Alright, so I played a few more runs. Veeeery fun and addicting. Played some more adventurer but couldn't finish. But it was definitely the most fun because of how wild it would get, sometimes both players having >50 health. Then I played wizard and pyromancer. With the wizard it was hard to get something interesting going. I ended always milling the enemies to death because I never managed to get their health down. But I guess that's somewhat intentional? However, what bothered me was the teleport ability. I never wanted to skip combat before a fight, only during one. Would have been nice to have it as a escape mechanic (and maybe try again?). Even had the wand to get the ability refill, but that was pointless.
I tried crafting, but the forges were very rare. However, I really enjoyed the theory crafting. Took most of my time to figure out what combo to go for. That lead to 2 "issues", however:
However, I had initially tried the build with a minion with "During each of your Standby Phases, discard 1 card." But this discard effect would not trigger the "When this card is Discarded" effect. The pyromancer however works pretty well with the many normal discard effects.
When crafting, I also hadn't realized I could scroll down the atk/def values. I assumed that I would only get values above 3 when I hit random. I was also missing some "negative" effects like "to summon this card, sacrifice/discard" modifiers to work in synergy with the discard effect, or lowering the mana cost.
At the merchant I sometimes had cards with negative gold costs.
Venom with high defense seems op.
Hm, that's about it that I can think of right now. Imo definitely Kickstarter worthy.
Final feedback for now... maybe...
So, I'm level 9, got most classes, except for Assassin and maybe one more. Since level 6 or 7 the game feels almost impossible to lose with the hero upgrades. I died a few times during the first time playing, but haven't died ever since as far as I remember. Feels more like I'm just playing my combos without much regards for what the opponent does. Also, the health potions are so strong, "Strength" feels almost pointless.
I tried the "Craft a minion with 4 effects" quest, but didn't figure it out yet. I assume it has to do with a specific item and/or luck event to get there.
Other than that I have like 80 to 90% of the main quests/achievements.
My usual run time is about 50 to 60 minutes. The fastest was 35. I tried the sub 20 quest but that wasn't really for me. I played on difficulty level 8 or 9, so maybe that makes a difference, but I didn't want to cheese it by playing on level 1.
If you want to know anything specific just let me know. Otherwise here are my notes from playing today:
Infinite loop bug on "gain health". The [Gentle Cultivator] would trigger each other. And the [Mech Spy] would get triggered in turn.
This loop happened twice, and both times it would go to roughly 330 health. Not sure if it's by chance.
This is what the bugged dungeon looks like after loading.
Well, first of all, thank you for all the feedback, and for playing in general!
I'll go over some of your comments.
-Difficulty: It is a bit hard for me to balance the randomness of enemies, the power of the meta-progression elements, and the power of the different classes with the player skill. The first 20 difficulties could be very easy for veteran card game players while difficulty 0 could be nightmarish for new players. I'm thinking of ways to balance this, but the AI being kinda of weak right now is a result of me nerfing it so much for the sake of inexperienced players feeling cheated by cheap AI cards. Also, I'm thinking about nerfing the meta-progression skills since they are a bit too strong at the moment. Lastly, you mention enemies not playing differently. They indeed don't change much in the way they play, but rather their decks get stronger the higher the difficulty. I know this isn't ideal but it is what I could manage for now. Not playing cards only occurs because their randomly generated deck was maybe terrible and they didn't get any cheap playable cards.
-Strength and potions: This is true, strength goes from being quite desirable to being basically useless with meta progression. I'm thinking of ways to deal with this.
-Infinite loops: The game has a hard cap of 50(I think?) triggers per card per turn, but that does take some time to reach with two cards. People like going infinite so I left the cap very high, but it might be a bit much, I'll do something about it.
-Quests, meta progression, and how they are unclear: These two systems are in fact a bit unclear when you first pick them up. Hopefully, once I get tutorials going this issue will be solved. Also right-clicking to level-down should be implemented at some point.
-Keeping decks: A system to keep records of your previous run's decks is being worked on for both the purpose of just checking your best decks of all time, to having them available for custom runs once those get implemented.
-Cards rising bug: That was supposed to be fixed but a recent change might have broken them I'll check it out.
-Quest tracker: This was requested by other players and I do want to implement something like this at some point, so yeah, it is on the list.
-Giving enemies a face: This is indeed something I should do, I'm going to try and figure out a way to get this going at some point.
-Bugs: I'm really sad to hear you encountered so many bugs. Having a screenshot of what the field looked like when those occurred would've been extremely helpful for the bugs in combat. For the loading bug, I haven't encountered them myself lately, but they have been known to happen before. If you even encounter them again in the future, sending your savefile my way would be really helpful. It gets overwritten as soon as you start a new game, so if you intend to send it, please keep that in mind.
-Game crash: Haven't seen this one before. I'll try to test out the scenario you mentioned.
-Card combinations being bad: That specific scenario (Add 1 mana for a cost of 2) was supposed to be forcibly fixed already but I guess it can still happen, I'll look into it. In general, I do want to keep some level of silliness for card generation, but I'll think about restricting more dumb combinations in the future.
-The Assassin quest; To unlock the assassin you need to craft a Minion with 1 active and 3 passives, add it to your deck, and play it during battle for the achievement to unlock.
Again thank you very much for your feedback and comments friend!
Thanks for the detailed explanation, but that wasn't necessary! Though appreciated.
While the inifinite loops are fun, they're somewhat annoying because of how long they take to resolve - especially when the time is running.
I'll keep an eye out for the bugs.
Btw, are there "static" (non-random) cards? Not from the starter deck, but from packs and shops. One card I had, some 7/7 dragon minion that would cause the enemy to draw 3 on my stand-by or something, would get refined but the "draw 3" didn't disappear. I was just wondering, because that card had a unique name - nothing that seemed random. Was a nice touch if intentional.
No problem the least I can do is give a proper reply to comments!
There's no static cards (yet). SRs and URs have a chance of being generated with unique names based on their card art. Refining can either decrease mana cost, remove negative effects, or increase attack and resistance, so maybe you got one of the other refine bonuses.
I think one of the charms of the game is how it sometimes generates cards that seem very well designed even though they are completely random.
