Thanks for trying again and getting it to work!
I'll be watching your video now!
Edit:
I just watched the video, thanks for being so thorough with reading stuff while playing.
You encountered a couple of bugs that I think might have been related to running on wine, particularly the time you targeted your opponent but the minion took the damage instead, that's not a mechanic, the cursor was just selecting something different and that might be because of Wine.
I also spotted some other issues I have to take care of so it was helpful to watch.
I think the game got particularly long for you because you played with the Full Control option, if you ever play it again I'd recommend staying in 2 or 3 since the game will always stop if you have any action you can take, and that speeds up the overall experience quite a bit.
As you demonstrated, a more organic tutorial is required and I'm working on it, so yeah your grievances are justified. Unfortunately there's no saving in that game mode so your run is over once you quit or die.
The only mechanic I wish you had noticed is the Variant mechanic. When you get a new card with the same artwork as a previously owned card, you can choose all of your copies with that art to have either the previous effect, or the new effect you just got.
At any rate, thanks again for playing and for the feedback!
I'm happy the recording was helpful, and thanks for clarifying some things. Shame about no save, but the next time I play, I should be able to get there much quicker.
The only mechanic I wish you had noticed is the Variant mechanic. When you get a new card with the same artwork as a previously owned card, you can choose all of your copies with that art to have either the previous effect, or the new effect you just got.Interesting. I will keep that in mind the next time I play.
Hey Fullen! I played a lot of your game in my free time.
I successfully finished 14 runs, and I am pretty sure 10 of those were in a row.
I encountered some bugs: chains that involve things happening when cards get discarded and player gains health seem to get stuck i.e. everything gets animated, but the chain doesn't resolve, and the game makes a clicking sound at a constant loop (I think it's the health gaining sound). I got some screenshots when that happens:
Here's another bug situation:
Enemy cast a spell to gain life, and during my priority I cast my spell which gives me life, and sends minion on top of the deck. After the minion was removed, the game got stuck just like in the bug above. here's screenshot:
Let's talk a bit about balance, because there is none and that's not necessary a bad thing, but it might give you some ideas.
I tried multiple builds and strategies, and I am sure I found the most broken ones.
Example number 1:
Cards like that make the enemy not play any more, because every time they get a new card, they must get rid of it before they have the opportunity to use it. It's a pretty safe way to play.
Example 2:
It's nice to win when the enemy cannot do anything, but what is more even broken is winning before they even get to play! At some point after many successful runs the enemies got pretty strong. Their cards get better, their decks grow in size, and they get much more health. Not a problem. Let me introduce you cards, ad strategy that wins every time before my enemy plays a single card:
I think the last boss had 35 cards in his deck. I calculated I could remove over 80 before his first turn, so it really doesn't matter how big and strong he is, there are even more strategies to make it even more abusive, but there was no need. I basically just remove his cards whenever I play cards, and I can just play 0 cost cards, and stack the same effects on multiple cards.
The only way I though of how it could be countered is if in my enemies starting hand was a card costing 0-1 mana which could take control of my minion. I could counter that by having those kind of cards myself, but that edge case never happened, so I did not need to play it that safe.
I don't think you should be completely rebalancing the game around bullshit strategies, because coming up with them is what makes it interesting. At this point I feel like I won the whole game, because I found that one strategy that always wins, but I got ideas how you could prolong the fun:
You should reward players for trying out different things instead of having them play over and over what works. You could do that with some sort of achievement system that would force players to come up with different strategies. To make that work, you would need to have the player be able to adjust the difficulty instead of keep increasing it until only the broken builds work. Have an achievement for getting 30 max mana, or 50 health, winning in x number off turns, getting a minion with x resistance and so on.
With that said, if you do want to balance the game, then I got some ideas.
At some point it became a chore to open card packs, especially when you must search for specific new cards whenever you want to add them to your deck. I think it would be nice to have an option of instantly choosing which cards you want to add to your deck from the "card opening pack" screen.
At some point I tried adding mods. Making a new one did not work for me (probably to do with wine and linux), but adding images to the existing anime mod seemed to work. The only problem I noticed was how some pictures appeared zoomed in in shop:
Another minor bug is how the text saying "upgrades available" shows up even when everything is maxed out (I had over 1k of each resource, but no screenshots).
At some point I changed my resolution, and went from fullscreen to windowed mode, and that completely broke the game for me (Wine on Linux). I tried searching for where the save with start up resolution and window mode is located to manually edit it, but had no luck. The only saves I found were in AppData/LocalLow/Fullen Games/Card Artisan
Is there somewhere else where you keep your saves? Deleting that folder did not seem to make any difference, which means the game is probably going to be broken for me the next DD if I don't manage to reset it back to how it was.
Man, I'm both extremely flattered you played this much and horrified because the sheer amount of improvements that I've been making from this version is crazy, so I hope you didn't get fed up with the game by the time the new and improved version comes around.
First to address the bugs you shared on your screenshots. I BELIEVE these should ALL be fixed with the next patch since I completely remade the chain resolution logic in order to precisely fix the problems you outlined which I couldn't get fixed by the DD49 release, however, I'll double check with this specific gamestate to see if it's working correctly or not.
The new system also allows for a "Super fast mode" that makes turns go by in an instant, so for veteran players like you it will make future runs way more enjoyable.
I'll address other suggestions and comments in no particular order but I think you'll be happy to hear that most of the things you suggested are coming soon!
First the "Finding the broken strategy" part. In part, I did want players to create broken decks and two-card combos, and there is a small bit of work put in place to prevent it from being TOO easy to achieve, but not that much really. Future updates will feature achievements as you mentioned to push players to try different things, but it will also provide increased challenge on higher difficulties (For example after winning 4 or 5 runs, bosses will have access to tools and logic to stop infinite combos specifically). This should force you to build a more robust deck that doesn't rely on a single infinite combo to win harder runs.
Edit2: Another way to incentivize the player to try different strategies will be the upcoming Equipment system that will give you unique items that modify combat. For example, items that make it so your direct damage spells deal additional damage if your deck doesn't contain any minions. I believe that if the player obtains such an item, they'll have a reason to want to try out such a build either in their current run or on future runs. I'm working on the foundations for this mechanic right now, so if everything goes well it should be running in 2 or 3 weeks with 50 different pieces of equipment planned for the first batch.
Additionally, one feature that I'm heavily debating if I want to add or not (And will probably include an optional toggle at the start of every run) Is limited crafting abilities at the forge. So what effects you have available when crafting will be limited and randomly selected. A higher Intelligence will give you a bigger pool of effects to use at every forge. This should completely eliminate the problem, but it might also eliminate the fun of doing these broken combos, so I'll have to test it a bunch to see if it's a good idea to include it or not.
Regarding adding cards from the pack to the deck, I was actually fiddling with that idea and will probably implement it for the next dd.
Regarding the issue of "upgrades available" still showing after maxxing your upgrades, I'm not gonna lie, I never expected someone to go this far with the demo so I didn't even test this scenario, needless to say, I'm extremely flattered you played it this much.
Edit: I forgot to mention, the problem with not being able to create mods is 100% because of wine since the way I create the file and folders is very windows oriented, I'm not surprised it doesn't work, however a workaround, for now, would be either doing what you did or just cloning the anime mod folder instead of modifying the content of the original so you can have multiple mods at a time (I believe this should work). Also I'll look into the merchant bug.
Regarding your problem with resolution, the options are saved as player prefs, so they are saved in the registry, I have no clue how that would work on Wine, but instead of trying to fix that mess, I can just do a build for you that fixes the settings on startup of the game. Additionally, since you played this much I'd be more than happy to give you some dev builds with the new improvements once I polish some minor issues the current development build has. If you are interested in either of those, feel free to join this discord server and I can send you the special builds there. https://discord.gg/QxyuB8t7
(Also if you don't use Discord which would be understandable lemme know and we can talk through some other platform).
It looks like you got some good ideas. The equipment does sound interesting. If you are worried about removing fun from the game by putting limitations on players, I think that could be easily fixed, by just adding different game modes that have limited number of crafts, card abilities that must be found and so on.
Another bug I found, but forgot to mention is how crafting minion cards which add x/x for each card in graveyards get crafted with no abilities.
the options are saved as player prefs, so they are saved in the registry
Damn, I was hoping for just a file I could locate and delete, so I would be ready for DD50.
I think I played enough this DD. I will get back to you on DD50 if my wine resolution problem persists between different Card Artisan builds. Ideally I would play a linux version <wink wink>.
I forgot to mention, I also tried the other game mode with 3d first person gameplay. I got to level 9 if I remember correctly. I know many features are missing, so it's hard to judge it, but I did not find it fun. By the way, I unlocked all illustration, and the number was bugged (it was something like 113 out of 112, so just off by one error I assume).
