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XCVG2 years ago

I love the concept of this game. It's magical girls and chess and turn based tactics, it's classic genres with new twists. Maybe it's been done before, but this is the first time I've run across it, and I had a ton of fun playing with the new pieces and mechanics.

I love the mechanics of unlocking and choosing pieces to build a team, too. The UI is pretty buggy and/or unintuitive, though, and it took me forever to figure out how to remove pieces or realize at all that you could have more than one of each piece. I wish the way mana worked was a bit better explained, too. And I'm still not sure if moving the starting pieces is even possible.

The biggest gameplay flaw is the inconsistent AI. Sometimes it plays perfectly, sometimes it runs headfirst into a brick wall. Neither of those things are great in the first place, and together they create an experience with really inconsistent difficulty. It's not a deal breaker, but this area could definitely be improved.

The difficulty ramp in terms of opponent pieces and placement was kind of all over the place. I had a very easy level after a challenging one, and I also had the same enemies twice in a row. I've heard it might be randomized, but I only played the game once. Maybe the weighting could be better.

I was having a lot of fun, almost had made it, and then...

I made a stupid mistake and my king got eaten. I hit restart... and the game kicked me into a level with six high-level enemies and only my starting magical girls. I wasn't sure if that was a glitch or deliberate; it felt grossly unfair to the point where I kinda lost all enthusiasm for the game and called it a day at that point. I had no idea the game was permadeath. I'm not a fan of that in general, and I really think that if this game has to have it, it should definitely have a check mechanic like chess normally does.

I think some people will complain about the slow pacing, but to be honest, for a game like this it works. The pixel art is great and the unique animations for each piece just give it that much more panache.

If there's one nitpick it's that I wish the info panel showed the enemy piece instead of the magical girl version of the piece when showing where each one can move.

The theme implementation is solid enough, although it's kinda the obvious one to go with in retrospect.

All in all I liked this entry a lot, and I feel it's one of the strongest of the ones I've looked at so far. I just really was bummed out by being unexpectedly kicked back to zero, and there are a few minor aspects that could be improved upon.

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Zactyl2 years ago

Thanks for playing! I was on a bit of a chess kick at the start of the jam, so when my first idea didn't pan out how I was wanting it I thought this could be a fun idea. 

You make a good point about the UI, I'll consider some ways to better telegraph that you can use multiples of the same piece or remove them from their positions. It's intended that you can't move the two sisters starting positions (although you can take two of the big sister and have her on any tiles with enough stars). Showing how the mana worked in general was an issue as well, really just tutorials on how to play were kind of relegated to the end and then proper ones were cut for time unfortunately. There's an explanation in the controls section in the bottom right of the start screen but even there it could have been explained much better. 

AI is another big one. It was tough trying to have it make moves that are at least understandable, but there's a lot of work that can still be done on it. On the bright side, I do have some ideas of stuff I want to do with the AI that might be fun. 

The opponent placements also need some work. You're right that they're randomized, but they're separated into four difficulty sections that I thought would be of a similar difficulty, so you won't be fighting a queen on the first couple of fight for example. The main problem was that they were all basically eyeballed for difficulty level, so its definitely possible (and likely) that there's some inconsistent difficulty progression. 

Not including check I don't really have a good excuse for... In the next version I'll probably add some kind of warning system for when you're leaving your king in check. The restart thing was an unfortunate bug, it was supposed to take you back to the beginning.

Thanks for all your feedback, I think there's a lot of improvements that I'll be able to make.

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