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Your theory is correct. So that shown 0 should have counted if you rolled any blanks. They are indeed meant to be difficult as the potential prize is greater than pretty much everything else there is in the game right now. Quite a lot of the events in the game are ones you can just blindly accept but this one I tried to make it so that you'd have to really consider whether you should gamble or not.

And what comes to the frog language, it's not expected to be solved. Those events don't even count as a real even (you still get another afterwards) and only give out some tips/hits if you've cracked the code. So basically just a pacing change where you might stop for a bit to ponder what is going on between fights. And I'm pretty sure the word game one is solvable even without knowing what they say...

The same as their normal crew member counterparts but better (ie. level two at the start). 

Patch deployed and I'm pretty sure that'll fix it. Seems to be coming from pad controls. Do you happen to have a controller plugged in, one that maybe has less than the "normal" amount of buttons?

Thanks, that should be enough to hunt the bug down and do a blind fix even though I can't replicate it myself.

Really peculiar indeed! I have tried it a bunch on Firefox too (on Mac though) and haven't encountered this ever. And doesn't seem like just a Firefox thing if that happened to you on Chromium too. Since it's playing the music and remaining black screen, my guess would be that there might be some weird error or some other glitch causing the "black curtains" from opening up at the start as they should. But can't find anything that could be causing it really and it's so weird that it magically just started working for you again just like it stopped working too.

That is weird. You're the second person so far to have encountered this and I have no idea what could be causing it. Could you check the console (F12 to access dev tools on Firefox) to see if there are any errors shown there?

And I have standalone on Steam available for few bucks but that too is just a wrapper app using the same browser version of the game. Porting it to completely native would be a quite a big amount of work as it would be pretty much remaking the game completely and it's not something I'm planning on currently.

So as far as I know, it's a bug that happens but I have no idea why. Have you found out a way to make it happen consistently?

Very cool!

Sadly didn't manage to beat it in the three runs I did. Did come very close to it twice though but got kinda dicked by RNG in the end.

The visuals are great. Everything looks nice and easily distinguishable. All I'd really do is add more animations and better (if there even was anything else besides linear) easings to existing ones like for example shuffle seemed very slow and stiff. But other than that it looked pretty damn flawless to me.

Same story for the audio work really. The music is chill and doesn't get annoying at all even with repeated plays. The sound effects too were nice and informative.

The gameplay is interesting but it's a bit much at first. Restricting the shop options to only what you can buy might be a good start to have it introduce itself a bit more smoothly. And I'd rather see the tutorial be more integrated to the first few rounds and not being an info dump in the beginning.

Being a full information game, it'd be nice to have the spawner cards also include the description of the card they spawn on them. I kinda strayed away from some of them thinking that their targets would be a hinderance (like some of them are) but they ended up being good too. And then there are loads of items that have a pointless cheaper counterpart that pretty much just clog the shop and are noob traps (torch to lantern, bonfire to axe and so on).

Had to go for a one more try but no luck again... so close again! 

But this seemed like a solid strategy really. Have a bunch of lanterns to light up the start, tip jars and super soakers to rack up some money and flips. Then harvest all the stacked up envelopes/leaves/balloons/fireworks and have some moons etc to spend them on.

Some of the other cards were interesting but didn't really seem worth it in comparison. It might be more interesting if there were less options to choose from but in turn you could spend all your money instead of just buying one card. Or you could even have both kinds of shops and even more different "events" in between to make the runs more varied and interesting.

But the early game is so boring, slow and tedious that it really deters me from trying again. You basically have to slog through the same steps every time pretty much getting rid of your starters and slowly building some bank to get it going with new ones. It just didn't seem fun after first two times. Dunno what a good solution for this would be though. Being a roguelike kinda limits the options as can't really have checkpoints/levels so that the goal would first be 10 coins for example and then it would kinda save your progress there and continue to 20 etc. One way maybe could be being more in roguelite vain and allow the player to maybe manipulate their starting deck somehow.

Good job! 👍

Not too hard to notice where the inspiration for this comes from.  Sadly the cards here (for what I've seen of em at least) don't have enough variety to make it all that interesting.  And I hit a complete wall few levels in where I just can't do anything no matter what I try. I just can't get enough mana fast enough to keep up with the constant onslaught of enemies. Not too fun getting absolutely stomped and slowly losing all your deck with nothing you can really do about it. And it's so dang slow too. Doesn't really inspire me to even keep trying.

It looked very nice and moody. Not a huge fan of the font though, it's not very readable and the tutorial having loads of texts for you to slog through without really getting to play yet made it feel even worse. It did a good enough job to teach the mechanics but it wasn't paced all that well and wasn't really interactive enough for my liking. It really would have been better if more integrated to the first level.

Well, after some time off from it starting to write this feedback, I went back and few more tries in managed to luck through the level with some luckier starting draws. Then proceeded to steamroll through the rest of the game with no issues.

So basically all the stat boost cards are pretty much a trap and not worth it at all unless you have a surplus of mana and in those cases you are already probably winning and have some secrets to spend your extra mana on instead. The dark ritualish mana gain card seemed to be the best one I saw by far.

Placing the cards seemed a bit pointless. Didn't see any reason why you really would play your cards on anywhere else besides the furthest along the track you can. Just made it clunkier to play and seemed like "we gotta do it like this because StS does it like this". Would need more deep mechanics of having more defensive front line defending the more fragile ranged units and casters but even then it would be just wrong or right with no real strategy involved.

The audio work was very much on the lights side but even though it was simple, it somehow didn't get too boring and irritating. In fact, it's still playing there on the background as I'm writing this. But sound effects were lacking a bit more. Having some more actual noises of combat and so on would have made it more interesting to follow. The game was mostly just about waiting for the next available cast while watching to fight go on so might as well make it more entertainable.

The fights should always start you with at least some mana. That initial wait every round start felt horrible. All at the same time where sometimes enemies were already half way down the track before you were even able to cast anything.

But yeah, all in all, it was pretty enjoyable ride. Would just need pacing improvements, less duplicate and boring cards and more interesting ones instead to make the gameplay deeper and less about just blindly waiting for your 2/2 grizzly to throw in the mix.

Good job! 👍

That is intended behaviour to ramp up the difficulty more.

Probably yeah, you need internet connection at the point when you lose and it (tries to) submit the score.

Fun stuff! Required some grinding but here we go. Still did some sloppy dashes and could still shave off some fractions but beating the dev is enough for now.

At first I didn't really like it but still decided to go for a faster run and stumbled on the secrets and it really clicked and grew on me. The controls (for pad) still were a bit mysterious to decipher even with the instructions which I guess isn't bad at all considering the theme.

And gotta agree with you on bisect at least, it's awesome for finding the regression points. But no love for blame, it's my favourite!

Oh shit, now I realized that there are separate trophy categories on the leaderboards. Back to the grind!

Yeaeeah, nope. Got at least the second spot on all but that final trophy is draining the will to live out of me with the inconsistent annoying wall clips and getting stuck or getting screwed by the invisible dash delay. On my first time through, by the way, I got it without knowing about the dash at all.

The hand drawn aesthetic is great but the sound was a bit lackluster. So little effects and they seriously lacked oomph and variety. And even the visuals had some not so great looking quirks like the corners and massive amounts of copy/paste. Would have looked so much better if you had drawn bigger chunks of the level by hand and not just small tiles.

The physics and controls overall were pretty good but could still use some improving. The collider being there for only about top half of the "single blocks" was quite annoying as there was a discrepancy between what it looked like and what actually was there. And double clicking the sticks happened by accident for me before even finding it and it first made be think if I completely broke it somehow. Only now I realized that it could be done with double clicking too cause when finding the note about it (and all the time playing after that) I just kept pressing both of the sticks just like using both shoulder buttons for dashing.

But obviously more content would have been nice. Running the same level again and again with the same objectives really got kinda stale a bit fast.

Good job! 👍

No please don't kill me! 😅 But yes, you can hit escape and press quit there to give up and have it submit the score.

Yup!

Nice art style and overall very pleasant to look at. The constant sprite tearing was a bit annoying to look at but obviously nothing major. But should be easy enough to fix with a quick google. Can't remember off the top of my head how to fix it as I don't often work with tile maps on Unity. And was the background parallax the completely opposite of what it should be like? Wasn't it moving faster than the foreground? Something about it looked off to me.

There were also few outliers that didn't lit the overall pixelated look. The collectables and the bullets didn't quite fit. The bullets were also a bit too small and slow in my opinion. They were actually so slow that when you pick up enough speed, you can't even shoot the enemies anymore as you run past your bullets. Might also want to turn on the "scale canvas size with screen size" option on the canvas so the UI elements aren't that huge when not playing full screen (or when playing on a smaller screen).

Might be just me but I had difficulties figuring out the state which the lighter platforms were. Their on/off states weren't distinguishable enough in my opinion. I don't think the game would even need two different styles of blocks as they'd already be distinguished enough by their phase. But I think quite a common trick with these kinds of systems is to have an additionally different style for off blocks on top of just dimming them. Mario Maker and Celeste come time mind as examples that tackle this issue well.

A quick game focused on running against time really would need a quick restart and ability to skip the cutscene on the end. It's no fun trying to improve your time when there are constant hurdles and delays put in front of you. The whole level design also didn't quite feel perfect for speed running. One of the early enemies was perfectly synced to make you either have to wait for it, get hit or skip the collectible (and jumping over it was very inconsistent too). And of you play flawlessly to the end, the final two enemies are impossible to shoot as you have so much speed. Doesn't feel great.

The audio work was pretty good. The music seemed a bit too cheery and chill to fit the game though. And there were quit a lot of actions which were missing sound effects like jump landing etc which made it feel more desolate and made the existing sound effects get more repetitive.

They're key pieces on reaching the ending of the game.

Pressing space will close that when it happens. Will fix it soon.

Well yeah, that is indeed true. And not only for skips and stuns, it's still overall way more luck reliant that I'd want it to be. I've been thinking of more stuff I could add to give more actual choice making and counterplay for some common big dangers. But still keeping it balanced so that players can't realistically survive everything (at least before the "end").

So controlling the camera was very tricky as the cursor wasn't locked. You just end up with about a 90 degree sector you can look at. And controls overall felt kinda weird. Kinda forgot about the dash for like over half of the playtime. That seemed to be the only way to actually have some control over the character as the bounces were somewhat unruly but obviously not being able to fully control the camera ie. the dash direction either didn't really help. I ended up with some final parts being so high up the stage that I would have needed to jump from the edge but the camera refused to allow me to dash that way. Kinda infuriating.

The visuals were nice. Pretty nice 3d models which I can now appreciate a lot more after first time trying to make my own game in 3d too. Very pleasant to look at color palette too. The player character seemed a bit plain to look at. Maybe because it was all just plain white as you only saw it from behind. Really would have wanted to have some audio there too.

But a multiplier game too, dang. But a multiplier game would require some more players. Wonder if it'd work better with more players.

Oh saw you mention the camera control working on the downloadable version. Not sure if that is correct with multiple screen setup as the cursor can still leave the full screened app and deactivate it. Locking the cursor to the center of the screen (Cursor.lockState = true) would fix this and it does work on web version too.

True, but they're not really designed to be fun. I don't think everything can be designed to be purely about fun. A game like this needs some things to be an obstacle and a challenge. The fun/accomplishment comes from beating those obstacles. And they (usually) start appearing on the late game where it's throwing everything at you to give some challenge.

Well, I'm not familiar with pygame myself. And it's hard to say what is wrong with just this. My first guess would be that you haven't fully published it if others can't even download it.

Yes?

Yeah I guess it must be something special you have but no idea really what it could be. So the screen remains black at the start... does the music still play? Could you check the console (F12 on Chrome and then console tab there) to see if it displays some errors?

That's pretty much true. There are some cases when you get a good seeming start but it still dwindles down before the end but mostly you either get a good start that can take it to the end or don't and lose kinda fast. Of course I could cook the books a bit and tweak the odds for more balance but that doesn't seem "fair" either. I do have some plans on making the end game more challenging and varied which will hopefully make it more interesting.

That's very weird. No idea at all why it wouldn't work on some computer specifically on any browser. 🤔

What do you mean, like the game just fails to load? Weird, don't think I've heard anyone else have that kind of an issue. What browser are you using?

What do you mean it ate the whole ship? 😱 But yeah, hard to say, there are multiple different pearl effects that you can stack on them.

I'd guess you had cabin boy, he allows you to loot extra cargo pieces and that message identifies you can loot more than one.

Nice! Mate feeling left out...

Yeah, it's intended to be that way.

Probably too late to save it but that is a side effect from pad controls (you can scroll through different trinket/crew member tooltips with LB/RB and mouse wheel. You most likely just scrolled and that happened. You can get out of with with pressing space. I'll soon add a way out of it by just clicking anywhere else too cause that's just confusing.

Nice! 👍

Didn't even realize that those two can indeed be the same one. I don't think it ever happened to me. By the way, that wasn't the king ship where you return the prince and get a crew member or a plated dice. But declining that offer is a valid choice too (though rarely) if you don't like what's in offer as you avoid buffing the next fight.

Ahh thanks, glad to hear! The hats are indeed just purely cosmetic. For now at least.

True, when you start losing it does kinda spiral downwards hard and it doesn't feel great. And as a flip side also when you have more than say something like 10 damage dice, it doesn't really matter either. Haven't come up with a good solution to either of these "problems" really. Leaving destroyed dice as broken ones still contributing to damage would kinda help on the downward spiral but would also make the meaning of having x amounts of damage dice even less as you'd just always get "enough" after just a few battles in.

Not sure if that's what you mean but if you have trinkets or crew members and use mouse scroll, it goes through the different tooltips for them. This is functionality coming from controller support. It closes and resumes normal mode with space button. Guess I need to make if go off with click too or something.

Glad to hear it's clicking! That puzzle is indeed meant to be very difficult to decipher in its own (though possible). There are some items/effects which make it easier.

Enemy gets to pick those ie. they are not strategic for you. Just like you choose where you're getting hit.

Hard to say without knowing more. Of course it could be just really bad luck but also can be missing some things (for example not picking up loot or not preserving your cargo dice well enough).

The divine being fights are a puzzle (ish) and I don't want to completely spell them out. Pay attention and experiment...

That's a pretty good idea. Adding special challenging events for the end game would help in both keeping it from becoming too repetitive and boring and also adding some more difficulty to it.