (Maybe something like allowing you to escape mid-fight as would be more useful?)
Stats are an interesting twist, but having only one stat directly affecting combat makes it better than the rest in my opinion. Intelligence might give you more options for card crafting for example, but you're still limited by the resources you have from what I understand. For Dex, getting first turn is nice but is it worth over more HP? And while Luck seems interesting and some items do seem really good (vampiric vest or what it was called carried my first run), direct survivability still seems a better option in my eyes.
I guess my point is it would be interesting if every stat affected the direct gameplay in some way, which would give you different builds for fights on top of the deck builds you can get.
Regardless, still a solid entry to the deckbuilding roguelike and I'm interested to see how it'll progress.
I tried to reproduce the crash you mentioned but I couldn't get it to happen again, but I'll keep looking into it.
Regarding the crafting mechanic, it is balanced by the limitation of 3 cards per forge, and by the -High quality crafting gem- requirement, if you can break it regardless of those roadblocks, then you should be able be broken as a reward.
The Wizard's class ability is deceptively useful. I made it this way with 3 scenarios in mind. First, in case of you being low health before an enemy encounter. You can skip the enemy to prevent risking losing, and instead skip to get to a resting place, merchant to buy potions, or maybe even a luck event. Second the ability gets much stronger once you level up in the main menu, giving the Wizard loot as if he won the battle when he skips the battle. Lastly its also there to be the class of choice for people looking to get a record time in beating the game.
Your point about stats is valid. However Dexterity also has direct impact on the battle giving you extra cards in your starting hand, and giving you a higher chance of starting first as you mentioned, which is actually quite important on the later battles (and after higher amounts of successful runs which increases the difficulty) .
While Luck and Intelligence don't have a direct impact in combat, they both are vital to craft strong cards, and to obtain more money to get strong cards and equipment from shops. (Luck increases drop rate for crafting gems and gold, while intelligence improves the selection of effects you have when custom crafting, and lowers the prices when shopping) In my mind you have 2 combat stats, and 2 deckbuilding stats. But it is a fair concern. I think that the more successful runs you have, the more you will need the non-Strength stats (Or at least the more you need to strike a balance among all stats).
Again, thanks for your comment and for playing, I hope my explanation makes sense!
Didn't know you could also upgrade ablities, that upgrade definitely makes the wizard ability really good then. And you're right, I forgot about Dex giving you a bigger hand at the start, which is not an insignificant buff. And yes, your explanation makes sense - might be that the strength of those stats are simply not as obvious at their first impression.
Oddly I haven't encountered any crashes since either, so sadly cannot provide more information - might've been just something on my end too. I'll let you know if I'll encounter any other bugs and best of luck for the future!
Cool, thanks man! Let's hope the crash was just a fluke of sorts, at any rate, I've already been fixing bugs other people reported, so I'm uploading an update right now.
i played for about 30 minutes. as a warning, my only card game experience was 2 years of Yugioh in elementary school back around the time it was first released in yurope. i had fun playing and encountered no bugs or issues apart from some typos (Carge into combat on the main fight screen, and watching my setp in the "a pit appeared beneath your feet" event)
the main feature in my mind was the card crafting, which was cool but i think the cards i craft are vastly superior to any that i could find, so i assume there will be some balancing issues since a player can tailor make a deck according to his playstyle and superstomp the enemies without any hassle.
the game appears nicely polished otherwise. i liked the events and how your stats play into it. i actually forgot about stats until writing that last line - that's another aspect i don't think i've seen before. all of this combined creates a situation where the player is entirely in control of his playstyle (more HP if he is playing a deck that takes longer to set up, for instance). i think you should expand on this idea as much as possible, since it feels like all other card games that i know are restrictive in this format. it would make an interesting multiplayer game with many meta possibilities, that's for sure
either way, feel free to take this feedback with a grain of salt since i'm not a card game player and i might be all wrong in my interpretation of things. keep up the good work and i hope to see you in future DDs
I've been procrastinating the fixing of typos for a long time now, but I did fix both of the examples you just gave!
Custom craft is supposed to be strong since you are limited on how many cards you can craft per forge, and by the amount of High quality crafting gems you have, plus, the game gets hard, and the cards you can get from packs and shops get stronger as you play, so it isn't as unbalanced as you might think.
I really appreciate your positive comments, I hope other players agree with the thinks you liked about the game.
Sadly multiplayer was originally intended to be a feature, but I decided it was out of the scope of the game if I want to finish and publish it in a reasonable timeframe. Plus the code is so spaghettied at this point that an implementation down the road seems very unlikely :c
Anyways, thanks again for the feedback and nice comments!
Comments
I came in with little to no expectations aside an impression from the colorful visuals you've got going. I didn't expect the depth there would be to the game. I was very surprised in a good way. I played on 0.4.0 Windows. At first, gameplay felt straightforward and simple. I can attack, however I can't defend on the enemy's turn if I do. That makes sense. Turns out Warrior always starts out with a card that has Relentless. I think that is a really good feature for new players since learning when to not attack and when to defend is a tricky thing in the first few runs. Especially since that card also has other abilities such as gaining 1 life and has 4 Resistance power. It's a card I almost always played when I drew it. That's without including all the other card synergies I discovered after playing the Warrior deck.
I did try out the other decks a few times. Mainly, I tried out Adventurer to try and get a grasp on the stats system. Luck and fortune are still foggy to me. Their influence seems to pale in comparison to whether or not I make keen decisions over the entire run since even without pumping luck, there's still a lot of chance involved with the cards and equipment I got. I never used intelligence since my strategy was to hit up merchants when I could if I had a handy sum of gold. For example, when I did my first few runs I skipped merchants and tried to aim for treasure and luck events. The rewards weren't enough to keep me winning though and I could even lose for messing with treasure and luck events. Merchants on the other hand were at least more consistent in that at worst, I could get something on the side like a card pack or scroll of experience. At best, really good cards since the shop rolls 8 cards for me of varying quality. On that point, the only part I understand from the merchant is that the cards seem to scale with either the amount of events I passed through, my level or perhaps something like the average strength of current cards I have. The one consistent aspect I noticed in each run is that the cards get better the further in I am and are almost never that good on a first merchant. Back to stats, I hard focused strength and dexterity. Strength is awesome for more than one reason. As a beginning player, health is at all times great to have more of. At a more advanced level of play, health points are key to stalling for growing the mana pool or getting the cards that I need to make a comeback. Dexterity is similar. The ability to go first or second isn't vital to me since it's dependent on the cards and equipment I have that run. However, the more cards I have at the beginning of the round is crucial. I would say it's even crucial for the enemy. One run, I got an equipment called the "Weakness Warhorn." I don't know if equipment names are unique since card names aren't. Anyways, the equipment's effect is "Champions draw 2 fewer cards at the start of every battle." It's a unique equipment, so I know that's a good tier, although I'm not sure if that's higher or lower than legendary. The gist is that this equipment didn't seem that impressive at first sight until I entered combat. There's a certain kind of comedy in watching the enemy not play anything for multiple turns. Especially when the early turns may be where huge plays happen and dominate the rest of the battle. One of my favorite equipment even if I only got it once. For the most part, I picked up the equipment to see what it meant in action and it concluded in something a lot better.
To a large extent, the Warrior deck hits home for me. I got very familiar with every card in the deck. For a moment in the first twenty runs or so, I had a misconception that I might have to stick with the deck because changing out the core cards can be expensive. The truth is more in tune with the idea that every card in the deck acts as a jumping off point. That one minion-beast that is able to Reinforce I on summon and on death is a quick 2 Attack power hitter for only 1 mana or to buff up another card since Reinforce I is not restricted to the end of turn. That is unless there's also the minion-celestial that's able to draw 1 card on summon and give +1/+0 to all Beast minions then it's a quick 3 Attack power for 1 mana cost. Play two or three of the minion-beast with Reinforce I and I can practically one-shot the early game. Sometimes it's even beneficial to buff the minion-celestial with draw 1 card on summon effect considering that minion has 2 Resistance power and anything with Resistance power is more likely to stay on my field. The minion-beast only has a Resistance power of 1 or 2 with Reinforce I and don't have a field buff effect like the minion-celestial for Beast minions. In that sense, the minion-beasts are more like throwaway blocks since even the strongest attack can be blocked if there's no special effects. That plus the persistence of Reinforce I means I can continually buff the minion-celestial to even become an offensive unit or stay as a defensive unit with 3+ Resistance power. All of that for a 1 mana-cost minion-celestial and 1 mana-cost minion-beast.
The 2 mana-cost minion-celestial with Relentless and life gain has 4 Resistance power is great later on in a battle when my mana pool is bigger because the minion isn't highly viable on its own. In the first few turns, gaining life can sometimes turn around a victory. That's not usually the case though. The 2 mana-cost minion-celestial pairs super well with the 3 mana-cost minion-beast with piercing and +2/+2 when it procs continually. This is a mana-cost of 5 for 2 minions whereas the mana-cost of 2 for 2 minions as seen previously works better as a shield to hold off attacks until I can build an offense. All those 0-cost and 1-cost spell-celestials that give life gain in addition to the 1-cost +3/+3 spell-beasts can carry me quite far in runs. Usually this strategy is enough to carry me up to the last champion of the first floor(?). The last card which is the 1 mana-cost no-effect minion-beast with 3 Resistance power is like a low budget Relentless minion-celestial is the best way I can put it. 3 Resistance power is quite strong for early turns since I rarely see anything that can hit that hard until mid-game.
All in all, the early runs were simple and fun. A sense of naivety. I would say everything completely shifts once you begin to understand what effects exist and how the battlefield is dominated after the first floor. A surprise on every corner is the way the real game feels. A whole lot of "Wait, that's a 0 mana-cost card?", "10 Resistance power at 1 mana-cost? I can't break that with attacks on the first turn or even the third turn.", and "Hold up, you can exhaust on main-2 and during an attack?" The enjoyment of the game goes up a multitude here along with the usual roguelike frustration of chance. It's a really good learning experience. Especially with crafting, I wasn't sure what was going to last over time rather than a battle or two then get replaced by card packs or the merchant. By simply being observant of how the enemy plays, I was able to copy and hone their tactics and become one with the card. Perhaps even what you call, a card artisan.
I'm probably not going to be able to recall all the exciting moments I saw. It is a "short" game in terms of being about a half-hour to an hour in length for me on runs. Of course, it's actually a long game because I'll replay it more times after that. I definitely think there's at least a few hundred more hours to go before I full internalize everything and what the most optimal strategies are. I think I've only scratched the surface and other players are bound to find more creative ways of playing. All the variables from stat choices, event choices, merchant purchase choices, crafting choices (itself which contains many factors like active and passive effects with effects and timing), minion type choices and variant choices. From my point of view, the game has got a nice sense of complexity to it and maybe the game is a lot simpler than I think it is as I have yet to discover it all and see it as a whole.
A rough rundown of the interesting builds I saw with enemies or did myself would be:
Some rare things I did see that makes me want to play again were: card packs with 4 cards with a blue outline, Doll of a Dog, Rabbit Rear, the mystery of what Renewed Rucksack is, trying to get 5 Suspicious Scales, the mystery of what the Chromatic Cuirass really does, the difference between average, strong and very strong cards, the secret requirement for the heavy gate, the locked metal door, the dojo, the throne, the disappearing floor, and the abandoned forge (I presume it has to do with equipment), whether the enemy AI is always playing optimally or if it can play dumb at lower levels, and what difference Artificer's Artifact really makes. Also a little curious if minion-types actually have some impact on cards. I can't confirm they do, however the starter decks seem to indicate minion-types have some aspects tied to them. I have plans to make more X-tier cards too. That was unexpected after seeing UR and thinking that was the end tier.
A minor bug I did see or I misunderstood is "When this minion blocks, give target minion -3/-3 until the end of the turn." This card didn't block. I blocked against the card with this effect and it weakened my minion. The other stuff is simple things that you probably have on your todo list like the "all all" in text and the blinking cursor behind the "Character Name" text. There might have been another where if I have the exact amount of experience, I don't level. I can't confirm that one as I only saw it once. It's probably a simple < and <= mix up. Another small issue is that music will stop playing in main phase which might be the result of spending a few minutes in that phase.
Overall, Card Artisan was a really fun experience to the point of mild addiction. I only managed to win the dungeon/castle raid once, so I haven't experienced all there is to in the game. I've barely reached level ten on the meta-progression stuff (I do wonder if I have to do meta-progression or if I can do a zero run all the time too, it's hard for me to know with enemy growth). There might be a bunch of information that flew over my head and I didn't realize it here. It was a bit sad to part ways with my deck after the first win. I wanted to see how well it could last against more threats. I did have a slight expectation that the dungeon would go endlessly or at least ten floors. I understand that scaling is difficult though (as it does scale tremendously when you get to the second floor), so for what the experience was, the execution was done well. The visuals are nice and clean. The particles look a little weird sometimes like when battle ends and it fades or on health damage. Navigating a large hand of cards (10+) is a slight pain and likely not a common occurrence anyways. I don't know if you have plans for the top UI to be unfolded indefinitely. A couple times, I did want have the timer visible to see what my average time was and I wouldn't mind having it open at all moments for that. On my part, I forgot to look and so there is no record that I have on my times which is fine. I should remind myself more often. Similarly, I know there isn't saves yet, however have you thought about keeping a history of decks from run to run? I'm often curious what I played in different runs. Maybe other players don't care for that kind of thing though. I know it's a minor thing. I enjoyed the bits of writing that you did have with events and choices. They paired well with the art and it did feel immersive like a real dungeon crawl except you're a looter who fights with the power of cards made in a magic forge (or is it really all just an abstraction for bringing in a party?). Whatever it is, I look forward to what's next in terms of development, whether it be new card effects, that adventure mode or something else altogether.
Well, where to begin... This is the nicest, most thoughtful piece of feedback I've ever seen! I spend the entire read rooting for you throughout your journey, joyfully laughing as you discovered new mechanics and figured out how to overcome challenges!
I'm so happy to see a player that chose the Warrior as its preferred class and went with a predominantly STR/DEX build. Up until now, most dedicated players that I got feedback from went the combo route so they dumped all into INT/LUK with either the Rogue or the Wizard, so seeing that you can have a good time with these more traditional builds is really nice.
Allow me to clarify some of the doubts you expressed:
-Luck and fortune: This stat is very easy to underestimate, especially as a new player. While it has no direct impact on your combat abilities, it influences many factors such as the number of items dropped in combat and in chests, the quality of cards opened in packs, the quality of cards found in merchants, the likeliness of getting better equipment, and the quality of rewards at some luck events. Most important of all might be the number of drops you get in combat and chests since that:s the most consistent way of amassing high-quality crafting gems, which are vital to creating a powerful deck.
-Intelligence; The other stat that also doesn't directly affect combat, but is likely to be the most important of all for later runs since this stat determines both your crafting ability and the prices you find at merchants. (With some added secret bonuses). Cheaper merchants are very nice, especially on later runs when prices start getting steep. But the most important is the access to more crafting options at the forge. This makes Intelligence key for combo decks since finding the piece you are looking for on a random pack is not very likely.
The merchant is definitely one of the strongest and most fun rooms in the game. Luck events can be pretty good, but unless you are out of gold, going for a merchant is probably the better idea, yeah.
Again, your describing your journey discovering the power of certain mechanics such as making Champions start with -2 cards is really exciting to read because that's exactly what I envisioned a new player's experience to be! (Unique is the tier below Legendary, btw)
Your description of the warrior deck also makes me very happy, it feels like I was able to hit some sort of balance in the starter deck where you can appreciate every piece and play around with them. While there are always better and worse cards at an objective level, every piece in chess plays a role! Sometimes testing these kinds of design points is hard as the designer, so hearing such a detailed opinion on what your impressions of the deck were is very reassuring!
The game difficulty goes up considerably after the first boss and the shenanigans begin much as you described with cards that traditionally would be crazy, but that's kind of the charm of the game, I think. Your enemies have crazy cards, so you'll have to match their might and get crazy cards of your own to beat them!
I'm not gonna lie, you had me hollering with the " Perhaps even what you call, a card artisan. " line, I wish I could have a review this charming on my Steam page once the game goes up there.
I'm going to dispel *some* of the doubts you outlined since some fo them shouldn't be mysteries and might be a bit unclear due to poor explaining on my side.
-Blue online on items: This just means that it's a more powerful item (Comparatively to what you would've got with a regular frame item in that same situation)
-Rabbit's Rear: Ensures that you get at least one SR or UR card in your packs. So basically makes card packs stronger.
-Suspicious Scale: This only makes the number of cards you open in packs go up by 1. (For example if your card pack says "A pouch containing 1 card..." you'll open 2 cards. The "Max 5" refers to the max amount of cards a pack can contain, so if your pack already has 5 cards in it, this equipment will have no effect. Unfortunately, you can only get 1 copy of each piece of equipment.
-The AI is playing the best it can, sometimes it isn't optimal because it isn't intelligent enough, sometimes it makes a suboptimal play that won't kill the player but will damage you so your next enemy takes you out. At any rate, AI will be improved down the line.
-Minion types are relevant mostly for effects and costs such as "Give +1/+1 to all Elemental Minions you control" or "You must control 2 Beast Minions to play this card". Although each color has affinities for certain types of effects. This means that certain card effects are more commonly found with certain colors. For example, Celestial cards have a higher chance of getting "Heal" abilities.
-Rarity: The chart goes C Common, U Uncommon, R Rare, SR Super Rare, UR Ultra Rare, and X for custom cards such as the ones you forge.
-
Thanks for the bug reports, some of those are on the laundry list, but some others I haven't encountered, so I'll try to replicate and fix them!
Regarding your comments/wishlist of features, here are some of the planned upcoming features:
-Saving of runs.
-Stats such as best time, playtime, minions killed, card packs opened, etc. Some of these are already being logged, so your best time is saved and will be viewable when Card Artisan 0.5 hits the shelves!
-Run history is *not* currently in the plans but honestly I should add that.
-New effects. ("Destroy all minions", "Shuffle your graveyard into your deck", and "Destroy your opponent's graveyard" are all already in the works).
-New trigger times. ("When this card is discarded..." and "When this card is milled..." are both ready in the dev build).
-Improvements to the modding capabilities.
-A Quest/Achievement system with a bit of meta-progression of its own.
-
Lastly, just to clarify the "lore", it is supposed to be just one hero going into a castle dungeon and creating powerful spells by using rare materials on magical forges.
Once again, I deeply appreciate your detailed feedback and it makes me extremely happy to see people enjoying my game enough to feel compelled to leave such a review. These are the kind of comments that make me wanna keep going and keep pumping features and updates as soon as I can. I really hope to see you around in the future, fren!
I sunk way too much time into this game. Only thing that still sort of confuses me is the center row and the order of events as they unfold, I kind of just blindly choose cards and click clackity click.
overall very fun.
Thanks for the comment, fren.
I'm sorry I don't have a proper tutorial to explain basic stuff like the phases in the center row but at least I'm happy you felt compelled to sink a couple of hours into the game even without knowing exactly what was going on with those things!
Played 3.13. Warrior.
Make a black border on your sword icon exe it seems invisible for some settings.
Great juice overall, very nice music.
I love the moddability for card images, this should be a focal point for your marketing "you can REALLY design your card here!" (make some bullshit card with goku, john wick etc, go nuts). I dunno if this mod also goes to card border and table, but it should.
I'm not a card game guy (and never player slay of the spire), so take everything with salt:
My brother made me play magic arena once, so I understand something of this, and everything is clear, but tutorial asap. Stupid example: an angel has relentless, but in the explanation on the left side of the screen you say "does not get exhausted when attacking". I know because my brother talks only about magic, but I don't really know. Maybe it would be helpful to know where your game differs from magic, and maybe this is a super niche game FOR magic players, but a newbie needs everything explained.
tldr, copy and implement a magic and heartstone tutorial. "how to play" is not enough for a noob.
card design type needs to be more obvious (see yu-gi-oh). Multiple times I mistook a creature for a spell card.
Make lvlup standout more (also told u in stream, su dunno if it's already noted). Right now it seems a common notification.
I like your events, they remind me of hands of fate.
I don't like the damage to player/enemy sound effect, but I assume it's placeholder
It's nice you can access your menù from the battlefield, but the icon it's too hidden.
I played vs elemantal wind mage "make a random effect". At first glance those random effects seemed out of nowhere, then I noticed dice of doom. Tip, you need a log of what happens during the game, think of digital tabletops like neverwinter/mmos (dunno if other games already do this, or I'm asking too much).
I don't have the skills to have an opinion on card crafting.
Got to final boss of raid but got wiped out.
Only bug: after I lost I choose 'go to menu'. In the menu cursor was invisible and couldn't click anything. I had to reastart.
Not my kind of game, but I think it's cool. GL next DD.
First of all, thank you very much for your feedback, fren!
-The sword icon will be replaced soon enough, but thanks for letting me know.
-I don't know to what extent I can include images like "Goku" in my Steam page/trailer, but I'll keep the message in mind! I agree on modding being important and it will be expanded soon enough to include things like borders and whatnot.
-I have no excuse for the lack of a tutorial other than it being a pain to make, but it will be there. The relentless Minion should also display the Exhausted remainder text, I'll make sure that's fixed.
-I'm glad to inform you that everything below this point has been addressed and will be up next update (Different card frame for Minions, Event log, cursor disappearing bug).
I hope you like the improvements, and thanks again for the feedback!
Shit got real when I realized that enemy can have gain health cards too.
I'm not a card game player so I can only give superficial opinions, for the record.
The game is intuitive enough that I missed the tutorial page and still managed to get through the first set of encounters while getting a grasp of the mechanics and guessing the card stats. Starting with relentless cards didn't help with learning attack/block thing though. I like the mana increasing by turn flow so far. Does non-utilized mana have any uses or does it incentivize using all of it each turn?
Hover on cards has some weird z sorting right now, it should put the card on top instantly (I know the pain). I'm not sure about having my hand cards cut off at the bottom. I'd rather see the entire cards whenever it's time to play them if possible, but it's easy to memorize cards by pictures so far, so it's not a big deal.
After game over and returning to main menu the cursor is not there, and not even just invisible. I had to alt f4.
Thanks for the feedback, fren!
I'm glad you made it without a tutorial, because even though there's the how to play page, a proper tutorial should be in place, and it will be sooner rather than later (hopefully).
The point of saving mana is to use it during your opponent's turn, but saving it any further has no point since it regenerates at the start of your turn.
Hovering on cards and the sorting you mention is set on a timer on purpose, I found that having it change instantly felt janky to me, but some people have complained that it takes too long right now, so I'll tweak that.
Only seeing a the top part of your cards is also designed that way on purpose (sort of) because having your entire hand up all the time is a bit too clutter-y and I rather have a cleaner field of view and then check cards when I have to rather than not having the option to have them tucked away. I said sort of because due to how big I made everything I have way less visual real state to spare, so yeah, that's a design flaw that I have to address at some point but that I'm dreading. So yeah, I'm counting on the memorization of cards that you mentioned for now.
The cursor error is there because right before uploading the latest available update I did some major code cleanup and with the unnecessary stuff I also removed that cursor.visible=true, it will of course be fixed for the next update (A big one, btw)
Again, thanks for playing and thanks again for the feedback!
I'm not sure if I'd just been doing something wrong, but when I tried to make a mod, the identities I tried to set to certain colors were shuffled around. Is there some way to edit the mods, or is that something in the works?
Either way! I'm loving the game, but I may start cursing you for how addicting the game is coming.
Hey, friend!
Thank you very much for your kind comments!
I've fixed the traits shuffling around with today's update (0.3.13), have you had a chance to download it?
I think there's no fixing the mod you've already created, but what you could do is create the mod again (just the distribution of the traits) and then dropping the previous mod's images as they are in the new mod's folder. Sorry that there's no better way to fix it, but that feature is definitely coming down the road alongside a bunch of other modding capabilities!
Also, I'm stoked to hear you are liking the game! Please let me know if you find any other issues so I can fix them right away!
Ah! Awesome, I'll download it in a bit once i get a few things taken care of. Thanks!
And yeah I'll let you know if there's anything else weird that I notice. I'm not sure if this was fully a bug, but when I went against a boss, they got into a endless loop of two zero cost cards that both had exhume, along with their own abilities but that's not the issue. Maybe you can increase the probable cost of the exhume ability?
Ah! Another player reported exactly that today.
It wasn't a bug per se, it was just the AI not having a real reason to stop doing that infinite loop since it was a strong "combo".
With the 0.3.13 update I also included a limiter to tell the AI to chill it with the infinite combos. I also made exhaust cards a bit more expensive in the last patch, but maybe it wasn't enough hahaha.
At any rate, this issue should be solved now c:
- when you first launch the game, clicking on the left on difficulty to lower it will make it drop to 0 instantly and play the "error" animation as if I'm trying to go below 0 or above max
- I often alt-tab out of games, currently hitting any key will skip the new cards after opening a pack, I'd prefer it not to be the case
- just had this issue where new cards are tilted to the right, no idea why : imgur.com/a/J9Nyoal
- I'd really like the vault to be or be able to be sorted by last obtained
-I'll look into that, someone mentioned this too but I didn't understand what they meant, I think I get it now.
-Roger that I'll make alt and tab not skip
-This issue is killing me, sometimes it's aligned right and sometimes it isn't. I'll look more into it.
-Sorting options are very primitive at the moment, I'll try to improve them in the future!
to anyone who reads this that is not the developer.
This is a cool game. You can come up with some interesting builds and mod cards to use any images you want.
I recorded playing games with commentary, this one has a short video of one of the op decks in the bonus folder
Here's the link to the whole DD50 folder:
https://mega.nz/folder/GclCXISL#gwE9S1kRTbe6amYLH2RiYA
I also included a zip file with a the quick mod pack I used
I love it, been playing for several days. There are bugs blah blah blah, you know.
I'd really like :
- a full reset option (does difficulty increase after beating it? I've been having a hard time restarting without my upgrades. a lot of games have a profile system, could be that) *edit* my bad, I just saw that it does. I didn't notice the message before.
- being able to close without quitting the run (that's just me but my graphics card is *really* bad, and starts heating up even with this. it's always been like that, it's not the game. the blood effect literally slows down the game. is it particles? maybe it could be a prerecorded animation? I realize I'm in a minority though)
- some patch notes, even short. once again, just personal preference
I'll try to be more technical if I encounter actual bugs.
First of all, thank you very much for the comment and suggestions!
Regarding the difficulty, aren't you in luck?! New version with Difficulty modulation just went up!
Saving runs will definitely be coming, a lot of people have been asking for this feature, so I'll make sure to add it soon enough.
The current graphics settings are virtually useless, and a proper "high performance" mode is something I want to tackle but have been putting aside in order to focus on more flashy features. Still, I will have to work on it at some point because the current PC required to play this is definitely not in line with how the game looks.
At some point I'll add in patch notes, they aren't in place at the moment because up until last week my player base was basically 0, so there was no point in having them. Even if it's just 4 people instead of 0, now I don't have that excuse anymore, so I'll have to add them soon enough.
I'll keep doing minor updates whenever I find and fix more gameplay bugs, but the next big thing coming is the achievement/quest system that should give the roguelite gameplay loop a much more rewarding zing to it.
At any rate, thanks again for your feedback, and do let me know if you find any bugs!
Hey, fren!
I implemented some small changes that should help with your situation. The "Lowest" graphics settings in the options menu now disables most particle effects, so that might help out a bit.
I'll make a new build and upload it tomorrow (0.3.12) if you wanna give that a try when it's up, that'd be great!
Great stuff man, love it. I've been playing MtG and roguelikes for like 20 years, so this is perfect for me. Your UI work is top notch. I really need to crib some notes from you on making a satisfying UI. The card art looks great, very nice use of AI. I've thought for a while that a card game would be a good candidate for such a thing, because you don't need, or even want, perfect coherence with each piece.
I have a display issue. My monitor is 1920x1200 by default, and that causes the left and right side of the screen to clip. I know monitor resolution stuff is a huge pain in the ass, but you might want to sort that out. In my last game, I got dinged so many times in reviews because I didn't handle different resolutions very well.
Overall, it's an excellent fusion of slay the spire and MtG, both games I really love. You've got something really nice here, it's fun and very well polished. Just get your Steam page up hahah.
Thanks, man! You are always very supportive and I really appreciate that.
I'm always relieved that people don't hate the UI because I'm not very confident when it comes to UI, if anything I was thinking about how much nicer YOUR UI is and how I needed to take some notes!
Regarding resolutions, you are 100% correct, it is a little gremlin staring at me from outside my window, I know I have to take care of it relatively soon or it's gonna get worse.
The Steam page is coming soon (TM). Jokes aside, I'll focus on polishing the logo and getting the main track of the final soundtrack going very soon. With that ready, I'll publish the Steam page.
You saw me play this on stream, so I don't think I need to say too much. But I would like to reiterate point that the game really needs a tutorial, especially for players like me who don't play card games at all. I liked the card art, even if it's AI generated.
Keep at it dude! I had a good time playing (Once I played the most recent build that didn't break).
Thank you very much for your time and patience, man!
You did a great job playing, especially for someone that doesn't love card games.
I most definitely agree on needing a tutorial and hopeful one day I'll stop procrastinating and I'll finally implement one.
Cheers!
I played the new version. It went a lot better, but I still deadlocked at a champion battle. Not sure how many levels there are but this one looked like the last one of a run.
This one here is just a small one
Darn, so close.yet.so far...
I have a very pressing question about your screenshot. Do you remember the effect of the blue card being played?
Also, the AI is paying the card cost of sacrificing Minions, do you remember if the game locked before or after the minions were sent to the graveyard?
Shield bug is an easy fix.
One day auradev, one day you'll be able to complete a run where the game doesn't die on you...
Sadly I have no clue what the card would even do (since there is no log and the card is only shown very briefly :'D)
I actually thought that it was a 0 Mana UR Sacrifice a minion card with no further effects :'D :'D
It's okay, I should be able to replicate this regardless, it seems to be an "AI paying cardcosts" bug. Btw you can zoom cards by right-clicking or by scrolling them, so if there's something on top of it and you want to read the card below you can try those two options.
At any rate, I just fixed a major issue with the AI activating Exhaust effects and them not resolving.
I'll try to tackle your issue and add a difficulty reset that another anon requested. Hopefully, I can upload another fix today.
I have finally cleared a run! The only bug I encountered was sometimes none of my spells were resolving, which was kind of annoying since I invested a lot into the cheap 6 dmg spell and crafted cards to recycle it.
Freaking congratulations my man!
I've been chasing that "nothing of my spells are resolving" bug. I've encountered it but can't reproduce it. It solves itself after a turn or after you play some spells, right? (Just trying to see if the behavior was the same for you).
I don't know if you've been doing it thus far, but remember you can use the gems you get during the run to power your character on the main menu.
Also, I just realized I can recreate the card's effect just by looking at the name. That blue card from the crash should read "As an additional cost to playing this card, sacrifice 1 Minion. Draw 3 cards; then, deal 3 damage to any target."
So yeah, the screenshot once again being super helpful! Thanks!
>I don't know if you've been doing it thus far, but remember you can use the gems you get during the run to power your character on the main menu.
Yeah I've been using the gems, mostly to get the Deal 1 damage 6 times spell to 1 Mana so I can loop it with Exhume, and raise Dex to better find my good cards.
>It solves itself after a turn or after you play some spells, right? (Just trying to see if the behavior was the same for you).
Not after a turn. However, it's not always "not resolving" sometimes it seems to also be just defining less targets. In one game, the Deal 1 damage 6 times spell only allowed me to give 1 target so I looped it until I burned my enemy to 0. The other time I couldn't specify any targets and I saw it, without any animation or other feedback, reduce the life of an opponent's minion. So actually something did sometimes resolve.
Very whacky.
I see, not exactly what I had in mind.
This is a good lead, however, I'll test using the Firestorm spell a bunch and see if I can recreate those behaviors!
Here's another deadlock
Having played the game for a bit now, I also have two pieces of balancing feedback:
- 0 Mana is undervalued. The difference between a 0 and a 1 Mana card seems to be just 1 Mana, but being able to play things for free and turning the game into Yugioh is a huge difference. Imo getting a card to 0 should cost a significant amount of additional gems.
- Exhume is undervalued. Exhume is basically Draw 1/2 from your discard pile, allowing you to recur or potentially even loop your wincon. In this game I had a 0 Discard 2 opponent cards and I also had a card that allowed me to Bounce 1 whenever a card is played. This allowed me to loop my opponents hand to 0 and then recur my damage spell. It costs like 2 gems to make 0 Mana 0/1 Exhaust: Exume dudes and using powered up starting cards you can run wincons that are worthwhile to loop.
Dang, for a moment there I thought this post wasn't gonna have a deadlock waiting for me. Just one quick question, do you remember if your enemy discard the card as a part of its cost or did it lock before that? Also did he only had the 0 cost card in hand when he played it, or did he also had that 2 cost blue card? (Don't worry if you don't remember any of these details, the screenshot is plenty either way).
I also appreciate the balance feedback, you might be right about exhume, I'll probably rebalance that! Although keep in mind that the game goes up in difficulty up to the 50th successful run you complete, so while you are overpowered now, you are eventually gonna need to be very overpowered.
This said, it might be boring if it's too trivial to win on the early runs. Balancing is very undertested at the moment, so your comments are much appreciated and will be taken into account!
- Just when I had a really good setup it deadlocked on the life gain equipment. It kept playing the life gain sound effect so I assume it was somehow triggering infinitely.
- I still find it weird how Exhaust works. Usually in Magic, etc. you tap when you attack. That you can use an Exhaust Ability after attack but not after turn end because then your monster is tapped seems weird to me.
- If a card is taken control of and then sent to the graveyard, it should go back to the owner's graveyard. Very important when someone has grave recycle.
- Floor boss level difficulty can vary a bit too much. Sometimes he opens 3 0 Mana UR and turn one kills you and sometimes he plays some strong minion and sacs it immediately and you just win.
After some testing it seems like the equipment has nothing to do with the infinite loop situation, it's the AI getting tangled with its own feet. I've applied some very heavy handed fixes to prevent these kind of issues and it seems to be working, but to be completely hones I just might have broken 20 different things, so I need to do a lot of testing. I uploaded the 0.3.07 windows version for the streamer to try out, but feel free to skip it if you are fed up with the deadlocks for now.
Regarding exhausting. The idea is to either allow you to attack and exhaust within the same turn, or NOT attack, and both block and exhaust on the same turn. It is a bit weird if you are used to MTG but I wanted to try something a bit different.
Regarding stole Minions, yes, this is a known bug that I haven't addressed, was left in this long because of how it's usually not relevant but I will definitely address it soon.
Lastly with boss difficulty, it is noted. With everything being so random it's hard to finely tune balance, but I will try to make it more consistent.
Again thank you very much for your time!
I think bosses having some unfair cards is cool but when they have too many U/URs directly at the start it feels a bit unfair. Here for example opponent starts turn 1 by playing an effectively 1 Mana 5/7 and while also playing a 0 Mana ramp 2 that also increases life. I didn't screenshot the next turn but he dropped another crazy 3 or 4 Mana U or UR that removed everything I played.
Also I noticed one more thing:
This minion here says that when it blocks; mill 3. However, it also milled 3 when I attacked and I blocked it.
EDIT: Screenshots are from 3.0.6.
That bug is still be present on 0.3.07, so thanks for reporting it!
Also limiting or managing the amounts of SR/URs sounds like a viable idea, actually!
The linux export has no sound and runs a bit too poorly on my laptop, even with the lowest quality settings, to the point where I sadly couldn't try the game
Hey!
Sorry to hear that, another dev tested the Linux build and the sound worked fine. Maybe the sound breaks because of the low specs.
Either way I apologize for the severe lack of optimization, this SHOULD be able to run on low spec computers, but alas, I haven't done a good job on that end.
I hope you get to test the game on a different computer at some point.
Cheers!
Tried the newest build. Immediately got a deadlock on the first level boss.
Opponent's Exaust: -4/-2 to target minion acticated and the game just halted. I heard some weird buzz sound effect playing in an endless loop in the background.
Another weird thing
Opponent targeted my monsters which were at 0/2 and 1/4 with his spell Firestorm (in grave) that had an effect to deal 6 damage to any targest. In terms of UI, I couldn't see how the damage was split. I chained a +1/+1 spell to save my 1/4 minion but somehow then my opponent's damage spell resolved without effect.
I'm sorry Auradev, I'll look into it .
Fixing the multitarget bug might have gone too far and the Ai might be doing NOtargeting lmao. What a shitshow on my part.
Right from the get-go, the game looks nice. The music is pretty, the menu is nice, the logo looks great, background environment looks pleasing. Real good.
The in-game UI looks great. Very clean and readable. The older I get the more trouble I have parsing game UIs, and I don't know if it's just because I'm old or if games these days just tend to have really dense, awful UIs, so it's nice to see one that I can understand at a glance.
I'm not really familiar with card games outside of oldschool Yu-Gi-Oh, so the battle interface took me a second to grasp, but it's pretty intuitive overall. The animations, sound effects, card art and everything else are all nice and fit well. Opening card packs is really satisfying. I don't have any complaints. It's very fun and feels intuitive enough for someone with only a little card battler experience to pick up and get going very quickly.
Thank you very much for your comment, friend!
I can't say much but thank you since it was such a positive review, but I'll keep trying to improve the UI to make it better looking while also being easy parse c:
Also since you are here, I streamed your game and got a pretty funny clip of my dying, if you haven't seen that already you can find the vods here https://www.twitch.tv/fullenmelee.
Cheers! (Also great Konata pfp)
- Lots of interesting juice
- The time it takes for a card to go into focus when you hover it during gameplay feels too long
- It would be nice for Keywords and trigger conditions to not just be bold, but to also have a different color and for them to have a tooltip on how they work exactly.
- Tooltips sometimes pass through cards (happened during hovering over cards obtained from a pack while the menu in the back was still open)
- Had a weird thing with a card saying that target minion gains +2/+2, implying it to only have one target, however it somehow affected two minions.
- Likewise an opponents minion chained the ability to tap for -3/-3 and I couldn't figure out the target
- Seeing chainlinks would be nice
- Am I understanding correctly that "Timer" based items really refer to the playtime timer? That feels kind of bad in a game about designing your own cards where can invest a lot of time.
- Seeing your max life during battle would be nice so I know I healed back up to full at the end
- What does Scrap Equipment do?
- On level 1 boss my opponent somehow played at 6 mana a card that deals 6 to any target 3 times, i didn't quite understand it but I got insta nuked
- Game hung up when the starter card that gives +2/+2 whenever you heal triggered 3 times. Not sure why it triggered 3 times when i got 2 heals from the heal starter card
- A log would be helpful. Sometimes I don't understand what happens at all in level when various trigger effects quickly discard my hand and mill my deck.
- What happens when you accidentally forget to click Take Equipment? Would I ever not want to take it?
- Replaying the first level repeatedly due to getting sacked before you even draw your OC cards feels kind of bad since it's only after the first level that you get to craft something.
Overall very fun.
In general I believe there is some sort of bug that causes effects to go twice on chain.
Thank you very much for the feedback, fren!
-I will look into reducing the focus timer.
-I have tinkered with keyword colors but haven't been happy with the results, will look more into it. Keyworded cards have tooltips on every screen EXCEPT the pack opening screen, which is a new addition, I will add tooltip to that screen in time.
-The tooltips passing through cards you saw was just the tooltips for the items underneath the card pack cards, which is why it was covered by the pack cards, I forgot to block them from appearing when opening the packs but will be fixed soon.
-You bring up a VERY annoying bug twice which is the multiple target bug. I've been chasing this goose for a while but due to how inconsistently it occurs I'm having a hard time reproducing and fixing it but I will definitely work hard to squish the bug soon. For now just think about it as the AI cheating since you know, they are the bad guys, and bad guys cheat.
-The not seeing the target bug is related to the above mentioned bug, hopefully they will both be fixed by fixing the core problem. Still, you should always be able to see the target for a card if you hover it before it resolves, but maybe that's also bugged when interacting with the bugged multitarget shenanigans.
-Originally in my mind a chain order marker shouldn't be necessary due to you only being able to play 1 card or effect before playing another of your own, but with multiple effects triggering at once, I can understand how having everything numbered might be best.
-The timer is the playtime timer, only one equipment interacts with the time, and it is balanced that way due to having a VERY strong effect. Additionally, even if you go beyond the 12 minute mark, that equipment has related Luck events that allow you to make it into a permanent +1 mana instead of just being tied to the timer.
-During combat you can see your full health by expanding the HUD on the top right, or by opening your inventory with C (or by clicking the button in the HUD) . You can also use potions mid combat.
-The take equipment button is there because a handful of equipments have both positive and negative effects to them, so you might not want to take it if that negative would fuck with your current strategy. Scrap gives you gold based on the item's rarity so you get some sort of reward either way. The scraping mechanic was added 4 hours before the DD so that's why it has no tooltip indicating what it does. Also I will make it the default action, so if you forget to take the equipment you still get the gold no matter what.
-Sorry to hear about that bug, I'll look into it. I'm pretty sure it isn't tied to how many times you healed and rather some weird interaction might have happen to happen when you used the third heal.
-People have been asking for a log and I'm working on it, hopefully will be ready soon.
-I mentioned before but yeah, right now if you don't take or scrap, you just skip it. But will make it into scrap as default if you leave without clicking either of them.
-Even if you are getting trouble getting through the first set of floors, you should be getting EXP to use outside of the run to improve future runs, making them easier. Also you can craft before the first boss if you find a forge behind a door, but even if you do you shouldn't have many High quality crafting gems, so you wouldn't really be able to craft much. (Unless you have a lot of levels in the starting gem skill, but if that's the case you are likely doing well and not getting stuck in the early levels).
-Lastly, the bug with the discarding is likely due to it coming from a Random Effect, some last minute changes I did seem to have heavily disrupted the "Create a random effect" effect and I didn't get to test all the scenarios in time, hopefully I'll get them fixed soon, but seeing that the discard2 effect specifically is misbehaving is very helpful, thanks for the screencap!
In general I'm sorry you encountered so many bugs, but I really appreciate your feedback and comments! Thank you very much for your time!
Hopefully I'll get everything working soon. =w=
Here's also a screenshot where the game deadlocked upon triggering the heal from the white unit and then the green unit suddenly triggering 3 times off it.
If you implement a log and fix the bugs you could easily release the game EA. Although since I read in the thread that just made the steam page it's probably better to let it collect some wishlists.
Thanks, that's genuinely a very nice comment, and seeing how well you are doing makes me believe you know what you are talking about!
Also thanks for the additional bug report, it is very helpful. I'll try to fix everything ASAP.
I did pay for the steam page so yeah, I'm-probably going to collect some wishlists first. But I'll keep your suggestion of releasing an EA in mind.
Thanks again!
Hey man, I'm debugging right now and I would like to ask a quick question. Do you remember if you changed the autoclip speed in settings menu before this bug happened?
I haven't changed any settings. I have only opened the settings menu to check it out but I closed it afterward without any changes.
Thanks for confirming!
I love MTG and this seems right up my alley. Runs very poorly on my laptop, but it’s bearable. I noticed when crafting cards, that the text saying “You can’t use this effect as an Active Effect” displays when I’m trying to set a PASSIVE, and likewise with “You can’t use this effect as a Passive Effect” when I’m trying to set an ACTIVE. Seems the words just got switched.
I’ve been playing for maybe 20 minutes and I’m not gonna stop for a while. I like this a lot. The art is nice and the controls are pretty intuitive. It’s nice to see the phases laid out explicitly.
I just ran into a bug. I found a ring that makes each player generate a random effect each main phase or something. My opponent got the effect “Gain 5 life.” Well, my opponent is just gaining and gaining and gaining 5 life over and over again. It’s up to about 2000 now. See the screenshot I took:
Oof, I'm very sorry to hear that you encountered such an annoying bug, I'll try to take care of it asap!
The equips are a very fresh addition to the game and I couldn't test every possibility, this seems like a very silly and easy to fix bug. I will also fix the active and passive mishap.
I'm glad to hear that you are otherwise enjoying it!
The bugs are fixed, friend! If you want, you can download the thing again.
Beautiful art and smooth gameplay that's fairly intuitive after a short period of getting familiar with it. Had a crash when I tried to restart the run mid-fight, but other than that only encountered some oddities (like one enemy after the first boss only ever summoned one minion, never attacked and otherwise kept healing itself, making it kind of a pushover). The "Resistance" stat was confusing at first before figuring out it's basically just the HP of the card.
Card crafting mechanic seems interesting, seemed fairly balanced at first glance though not sure how broken it could be with more experience with the game. At the moment class and stat balance seems a little odd to me: Wizard's special ability seems fairly worse compared to Warrior's for example. as skipping fights not only skips the actual gameplay but prevents you from getting rewards as well, which I'd imagine could bite you in the long run. (Maybe something like allowing you to escape mid-fight as would be more useful?)
Stats are an interesting twist, but having only one stat directly affecting combat makes it better than the rest in my opinion. Intelligence might give you more options for card crafting for example, but you're still limited by the resources you have from what I understand. For Dex, getting first turn is nice but is it worth over more HP? And while Luck seems interesting and some items do seem really good (vampiric vest or what it was called carried my first run), direct survivability still seems a better option in my eyes.
I guess my point is it would be interesting if every stat affected the direct gameplay in some way, which would give you different builds for fights on top of the deck builds you can get.
Regardless, still a solid entry to the deckbuilding roguelike and I'm interested to see how it'll progress.
Thanks for the review, fren!
I tried to reproduce the crash you mentioned but I couldn't get it to happen again, but I'll keep looking into it.
Regarding the crafting mechanic, it is balanced by the limitation of 3 cards per forge, and by the -High quality crafting gem- requirement, if you can break it regardless of those roadblocks, then you should be able be broken as a reward.
The Wizard's class ability is deceptively useful. I made it this way with 3 scenarios in mind. First, in case of you being low health before an enemy encounter. You can skip the enemy to prevent risking losing, and instead skip to get to a resting place, merchant to buy potions, or maybe even a luck event. Second the ability gets much stronger once you level up in the main menu, giving the Wizard loot as if he won the battle when he skips the battle. Lastly its also there to be the class of choice for people looking to get a record time in beating the game.
Your point about stats is valid. However Dexterity also has direct impact on the battle giving you extra cards in your starting hand, and giving you a higher chance of starting first as you mentioned, which is actually quite important on the later battles (and after higher amounts of successful runs which increases the difficulty) .
While Luck and Intelligence don't have a direct impact in combat, they both are vital to craft strong cards, and to obtain more money to get strong cards and equipment from shops. (Luck increases drop rate for crafting gems and gold, while intelligence improves the selection of effects you have when custom crafting, and lowers the prices when shopping) In my mind you have 2 combat stats, and 2 deckbuilding stats. But it is a fair concern. I think that the more successful runs you have, the more you will need the non-Strength stats (Or at least the more you need to strike a balance among all stats).
Again, thanks for your comment and for playing, I hope my explanation makes sense!
Didn't know you could also upgrade ablities, that upgrade definitely makes the wizard ability really good then. And you're right, I forgot about Dex giving you a bigger hand at the start, which is not an insignificant buff. And yes, your explanation makes sense - might be that the strength of those stats are simply not as obvious at their first impression.
Oddly I haven't encountered any crashes since either, so sadly cannot provide more information - might've been just something on my end too. I'll let you know if I'll encounter any other bugs and best of luck for the future!
Cool, thanks man!
Let's hope the crash was just a fluke of sorts, at any rate, I've already been fixing bugs other people reported, so I'm uploading an update right now.
Cheers!
ahoy
i played for about 30 minutes. as a warning, my only card game experience was 2 years of Yugioh in elementary school back around the time it was first released in yurope. i had fun playing and encountered no bugs or issues apart from some typos (Carge into combat on the main fight screen, and watching my setp in the "a pit appeared beneath your feet" event)
the main feature in my mind was the card crafting, which was cool but i think the cards i craft are vastly superior to any that i could find, so i assume there will be some balancing issues since a player can tailor make a deck according to his playstyle and superstomp the enemies without any hassle.
the game appears nicely polished otherwise. i liked the events and how your stats play into it. i actually forgot about stats until writing that last line - that's another aspect i don't think i've seen before. all of this combined creates a situation where the player is entirely in control of his playstyle (more HP if he is playing a deck that takes longer to set up, for instance). i think you should expand on this idea as much as possible, since it feels like all other card games that i know are restrictive in this format. it would make an interesting multiplayer game with many meta possibilities, that's for sure
either way, feel free to take this feedback with a grain of salt since i'm not a card game player and i might be all wrong in my interpretation of things. keep up the good work and i hope to see you in future DDs
Thank you very much for your comments, fren!
I've been procrastinating the fixing of typos for a long time now, but I did fix both of the examples you just gave!
Custom craft is supposed to be strong since you are limited on how many cards you can craft per forge, and by the amount of High quality crafting gems you have, plus, the game gets hard, and the cards you can get from packs and shops get stronger as you play, so it isn't as unbalanced as you might think.
I really appreciate your positive comments, I hope other players agree with the thinks you liked about the game.
Sadly multiplayer was originally intended to be a feature, but I decided it was out of the scope of the game if I want to finish and publish it in a reasonable timeframe. Plus the code is so spaghettied at this point that an implementation down the road seems very unlikely :c
Anyways, thanks again for the feedback and nice comments!