itch.io

Hi, the game is not under active development currently, though I would like to eventually solve the design issues that had stopped me and complete it.

here are some thoughts that came to mind while playing
UI:

-in the character selection screen why do I need to undo the selection before I can click on another character?

-the quit to main menu button is difficult to find

-you could grey out unclickable cards, and highlight the end turn/draw buttons when no card is clickable

-the constant highlight on some UI elements is a bit misleading. to indicate the turn player I think it would be enough to only highlight the character icon

GAMEPLAY:

my biggest problem with the overall experience was that the  suitable (heh) amount of game actions and decisions you take doesn't translate well to actual player agency. for example I was playing against a slime, and after a reshuffle all that changed compared to the start of the battle was that I lost some hp. this retroactively makes the player feel bad about his input not having weigh, and makes the battle feel very slow and sluggish because there's no strong sense of having made progress after a reshuffle. on the bright side I don't think that this is something you can only fix through revisiting the game mechanics, you can probably just tweak some numbers (like buffing damage and hp while keeping the heal constant) and add some more difficult to recover from skills. maybe, to really make sure that there's no matchup where neither player can progress, you can make an alternative wincon in this manner:

- every shuffle starts a round

- after a reshuffle the player that lost less hp wins that round

- the battle can also end if one wins 2 rounds

The linux export has no sound and runs a bit too poorly on my laptop, even with the lowest quality settings, to the point where I sadly couldn't try the game

I've been keeping an eye on this project because the concept is up my alley, but in the past the effort spent in parsing what was happening prevented me from really delving into the gameplay proper. For this reason I'm very happy to see that you've been receptive of my and others' suggestions in the thread, I believe the UI/UX has improved greatly as a result. One more retouch I'd like to see is left-aligning enemy posts and right-aligning the player's. As for the gameplay, the roguelike mode doesn't feel very rogueliky, every resource you gain is a net positive because you don't lose access to what you had before, so pathing and related decisions lose a lot of weight, and experimentation isn't stimulated. I think that you should focus your efforts in expanding constructed modes, maybe dividing the available archetypes in classes and having some short story lines, taking a page from card quest (which shares your deckbuilding-in-blocks approach).

Damn, that's going to be tricky to debug, I've tested the current apk on my phone and it worked as always. Do you mind giving me some info like your phone model/OS, a screenshot, and whether the ingame version matches the web one (0.8.4B)?

>When I run into the guy with horns and green eyes it's over.

That's the boss, and I'd say that reaching him is a nice result! I have kept him noticeably above every other enemy, even considering its boss status, because in the demo beating it unlocks higher difficulties, that require an higher average combo to have a shot at.  When starting the game, tangled feels like a bonus because in the allotted movement time new players can't really make more than 60 profitable moves, so the time aspect is just an added difficulty. With more experience you start moving orbs fast enough that you make around a hundred moves on average to clear the whole board relying on muscle memory (example run), which makes tangle a status that forces you not to rely on speed.

>If the board was taller, I wouldn't feel like it depended on luck as much in that case

This also ultimately depends on the player's experience. At a high level,  increasing the board size would increase the variance of your average stat output, because you clear more orbs and the probability that the orbs replacing them cause additional combos increases.

Thanks for commenting on the bullet points I asked about, and for pointing out the typo.

>The abrupt music restarting is a little annoying, but I assume it's temporary.

Now that I'm rechecking, the battle music's loop offset sounds like it was slightly off, thanks for this as well.

As for the difficulty, I'm glad to hear you got to the boss despite finding the game hard. You do well in pointing out that some orb sets are too unforgiving compared to others, considering the other mechancis I added I should make their utility more granular.

Sorry for the late reply, I already had that font in my fc-list (I tried to put it in .fonts and update the cache like you're saying too for good measure).

Unfortunately text doesn't show up when running the game with WINE.

Thanks for commenting, the difficulty definitely sounds like the biggest problem at the moment.

>No idea how to start the easy mode.

It's the default, to unlock harder difficulties you'd have to beat it. Anyways, point taken, I'll lower enemy stats on 0.8.3 (in fact, for anyone reading this when that version is up, let me know if things require further tweaking).

The first few encounters are easier by virtue of being drawn from a different encounter table than the one used later on, but reading your comment "easier" isn't the word to use. While it's true that the skill ceiling for this game is high, I certainly don't want the easiest difficulty to feel too difficult even for a beginner. I'll chop down their HP and block a bit more, thanks for the feedback!

the bad news is that window scaling 3x just adds a black border to 2x for me. the good news is that that's my only complaint; the tutorial is helpful without being boring or condescending, and it's impressive how the mechanics make the concept of a real time puzzle game seem natural. overall a very well reasoned game.

while it's normal for some menus to be missing in a prototype, I think that you should have volume settings and the ability to pause as soon as possible. the music is nice and fits the game well, and the title screen is amazing, but it also sets people's expectations for good backgrounds up, so take extra care with (re)drawing the battlefield. I also liked the powerup selection's flair and the enemy designs. personally I found the initial walk speed and heart collection radius too small.

on the technical side, I didn't encounter any bug or powerups interacting/behaving weirdly, but the performance declined noticeably with time and couldn't get to the 10min mark before the stutter got too bad. 

as for the concept itself, I don't have much to say, this being a clone. if you added a twist to the genre I must've missed it.

This is the last DD submission for this game, as the demo is, for practical purposes, complete. As such, some of the areas where I'm most interested in feedback are:

- game feel (are any VFXs bad, and are any missing?).

- whether the japanese translation is acceptable.

- the easiest difficulty's balance (especially if it's your first time playing). ideally it should be at a level where you die without feeling discouraged.

Of course bug reports, general feedback and random design ideas are welcome as always.

Thanks a lot for reporting, I wasn't able to reproduce the bug but I got rid of some possible causes and pushed the changes.

Glad to hear back from you after the changes I made, in particular I'm happy to hear that you found the tutorial useful. 

> is there a way to make the first few fights easier?

The problem with making the first fights too easy is that they risk becoming a formality for an experienced player when starting a run, and I fear that this initial downtime will impact the long term replayability (which is what I'm trying to get right the most). I'll keep working on making fights easier at lower difficulties; in particular I want to make some enemies' moves and abilities, like combo absorbs, proportional to the selected difficulty. In the thread the idea of having a puzzle mode, where new players can practice matching without it feeling like a tutorial, also came up, and I'm definitely considering that as well.

>What are you planning on adding next?

As far as mechanics go, the last big thing I'm planning on adding is wits (consumables that have an effect on the board). I already added a testing version of them to the game, they're the three buttons at the bottom right next to the statuses; I just need to see if they make sense, and if yes, design a few more of them, make them available thorough the run and add them to menus, tutorials and help texts. For QoL, I don't have much else planned, other than fleshing out the statistics page and having a summary of the run when you die/win.

After that, the demo version of the game will pretty much be completed! For the final version, I want  to make a run longer by adding another 2~3 floors (after you defeat the current boss you'd advance to the second floor instead of winning), which is going to involve making a boatload of new enemies, relics, starting bonuses and events (I'm unsure whether I should add other orb types, I'm still considering it).

>Perhaps find a way to convey to the player that you can move more than one orb at a time to set up combos.

Yeah, if there's one take away I got from everyone's comments is that I need to stop beating around the bush and make a proper tutorial about the matching mechanics. Thanks for the kind words about the overall experience!

Thanks for the comments! Unfortunately most people assume that there's some kind of restriction on moves, à, là candy crush, and they don't go above 1 combo, but in reality you can set your whole board with enough practice. I recorded a small video of the intended gameplay for the last DD I partecipated in, I might as well repost it: 

I honestly really struggled with the controls, especially as the number of faces and the complexity of the puzzles grew. some stuff I found myself wishing for was:

- using the scroll wheel to adjust the field of view

- as others mentioned, snapping to the face that's currently being viewed when changing the camera angle

- a "lock" button that doesn't change the camera angle once you let go of the cube

- generally faster/snappier animations on face change

- some way of showing the whole cube at a glance, like pic related

I liked the concept and, from what I've seen, the puzzles put its potential to good use; in particular you've done a good job of introducing and easing the player into new game elements and tougher puzzles. For this reason I feel like that it's worth focusing development efforts on stuff that complements the puzzles before adding more levels.  Good controls are especially important, because the period of time the user takes to input the solution he thought about is essentially downtime between the two fun parts of a puzzle game, thinking and winning, so you want to minimize that.

>When choosing orbs, I would like it more if what it does shows up when hovering instead of clicking and holding.

True, I initially didn't bother with supporting hovering because the target platform is Android, but that shouldn't excuse not supporting the HTML5 version a bit better. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for checking the game out even when you don't like the genres it belongs to, especially since I'm trying to appeal to a niche as opposed to a broad audience.

You gave a very good spin to the genre with the weapon/surroundings interactions, you should definitely flesh things out even further by generating more complex biomes, changing the way the enemies behave depending on the terrain, so that you can retreat to more favourable ones against certain encounters, and most importantly improving weapons mechanics. The threat level system you use is fine for enemies, but it makes it very clunky to use weapons to, say, break stone. I think it would be beneficial if weapons displayed a list of tiles they can break, and had a separate, fixed usage rate with which they break them.

I like the concept behind the game, and I think you're well on your way to have a finished product in your hands; once you've finished adding assets and implementing menus, I think the only stuff that's really missing is a big round of juicing, for which I recommend using Super Hexagon as a reference (to be clear, I do like your choice of SFXs and animations so far, I just think you need to add more, because this kind of geometric style has a harder time carrying its own weight).

As for the gameplay, allow using Z/X to fire white/black bullets, and I feel like you should be able to fire at a slightly higher rate when you don't hold a button. Lastly you could consider dividing up enemies in waves, with a wave counter, to give the player the occasional breather ( you could further expand on this by making some levels where the player wins after x waves, and treat your current game as an endless mode).

To me the simplicity of the controls felt great when it came to throwing potions, aiming with just the arrow keys and pushing the rest of execution difficulty onto imagining the trajectory and repositioning yourself was satisfying; when it comes to the movements options that you offer however the controls felt more lackuster: I would've very much liked to have the chance to dash, shield (especially if it reflected the bouncing bones), and evade attacks. Without any better option to defend myself what I found myself doing was running back and forth without jumping, which didn't do justice to the fun enemies you've designed.

Duly noted, it has become abundantly clear that a visual tutorial is needed. I will admit that I was trying to avoid making a full fledged tutorial, but, seeing how the video I posted cleared things up, this is one of those cases where showing how matching works gives information that would be too difficult to convey in writing.

>Tangled mode was actually even harder for me

I personally find it harder as well (depending on how many moves you can do), hence why I made it a malus. The reasoning is that, when matching normally, what usually happens is that you plan a route to tidy up a side of the board, and can usually tackle the other side without having planned ahead, because the area is smaller and lets you ad-lib without getting lost. When your amount of moves is fixed however you really want to try and be efficient not only on this large scale, but also locally, because you're rewarded for fixing any combo that's near your held orb (and sometimes as a result you get "caged in" your own combos, forcing you to undo one of them to get out and wasting time). Plus as you said oftentimes the most efficient move to make is a diagonal one, and they're hard to pull off consistently.

>From my point of view, the (?) stages were counterproductive, because it'd make me go against a more difficult enemy sooner. 

Well spotted, the fights at the first few depths are pulled from an easier encounter table, so using an event node at the start has this drawback.

>In terms of visual communication, the fact that only the enemy HP has a bar and the rest is just numbers meant that it'd feel pretty underwhelming whenever I was doing anything other than raw damage, especially because I was mostly focused on actually learning to get matches and not paying too much attention on the stats part.

I'm not quite sure what are you referring to, are you talking about block and evasion coming off as less important than damage?

>does *anyone* do this kind of high-speed match-3 gameplay where you're supposed to rearrange many pieces before they combine?

The only other game I know of is Puzzle and Dragons, which I shamelessly took a page from; everything else seems to follow the traditional candy crush single swap. The fact that this latter style of gameplay dominates the genre is probably yet another reason why a hard to play/not casual match-3 game needs a tutorial.

Finally, thanks for the kind words on the UX, it's reassuring to hear that it doesn't feel as cheap/rushed as its creation was.

>The only other slight I found is that it didn't seem that matching 4,5, a cross pattern, or comboing increased the effect of the orbs that much.

I agree that they should feel special; my approach was, rather than making these reward a power bonus every time you match them, to have them be conditions for activating orb/relic effects. In case you're talking about these latter orbs/relics feeling underpowered, I believe that this sensation is due to the fact that all the bonuses that I currently have in the game are multiplicative, exacerbating the problem of a low amount of combos doing way less damage than a high amount of them. The idea of making some of these bonuses additive sounds excellent because it still rewards every level of skills while being much more useful to new players, which I'm seeing is needed given the consensus on the game being too difficult. Thank you for putting me on this train of thought.

Indeed, I tried to make orb uses as clear as possible from their artwork, when it comes to the orb set you start with I couldn't do any better than this for lore reasons (the starting gear of  a salaryman who got isekai'd is just going to be his everyday items used as makeshift weapons).

>tapping an orb without moving should show what that orb does

My fear is that the popup may become annoying once one knows the various orbs' effects but I'm taking note that the current way to look them up is clunky, I'll make that info more accessible.

>I think the same would be easier to learn and easier to balance if instead of time being a factor, the amount of spaces you can move an orb is

There is a status effect that does exactly that, removes time limits and instead introduces a moves limit, it's the first "malus" that I tried because this idea sounded interesting to me too. I personally found the resulting gameplay "once in a while fun" so to speak, it's good in breaking the monotony of the usual puzzles but when it lasts for too long it slows down the pace of the game too much for my tastes.

The linux version isn't finding .NET; when .NET is involved from my experience it's less work to make things work with WINE rather than try to port the whole game. Either way, it's probably a lot of work for a very small amount of users, I thought it was fair to let you know the issue but I'm not suggesting you prioritize it over anything else you might be working on.

Brilliant game, both in terms of the idea and how you designed around it. I initially wasn't understanding when exactly was I "meant" to play the tetris part and when should I move my character instead, but a run of endless mode really cleared up all the tradeoffs at play there.

My only minor complaint is that I wish that was possible to hover onto or select a grid piece to read information about the enemy/object standing on it, but apart from that, complimenti!

I tried to play on WINE, after the starting prompt I'm shown an azure screen identical to the sky in the screen, but nothing else. The log's last line is "new player at: 0.0.0.0" with no error messages.

- It would help clearing the window after an invalid input (maybe with a "Your last input was invalid"), too many of them can clog things up and force you to scroll up. 

- There's no help/h/menu command, thankfully your screenshot showed how to attack.

- Again, I would've preferred the window be cleared after a turn, to keep the screen tidy (if you were avoiding to do so to have the history of the combat you can add a show combat log action).

- A 0 + anything that's not a digit + anything is strangely being accepted as an attack command.

- You should show the battler's hp when you print info about the current turn.

- After a while (at the end of the battle I assume) the window closes, I would rather showed a simple "won/lost. play again/quit: " prompt.

>It is optimistic to believe a player that don't know anything about the game will do 4 combos regularly, much less 8.

That's very fair, I've been playing this kind of match-3 mechanics for so many years that I can't hope to guess how good an average new player is. If the current custom seeds are doing a poor job as a bridge in difficulty I reckon I will have to think up a more structured one with easier enemy movesets, more movement time and a more generous damage calculation formula.

I was forgetting to reply to this also:

>Clicking an orb and dropping it in the same place counts as a move somehow and ends the turn instead of it cancelling the move altogether. 

I haven't been able to reproduce this bug on mobile nor on browser: There's some browser-only unintended behavior caused by the mouse going out of the screen bounds, which I don't intend to address given that the online version is only temporary, for this DD.

Thanks for having taken the time to lay out your questions. I saw that you found some answers by browsing the help menus, but in case they weren't exhaustive (and on that matter, it would be very useful to know what they failed to explain), and for others who might have similar doubts:

- On matches doing no damage: not every orb deals damage when matched, some instead increase your block, evasion or heal you. You can check what an orb does by holding click/tap on it during a selection menu or in your inventory. The enemy can also influence your damage with stats and abilities of its own (nimble is one such ability, letting the enemy avoid the first instance of damage). You can browse the current modifiers that an enemy has (if any) by holding tap/click on them, under its hp bar, and similarly you can also check out what it intends to do on its next move, after your matching, by holding its text box.

- On the overall difficulty: the game is balanced assuming that the player is very familiar with the matching mechanics. On average a 6x5 board contains a bit more than 8 combos, and making less matches than what is available is penalizing both because the number of combos itself goes into the power formula, and because less items are activated, so your stats output with 4 combos will be noticeably less than half of what it would be with 8. Not only this will result in dealing an unsatisfying amount of damage, but you'll also fail to block attacks that are designed to be fully blockable. I can't do much about making the enemies weaker, because, given the above, enemies are more than twice as weak for someone familiar with the mechanics (in particular the first encounters are all one-shottable): That said, in the game's main page I have provided some special seeds that you can try to make yourself stronger. You're right in pointing out that thinking about stats, relics and the enemy moves while having your hands already full with making sense of the matching can be overwhelming; there's a sandbox mode (seed SANDBOX) that lets you focus exclusively on practicing, but I reckon that it can't be considered a solution to the issue.

>Why would I want more orb types?

There's a lot of answers for this, some subtler than others. Improving your average item quality, mitigating the "overload" attribute on the orbs, removing your bad starting orbs by pushing them out of a color's item slot, skewing your build towards damage/block, synergy with relics, and similar things you can think about, though, admittedly, the demo is much shorter than what would be required for a lot of these considerations to really pull their weight.

>Having to wait for the enemy to make a move before I can make mine is annoying

My goal is to balance waiting times and readability, since the enemy turn can be pretty important when deciding how to match next. Seeing how it was bad enough that you voiced your thoughts about it I will prioritize working on enemies' VFXs, thanks for the pointer.

>As a suggestion (take in mind I suck at this game) all combos, regardless of type, should do damage. Then the damage orbs should do even more damage.

My hunch is that it will add a fixed amount of damage to the player output, so lowering the enemies' hp by a fixed amount would achieve the same effect, but I will experiment with something like this because I would like to avoid some softlock scenarios where a player is accidentally left with no way to do damage.

A few words about the demo itself, you forgot to explain what the red arrow resource is, and it doesn't look like it's even ever used in the tutorial so I'm struggling to guess what it does.

As for the game: the core mechanics are very promising, and it definitely looks like you can build something good upon them. to me it looks like they could work really well as a core for a dominion-style 2p game, where there are, say, 5 target cards to build and whoever builds 3 of them first wins. this way your current game modes can be reimagined as a single player/puzzle mode, and you get "for free" what I think would be an interesting spin on the multiplayer deckbuilder genre.