Thanks for checking it out!
the tool tips for enemies will tell you that they'll spawn spiky balls on their turn, there isn't much variety in enemy behaviour for the time being.
I’m not sure how I feel about RNG in turn-based tile puzzle games, but maybe that’s just me being burnt out from games like Into the Breach lol.
I was actually hoping it will feel similar to into the breach lol. Thing is, this game probably isn't the best use case for procedural/RNG puzzles (at least with the current, less feature-complete, jam version). Of course handcrafted puzzles will be better then RNG in isolation. With handcrafted puzzles you're just after the a-ha moment where with something like into the breach you're motivated to find a more optimal solution because you don't want to lose the run. Its more high stakes so there's tension from turn to turn -which is the important thing. That's the thought process as to why there are more portals when you are close to winning.
Ideally you'll feel a tension that motivates you to optimise your turn but this game is too low stakes for that (I just leaned into the core gameplay loop being fun for now). Maybe it wouldn't have felt frustrating if it was somehow communicated that the difficulty is increasing from turn to turn (kind of ran out of time to implement something for that though i also didn't want to steepen the learning curve or add to the UI). Its done so the player will have a reason to try and optimise their turns (you'll get the win by either playing aggressively and finishing early or gathering loads of actions to win later). Also if you feel like the final turn was easy then there wouldn't be any tension which was the goal (it would be a boring turn otherwise, maybe tedious that you have to go through it like the level should've ended last turn). I also found it lends to the feeling of getting a checkmate against the game on the last turn which i found sort of interesting.
I'm not 100% sure how this'll change since the only other opinion I got on the matter was along the lines of "I love how you get really close to winning, makes me wanna try it again" which wasn't the intension but cool for him at least. It is flawed in that losing can be a slow process so you're probably better off restarting if things are looking bad (I'm gonna change the hp system so this'll go away). I was so focused on making sure every turn was interesting (when winning) that I forgot to check what it was like when losing.
I might have the character animation show acceleration and deceleration when starting and stopping to improve game feel (like hollow knight or with shmups) but at current i think tight controls suit the mechanics better. Maybe ill execute this concept differently in the future with momentum based platforming as a sequel or something.