You cooked wonders with this little auto-battler! It was pretty satisfying to navigate stages and mix/match lineups to discover all of the effects. Definitely keep cooking this, as I'd love to play a more polished version!
- The game hooked me for a pretty solid amount of time start-to-finish in a similar way to how Super Auto Pets does, so that's a big plus!
- I thought you did a good job with the ambience -- sounds for an early mockup are pretty good, music lines up with stage progression and bosses. Also really enjoy the pixel art style you've adopted for this, even if its an early proto-stage (the characters look great imo!) -- makes me curious to know what they'll all sound like in the end product >:)
- Tooltips with numbers and an improved discovery system for synergies could be great UX improvements for knowing what effects the characters have and can buy!
- You should add a settings menu in, so the player can adjust window / sound settings! It was a pretty tiny window for me...
- I'm not super sure how well-balanced the character abilities are, as I found I was able to first-try clear the game via a frontline of fluffy warriors + Mio and Ame + Botan, and Calli right at the end (wishing Kaela had her stuff up 😭)... they had a ridiculous amount of sustain, but the fact that I had a very hard time deducing how (no concept for health pool size, attack damage / range, etc, since those numbers are hidden from the player except via bars) means that I wonder if there might be room for improvement in giving visible indicators / numbers to the player, if even on tooltip hover-over?
- -> visible numbers for health, damage, stats do matter a lot, as this is a numbers-go-up sort of game! it satisfies the neuron...
- What is the blue bar that increments for the idols? Is it some kind of ability charge bar? I noticed health pools would go up, but I couldn't exactly tell why / if it correlated... do you think something like a multi-page tutorial "deck" from a main menu could help get the player up to speed?
- I did encounter only one bug during shop mode, which may have to do with how you're handling indexing in the "player hand"...
- when I sold an idol and bought another, for that round only they would end up in the same slot as another idol, instead of the empty one... rendering that slot unselectable both here in shop, and in the battle phase (surprising! luckily scraped out both fights) -- which then reset to their normal order and became usable again the next shop/battle phase. odd!
- I do wonder how you intend to expand on the stage progression and overall experience to make it more replayable! At the moment, I feel like I could play it a few more times to experiment with the different phases; but it does become pretty easy to rotate builds in later stages with the "economy" stacked up of existing idols you've bought...
- and to me, there's something missing in the game core... something that exists somewhere in the following two observations:
- 1) an ever-increasing difficulty curve that matches the potential builds one can divest (you don't see this in e.g. Super Auto Pets, because it is ranked multiplayer combat about finding the most broken build, so that challenge ramps up by itself; and if you fall behind, you lose... this is where a ton of the fun is for those players! it is likely possible to algorithmically scale the enemy pool for a stage (in health/damage output for enemies) to mimic that in this PvE context, based on current idol hand stats...)
- 2) some system or means to ramp up the scaling potential and increase the potential mixes & matches for synergies beyond the idol traits -- this could be a misguided observation, but I do wonder what exactly is missing here... food for thought, at least!
Beyond the blast of feedback for you here to take or pick apart or reject as you'd like, I had a blast playing it! Thank you very much for submitting to the bakery 🙇♂️