Hi there! Thanks so much for playing, and for passing along this very encouraging feedback - it's really great to hear!
As you guessed, the four of us have all worked together in the past at different times. That definitely helped thing to run smoothly! i think it also helped that we got a very clear idea of what we wanted to do early on.
So glad to hear you felt the difficulty and combos felt right! Our biggest focus was on trying to get that stuff feeling as solid as possible, so very glad to hear we hit the mark for you!
Our itch page is now live here:
https://teamlazerbeam.itch.io/shroom-and-gloom
Thanks again for the feedback - it's greatly appreciated!
Viewing post in Shroom and Gloom: Jam Version jam comments
did a second run today. pleased to find that my build ended up significantly different than the first one!
managed to beat the game this time around but it felt like a bit of a cheese. picked up the 'everlasting truffle' very early. it's difficult to see how this isn't op; you can easily farm the card on low-level mobs and pick up a huge amount of hp. given that the card title also clips off the sprite, part of me wonders if it was a debug item? it doesn't seem to be more valuable for cooking, either. even if something like this was balanced as a viable strategy (say, by throwing in a bunch of health trading cards), it still seems a little rough to have to grind with it in the early game.
I do appreciate the biphasic decks. having useful items as cards motivates interesting player choices--your draw potential is hurt by hoarding valuable stuff--and the risk v reward feels like good design.
that being said, it was unclear if you can shuffle your 'home' deck? I should have paid closer attention but it seemed as though sometimes I can't draw into what I expected. on my first playthrough I was fairly confused about drawing and shuffling after a fight vs on entering a safe zone. I'm reasonably convinced that it works mechanically but from a readability perspective it could probably use a little love.
the relationship between truffles => the campfire is fairly unclear, but the rest of the game stands on its own so that's OK. feels like more of an easter egg than a mechanic. once I did pick up on the crafting, the items didn't seem more useful than my actual deck. but that was just my initial impression.
having card trashing handy with the pig is nice. that being said, my deck never really felt bloated. you start with very few cards, and because trashing is so easy, you can trivially thin your deck. perhaps this is intentional--it's certainly your choice--but it might put more pressure on the player to make this a less accessible strategy.
the damage cards also feel somewhat fungible. this is again something I like--I'm excited by the idea of modding and mashing up cards in this style of game, and I think it's a powerful design direction--but it's too random to feel like a significant player choice.
ultimately, it feels easy to become very powerful. my draws were almost always good. I can almost always get my cake and eat it too. this is something I like about the game overall. but this might hurt replayability. not sure--I've only played it twice, and this is only a demo. probably though you want a little more deck difficulty, as opposed to just making the enemies harder.
again, overall, great work! happy to answer any playtest Qs, but I'm sure you guys have a local scene there to watch people play live.
Wow! Thanks for the all feedback. We haven't had a lot of outside feedback so far, so this is very valuable.
We'll have to do something about all the potential farming. It's nice to hear you're getting powerful cards, but we don't want players sitting grinding turn after turn on low level mobs.
I think all the points you raise are very salient. Buffing the campfire seems sensible. Maybe making thinning the deck a bit more expensive/complicated. I'm a fan of creating monster combos in card games, but the combos in Shroom and Gloom don't involve much investment or specialization. Though I think some of that will come naturally with more content (or at least, with more content we'll be able to design more complicated card relationships).
You sound like an expert on card games (moreso than us). I'm going to be borrowing some of your lingo and ways of reasoning about card games!
oh ho. an expert--that's a good one! did get into dominion a little back in the day, but I don't do much with deckbuilding in my own design practice, unfortunately.
some final thoughts. did one last playthrough (it's fun!). was able to farm the positive feedback cards (I think there are two? 'raging edge', which quickly spirals out of control, and something something blade) pretty successfully. it looks like one of you may have capped the total mob count to ~20, or at least it seemed that way, since some squid thing just flat out stopped calling for reinforcements. by the end of it all I was dealing about 400 damage per turn.
there are many ways to combat this kind of thing. slay the spire I think features several enemies with positive feedback loops of their own, making lingering in encounters incredibly punishing. you do a little bit of this with the shield buff squid. but really you might just want to apply reinforcement actions more delicately, and pair them with powerful opponents (which check the player) rather than making it a thing you can always just do.
I'm definitely not against easy trashing--it can be a powerful creative tool for the player. but perhaps if you go down that route, you might consider balancing it against something else. all roguelikes sit somewhere on the control/constraint creativity spectrum, right? i.e. whether you're forced to play the hand you're given (pun intended) or you have the flexibility to always make your own build, no matter what. this has apparently been described as 'headroom' in the past: http://nethack4.org/blog/strategy-headroom.html (kudos to my jam partner Elliot for sharing this with me recently). what I like about shroom & gloom is that the cards feel more component-based and buildable than the typical deckbuilder, but maybe you're not trying to move in that direction. I mean, if you don't, I will! :)
speaking of which: it seems as though there are no tradeoffs to all the stacks you can put on cards. one common strategy I had, which feels degenerate, is just to load everything useful on one uber card that I know I'm never going to lose.
finally, here's a dumb thought. I realized that you guys are one key away from a mouse-only game. don't get me wrong, the W card is gorgeous, but if I could just click to move forward I could throw my keyboard away and put my feet up. the ultimate lazy day.
Haha! Having the "W" to move forward (rather than a click) was the closest we came to having an argument during the jam. I think we could probably include an option for people who want to play single-handed, but there was something about pressing forward that felt a little more visceral.
We're not big fans of puzzle games, so I think our natural instinct is towards more headroom, more viable strategies.
That said, the thing that bothers me most about more headroom designs, and is mentioned in that pretty excellent article, is that players will repeat themselves given the chance, and this is boring. You mentioned headroom in the context of farming strategies in Shroom and Gloom, which is something specifically mentioned in the article, though the solution the author found probably won't save players from their min-maxing instincts in Shroom and Gloom.
Sorry if this is turning into a bit of a long response, I'm just interested in thinking about aethetics-of-dynamics in deckbuilders.
Despite some divergences, Shroom and Gloom is a "Slay The Spire-like" (which is a genre these days, one that I'd prefer to call a "Dream Quest-like" but that game never got popular). And in terms of the headroom dynamic, these games have a lot going for them. As in, they avert some of the problems of too much headroom simply by not giving many options (in Slay The Spire-likes the first choices are all "Choose One Of Three"). (in this way Slay The Spire-likes are quite different to traditional Roguelikes).
Alex Smith (the author of that headroom article) would argue that limited card choices steers players due to the low headroom in subsequent choices, that the player has to commit to a path once they've chosen it. He'd be right... but there's still something curious about simply not giving players most of the choices in the game. i.e. it's possible to make a game with relatively high headroom, but low repetition just by having a lot of content that doesn't appear every run. Like simply not offering any cards that allow farming is an actual solution, even if these cards exist in the game and do appear sometimes.
And the thing about CCG's in general, is that the random-draw-from-a-deck is naturally great at getting players to improvise (which is the opposite of the feeling Alex Smith identifies as being caused by too much headroom, i.e. Players deciding on a strategy early on and then just sticking to it). I feel like there's got to be a way to disrupt a farming strategy through introducing more randomness, like if the first half of a run involves a lot of farming, but then some event takes place half way that provides an even better approach, that would reduce the overall repetition, and as I see it the repetition itself is the problem.
All of this is to say, that I feel like Shroom of Gloom is in a good place with its headroom... but there's consequences of our highish-headroom approach that you've pointed out that I'd like to avoid - like repetitive farming, and low improvisation decks (that have few cards, and so more repetition when playing).
And I desperately don't want to reduce the headroom to solve this by direct nerfing of options (which is the low headroom approach), while I also desperately want to limit the boring strategies.
What's left then are largely content-based solutions. As in, solutions that involve more content that introduce new incentives for players or otherwise force players to improvise around a new element. And I suspect in a high-headroom design paradign content is usually the tool that solves problems.
You've already mentioned some approaches with limiting farming, like new enemies that gain in power. My feeling is, whatever these limits are they need to be baked into the rules of the base game, rather than specific encounters. For instance: all basic enemies can flee (after a turn or two) when they're feeling doomed, but then come back in a later fight. The same amount of killing enemies for "If Fatal" improvements might happen, but it would be less possible to ignore enemies and keep buffing your cards (which isn't a fun strategy).
but there's still something curious about simply not giving players most of the choices in the game. i.e. it's possible to make a game with relatively high headroom, but low repetition just by having a lot of content that doesn't appear every run.
I think you're getting at what (I believe at least) is missing from the headroom framework. Alex Smith would appear to value player choices only with regards to their relative probability of reaching a final win state, but this disregards how such a probability is actually computed: in general, the chance of victory depends on future choices, such that the value (sometimes referred to as the 'return') of a choice is actually a composite of every future choice in the chain of choices that make up a playthrough.
more plainly, two choices may have an equal likelihood of victory, but differ (e.g. in length, or composition) in how this likelihood is actually computed. despite their apparent similarity, they can actually be quite different, and in fact quite meaningful to the player, i.e. meaning is clearly not fully represented by the 'probability of victory' signal as Alex Smith would seem to claim. to reuse an example from the article: if two characters play very differently--so differently that learning one teaches you nothing about playing the other, say--but otherwise present equal opportunity for success, I would consider character choice to be meaningful: it determines the rest of your game!
there is something orthogonal to the notion of headroom, I think, and being unaware of it can lead to dangerous conflation (particularly 'high headroom' and player creativity). as you point out, the degeneracy of a 'puzzle' experience (there is only one path) is not the same as low headroom. ultimately what seems like poor design, at least in the context of these sorts of games, is making only one path viable. I think that you can give the player plenty of creative choices early on, as long as they have to pay the price for these choices eventually... and that's what I think could be neat about shroom & gloom, at least in the early game.
on the other hand, giving the player too many options probably overwhelms them with choice and/or puts them in a rut, as you say. this would seem to relate to player creativity in general. this post focuses on sandbox games, not roguelikes, but I am surprised to find that it has some relevance here. offering the player three cards and telling them to make a decision feels a lot like giving the player an interesting and functional design constraint.
regarding farming. at some level I believe that farming (and stuff like exhaustive inventory management) is just 'bad', at least in the sense that it's unintentional (i.e. as opposed to a game 'about' farming). regardless of the value of the reward (and sometimes in spite of it), the cost of farming is usually only player time, and player time is a valuable resource. either just give the player what they want, or incorporate some kind of risk/reward tradeoff into farming, right? curious if you agree. I mentioned this already, but one thing I liked about shroom & gloom was that it puts a negative feedback loop on inventory management. if you try to hoard tons of cards in your home deck, you'll just weaken its draw power overall. I would probably enjoy if farming was given a similar treatment.
this segues somewhat neatly into your other comments.
the thing about CCG's in general, is that the random-draw-from-a-deck is naturally great at getting players to improvise . . . I feel like there's got to be a way to disrupt a farming strategy through introducing more randomness, like if the first half of a run involves a lot of farming, but then some event takes place half way that provides an even better approach, that would reduce the overall repetition, and as I see it the repetition itself is the problem.
I would like to push back a little against this, but not much, because it's more important to preserve your take--particularly in a genre game like this.
but I would say that the whole point in building a deck, from the player's perspective, is to make something that consistently delivers exceptional performance. in order to do this, you need to be able to understand your deck in its totality--you need control. deckbuilders feel like a battle against the machine, where the player always wants more control but is (positively) constrained by some aspect of the design. MTG (which I have very little experience in) has a minimum deck size for this reason.
so when a card shows up in my hand, I already know what to do--it's part of the engine. this is because it is common in these sorts of games to have total information when it comes to the composition of your deck. understanding your deck is knowing all the hands you could draw, and this information isn't gated by anything (in particular: time) so investing into this sort of knowledge can be seen as a weakness in the player that is either encouraged or discouraged by the design. a little like farming I guess. so the extent to which players 'should' improvise I think is very low, or at least the game as it currently exists does not encourage this in play. you could however imagine several changes that would (not knowing what's in your deck is the obvious one, but also cards that mutate in the background, or cards that synergize very broadly, etc.). I am sure slay the spire supports large 'grabbag' decks--I am not a serious enough player to know--but there has to be something that makes these viable, otherwise you just draw into a lot of terminal cards.