Great game so far!
Here are a few suggestions. There is nothing really original, but perhaps it still helps.
QoL features
These are aimed mainly to make longer runs as well as finding/reporting/debugging bugs faster, easier and more fun.
1. Speedup: Options to skip animations (via buttons)
- (a) Skip to end of current combat round
- summary for each follower/enemy (all at once): Show accumulated damage taken, stats + faith gained etc. and maybe some indicator for status change between alive/dead or getting newly summoned.
- This summary should probably stay visible longer since there should be much more info available at once.
- Perhaps this skip action automatically pauses the game and the summary stays visible while the game stays paused.
- Or this skip action is only available, i.e. the button is clickable, while the game is paused. This could also prevent unwanted interactions and visual glitches.
- This should scale much better than a flat speed factor and still give some idea of how well the build is doing.
- Not sure whether skipping to right before or after revival actions would be better.
- Filling the combat log with some kind of summary might be better than flooding it with the usual entries.
- summary for each follower/enemy (all at once): Show accumulated damage taken, stats + faith gained etc. and maybe some indicator for status change between alive/dead or getting newly summoned.
- (b) Skip to end of combat
- Only show the final state of the battle.
- Not sure whether a summary like the one in the previous option would be needed.
- (c) Skip transitions
- Maybe unlock these features after defeating the dragon for the first time or only in endless mode.
2. Replay last combat (during normal run)
- Note regarding RNG:
- I hope the game uses some kind of software-only deterministic algorithm for pseudorandomness where the state can be represented and restored with very limited data like a random seed.
- Otherwise this feature would probably take a lot more effort to implement and there could be no compact replay code.
- Generation of compact replay code that encodes everything relevant: game build, RNG seed before start of combat, current enemies (including stats), current followers (including stats and modified abilities), reliquaries etc.
- Used internally so not every combat action taken has to be saved.
- This could also be a core functionality of a robust autosave feature, so it hopefully does not require much additional work.
- Export for bug reports and/or for sharing with other players:
- Display code in pop-up window or copy to clipboard or save to file.
- Displaying it directly in the game interface is probably not a good idea since even a "compact" code can be quite long.
- Used internally so not every combat action taken has to be saved.
- After starting the replay, the combat should simply work like it would normally do.
- Obviously the outcome of combat and the contents of the next shop should not be affected to prevent abuse.
- Hopefully this can reuse a lot of already existing code so the implementation does not require too much additional work.
3a. Replay mode (selected from main menu)
- Implementation hopefully takes very little additional effort.
- Replay one specific combat outside of an actual run.
- Import/input previously generated replay code (your own or shared).
3b. Sandbox mode (selected from main menu)
- Implementation probably takes a lot more effort than a simple replay mode.
- Configure and simulate one specific combat outside of an actual run.
- Try out extremely improbable builds.
- Test synergies, bugs.
- Import/export replay code or something similar.
4. Display more information during combat
- Round counter
- Combat time
- Estimation of remaining combat time:
- This requires the combat to be precalculated at the beginning—without any animation—to get the number of every kind of action that is going to take place.
- This would probably require the RNG used to be as described in the note above (see 2nd feature requested).
- etc.
5. Preview of modified stats/abilities in shop
- It would be nice to see what you will actually get before recruiting a new follower.
- As an addition or alternative: Some visually highlighted indication of pending "on recruitment" effects would be helpful.
- This could be some highlighting effect on the not yet chosen follower and on the relevant already recruited followers.
- Maybe even some kind of nice warning to prevent frustration: "If this follower is recruited, EffectXY will go to waste."
- Motivation:
- If no follower has been recruited for several encounters or you have to pause the game for a few hours, you might have forgotten about the last Prophecy or that there still is some Cleric/Artificer waiting to be useful.
- The Artificer only seems to enhance values written as number symbols while ignoring values written as words like "one", "once", "twice". The resulting frustration could be prevented with a reliable preview.
- With more followers, aspects and other stuff being added, having to keep track of everything yourself can reduce fun—especially for new players and people with bad short term memory.
- This could be part of the tutorial. I.e. if you disable the tutorial when starting a run, you have to keep track of everything yourself. Or it could be disabled by a separate option.
6a. Visual stacking of (almost) identical followers
- Here "(almost) identical" means only health+attack might be different.
- Idea: Waste less horizontal space by stacking them similar to playing cards in Klondike (solitaire), i.e. only one copy is completely visible and the rest only show their health+attack—or a symbol for being dead.
- The order should be intuitive and there probably should be a maximum stack size.
- This should only be a visual change. It should **not** influence adjacency and order.
- When one of the mostly hidden followers is part of a combat action, it should be temporarily displayed completely even if that means temporarily hiding some of the other followers completely.
- This probably does not work well when two or more followers of the same stack are part of a combat action (e.g. stack of flagbearers when one of them gets killed), but in most of those cases there should be an intuitive (or least surprising) solution.
6b. Rearrange visual space
- During combat there is a lot of unused visual space while builds with lots of summons are going far off screen. Some of that space could be made available and used to reduce this "overflow".
- (i) The depth indicator could be changed from horizontal to vertical and moved to the left/right border to free up a bit more vertical space.
- This would feel more intuitive for something called "depth".
- If the dots are closer together, more could be displayed at the same time and the next hunt could simply be visually marked without needing a big countdown.
- The dots for different event types (shop, encounter, hunt, prophecy etc.) could be distinguished visually (symbols, colors) to reduce further use of space for long words.
- (ii) More rows for followers
- During combat the followers could be displayed in two rows instead of only one.
- This would require more vertical space (e.g. using (i)) or some resizing of the "cards".
- This should only be a visual effect without changing adjacency and order.
- With lots of summons and no stacking (see 6a) this could still require a lot of space off screen …
- (iii) Zoom + more rows
- With some kind of zoom there could also be 3+ rows of followers.
- This zoom should probably be automatically and dynamically adjusted to the current number of followers during combat.
7. Visual indicator for state of "once per battle" abilities
- Some indication of whether a followers "once per battle" ability was already triggered would be nice.
- Maybe some kind of special border around the "card"?
- Not sure how this should work for followers with two such abilities.