Post by diabolodev in One Armed Bandit jam comments

AGDG DEMO DAY 57 » Entries » One Armed Bandit

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i played and lost quite a lot (and got the HoS glitch on a run i thought would have won) but just won with a poison + poison ivy + healing/regenerating build. i was lucky the last boss was the joker because the manager would have made my symbols useless after one use, then cleansed the poison and made my whole run useless like he does to a lot of builds

the best moment i had was in another run where i had the automon, the generic poison symbol (cactus?), and lots of shields versus the chieftain and it was a drawn out fight to see who would out damage the other. i lost
OAB seems uniquely like the kind of game where you can lean into that sort of inactive, automatic gameplay and balance the fights around setting up a scaling build then letting it run to see if it outpaces the opponent. as i understand, fights in the game are designed to punish the player for staying in fights too long, but after that experience i think that might be the opposite of how fights should go. either way, i still really think that timing the slot machine is only a detriment to the game

i still feel that playing optimally means having foreknowledge of how enemies fight and whether you should fight them or not, which often means just avoiding fights altogether and walking around the board to collect health, cash, and shop, which is lame

in recent builds it seems like every color is more capable of doing nearly every thing, i notice that greens now can add block/retaliate when healing. in a way this makes the "why shouldn't i just use one color" problem worse, meanwhile if i were on a build that was built around retaliate i probably wouldn't be able to build into the kiwi (or whichever green symbol has it) because my whole board would probably be a different color

stolen wallet is a cool item. i'm not sure if i like the reversion to the shop sponge's reusability

in DD56 i purchased two discount artifacts, then the shop sponge's cost became a float with two decimal points. purchasing the sponge then turned my held money into a float with two decimal points. i'm unlikely to encounter the artifacts again to test this on the current version so i may as well report it now

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AutomonDev158 days ago(+1)

Thanks for playing again!

Fights are indeed meant to get harder as they go on. I feel this is necessary due to an abundance of way to get meta-benefits like money or health during combat. You could in theory set up an infinite fight with Money Shield and some other items and symbols, so enemies need to scale in power

If timing the machine is a detriment, do you suggest to let it just automon it all the way? That turns the game into an autobattler completely and takes player agency down from 33% to 0%.

Or maybe that's appropriate in a gambling-themed game. At the very least, I'll add it as an option in the settings

I agree that not knowing enemies ahead of time makes them dangerous, but this feels unavoidable. I don't know what I can do besides expanding enemy descriptions, or tightening the map to force the player to learn the enemy patterns

Yes, I tried to widen the options for each color. Main motivation for this was the fact that blue was always necessary as the only damage-prevention color. Trying a build without blue would just cause you to rawdog all incoming damage. Green has its damage prevention on dissolving symbols now, so blue is still THE block color

I reversed sponge because when it was one-time use, each new symbol in the build was kind of locked in for good. With reusable sponge, I found myself pivoting into a different color more often, or getting symbols for a specific boss or enemy, knowing that I'll remove them later.

You shouldn't be able to get 2 discount items anymore. Or 2 of any item in fact - I've made them all unique after having some odd runs with triple vest or whatnot

Thanks for playing this game consistently on the demo days, it's been very helpful. Next version that will be available will probably be the Steam release. I'll send you a Steam code for the game when it comes out. Thanks for everything and see you next game!

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diabolodev158 days ago

you're welcome, good luck on the release! i really do play it because it's fun, despite how critical i might seem of the game. i wouldn't have complained so much about things you won't realistically be able to change before release if i knew it was coming out so soon

If timing the machine is a detriment, do you suggest to let it just automon it all the way?

well, maybe. if you were to add it i would suggest copying how digital slot machines have the option to spin manually by pressing the spin button or switching to an automatic mode by holding the button for a few seconds, then stopping automatic spinning on the next button press. the automon item might still be interesting/useful if you added this as an option because players will lose the option to spin manually if there ever was a case they wanted to. but if you have any doubts about it you should probably ignore me on this one since AFAIK i'm the only one saying this

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