Post by Brushinobi in Behacked comments

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Hello ! :-)

I completely broke the game again ^^'

Just like with the jam version, I had to lose on purpose because if I played seriously it was 100% impossible for me to die...

Also when the score exceeds the limit it gets negative (cf screenshot below) then if it exceeds the negative limit it gets positive again, and so on... It is around 2000000000 points so my guess is that the limit is 2³¹ = 2147483648.

To end the game I had to kill myself, but the score wasn't saved to the leaderboard because it was negative at the time :'-)

At some point the game couldn't keep up and the enemies were frozen completely, and even when the combo should have stopped it kept increasing if I made a new valid match instead of resetting. (If i tried to make and invalid match it went back to 1 though).

Now my thoughts about the new skills and enemies : a lot of great ideas and a more difficult start, but with some patience and a bit of luck in the beginning it is still quite easy to become godlike and completely invincible.

- The skill that doubles the score on a 20+ combo is nice, but at the moment still way too easy to obtain (I got a 200+ combo pretty easily with terraforming + trump card + other skills that randomize tiles and can create almost infinite combos, and even the grey tiles couldn't stop it.)

- The ability to reroll skills is interesting but breaks the balance even more especially since it is cumulative : I could reroll skills up to 8 times and just like with the jam version I just had to avoid crappy skills that could kill me to stay immortal. Even without clicking anymore, if an enemy attacks me I get teleported and randomize tiles, start a combo that will heal me and kill most enemies (often clear the board almost completely)

-> The game is challenging and interesting in the beginning, but after that rough start you loose any sense of purpose because the only real threat is yourself. I don't think that players should ever have to penalize themselves on purpose to kill themselves and bring the run to an end.

anttihaavikko2 years ago

Thanks a lot for the lengthy feedback! ❤️

Yeah the score limit is indeed that, I'll change it to unsigned one so it can hold at least the double value instead. I didn't really predict the scores could go that high so didn't really take the limit into account. I usually like to balance score games so that the high scores would end up between millions to hundreds of millions range. Somehow that just seems like the most visually pleasing score amount. High but still not that high that everything past the first digits loses the meaning. 🤷‍♀️

Yeah I definitely didn't want to have the game go infinite or force the player to manually end it by killing themselves as nothing else is capable of doing that anymore. That just seems like a bummer. What do you see as the biggest factor in letting you go infinite like that? Some specific skill combo or what? One small adjustment that came to mind that I will most likely do is reset the multiplier when you get hit. That would solve the "auto play" mode you mentioned and also help in making it more work to make the multiplier go up (or not making it drop).

Other thing that could fix the issue of going infinite and losing all sense of difficulty could be limiting the maximum level of player. Don't really like that route though and it would make the RNG of the skills you do get even more impacting.

I think I will also add new new more dangerous enemies to the end of the list. I guess even the dragons don't pose enough of a threat right now.

The enemies being completely frozen seems like a bug. I guess the game somehow got to a state that the enemies think that you're comboing off or skill picking and they can't move. Did this happen before the score hit negatives too, of course the negative score might have some weird impacts as well as that isn't supposed to happen at all.

Brushinobi2 years ago

I think the main issue with the game in its current state is that it has an inverted difficulty curve : at first it is very difficult and you rely mostly on luck, if you are able to deal with enemies it is great, but you are often stuck with enemies that you can't kill because there is no available match nearby. Rats are especially deadly in early games because they are really fast and decrease your max HP, so even if you get a healing skill such as "tap the source" it becomes useless. However, when you survive the early game and manage to have a nice build you become unstoppable.

Hum any skill that shuffles tiles (terraforming, survival instinct, fallout, etc...) will create new combinations, especially when paired with skills that increase the match probability (trump color, wildcard, fertility, etc...) and that will easily lead to almost infinite combos. Terraforming is especially insane with the skill that teleport you when matching a specific color, because you will teleport and shuffle tiles again and again.

What will be a pain to balance now is that shuffling tiles became a necessity to survive because of the grey tiles, but in the end even with the miner skill once I started a combo I would clear the board.

Maybe putting a limit on the max HP could also help ? (As you can see in the screenshot, half my screen was filled with hearts, even if I picked offensive skills most of the time) I also had so much vampire touch that killing any enemy would instantly heal me completely. (not that it mattered at that point because I would clear the board almost every time) so maybe put a limit on the healing skills too.

Skills that deal damages, like poison trap and bows don't have a limit either, so after a while most enemies would die as soon as they moved xD

The second best skill in the game is "Good learner", because twice as many skills means that you get to completely overpowered combinations twice as fast, (careful study is pretty powerful for the same reason) and when you can reroll the skills a few times for each because of a few "gambler" it is really easy to break the game. However, the most game-breaking one is by far "Chaos", because it randomizes the color of skills : with this, any tile can one-shot enemies with a lot of poison, you can fully heal when stepping on any color, etc... It is one of my favorites because it makes most of the other skills more interesting, but it also completely breaks the game's balance at the moment.

As for the score issue, the "patience" skill plays a big part in it, because I could just double my score again and again hundreds of times and it grews exponentially, so maybe replacing it with a fixed amount of points would be a bit better to prevent extreme scores.

anttihaavikko2 years ago

Yea, good points.

I know that "Chaos" is the source of all completely busted build but I don't want to change it, it's too much fun and hence the name, chaotic. The poison tiles (like all the step on effects) also do not affect flying enemies so even if you stack that up, there is also a good amount of enemies still posing a threat (and now even more deadly ones as all the additions were flying). Of course the other ranged damage dealers still work though.

I don't really mind the "Patience" increasing the score exponentially. It's more of an issue if you can continuously trigger it again and again.

I guess adding some max hp and skill stacking limits might be a good idea worth investigating. Also "Good learner" and "Gambler" might need to be toned down a bit too, they are indeed quite powerful in the long run.

Hmm, now it comes to my mind that I could add in a negative effect (like the ones on dailies) every 10 or 5 levels for example which also would make staying alive more and more difficult and also help on it not getting boring and stagnant. I might wanna play around with such for the next patch... 🤔

Brushinobi2 years ago

I agree with you, chaos is really fun ^^ Don't you think that the game would be even more interesting if it was activated by default ? That way each run would feel more unique.

Adding negative effects regularly seems like an excellent idea to keep the game challenging and interesting ! (Maybe after an active duration instead of levels to avoid penalizing people with the "careful study" skill and encourage players to be more aggressive ?)

One thing that I would really enjoy too is a clearer presentation for cumulative skills : for example instead of having "vampire touch" every time, have "vampire touch 2" when you pick it a second time, etc... that way it would be easier to track down if a skill is relevant or not on long runs. Also, it could also be easier to see on the left column if you present skills in a similar way instead of a never-ending list that continues off-screen. Of course the ideal way would be to get a new icon for each color when there is chaos, but you could have a line for poison skills for example, with a list : green poison 3, blue poison 1, orange poison 2, etc...

When leveling up, having this kind of presentation and screen cards that don't overlap the column on the left could bring a more tactical feel, because you could clearly see what you already have and pick new skills accordingly (it is especially useful on very long runs where you kind of lose track of what you got)

Putting a limit to offensive skills so that they can't appear again when they can already one shot every enemy could be cool too, because there is no need to have green poison 20 if no enemy has more than 10 HP for example. Same thing for healing skills and health upgrades if you put a limit on the max HP players can have.

anttihaavikko2 years ago

Just uploaded a new patch with some new run killer enemies and the reset of multiplier when you get hit. Hopefully these changes will at least make it less likely to go infinite. Also, that negative 1 bil score did upload but just won't show up because the leaderboards only display the highest score per player. 😅

itch.io

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