itch.io

Really cool and well done. I'm finding it brutally hard right now. Maybe a little more explanation in the description?

As I play I'm slowly figuring out that there is a lot of information built into the display, but it took me a while and I'm still not sure I totally get what's going on.

Edit: Oh, there's a help page!

Edit 2: It seems like I lose attack and defense each time I move a card (regardless of demon clock). This doesn't seem to be mentioned in the help page (which is very nicely done).

Great game!

I always feel a little bummed out by games like this, because just as it gets you hooked it comes to an end. The third act especially was less difficult than the earlier two, even while introducing the coolest abilities.

Still, release-quality game design, really impressive! Hope this level of polish turns into something longer I can buy.

Congrats on getting back into it! It's an original idea, hope it develops into something really cool.

It's so funny to me that, for once, my janky setup (Firefox on an m2 Mac with 8gb Ram) isn't getting any of the glitches people are posting.

FYI the limit to the knife summon seems not to be functioning. If I understand the card-text right, he should be losing health as he heals, and heal only up to 3 health (or whatever his health is at the time knives are activated). For me, all copies of the knife summon are healing an unlimited amount, and not suffering any health loss from healing.

Great update! I'd say the demo is looking polished and a great advert for the game. I really like the mixing of the deck order - the seagull is a good boss, but knowing it's the final one every time makes it easy to beat with certain decks (reflection wrecks it pretty fast, but has more trouble with other creatures and bosses).

If I could make a suggestion: adding some hint of a larger story/mystery to the intro and ending of the demo seems to be a common way to hook players to buy the full game. The only thing missing from the current demo is a sense of "wait, where's the rest? What happens next?"

Ah, got it.  I guess that was my personal functional hyper focus.  I heard "trader" and thought "avoid combat."

Woah! Awesome! I was not optimistic you would figure it out given how little info I could give.

I get that, but that means that I need to acquire resources for either 0 or 1 gold in order to make any money.

I haven't seen any way to get new resources for less than 2 gold. Am I supposed to farm enemies?

Looks great...either the balance is off or I am just not getting it. When a town wants to buy a good, it gives me 2 currency in trade,  but no good ever costs less than 2 to buy. This would seem to mean that your net worth is constantly decreasing as you consume and sell resources.

I'm clearly missing the part where you acquire cheap resources.

One was just left of the cola bottle in the pit.  "Left" might be a poor description, but I was fighting one of the creatures (either a 2-hit creature or a 4-hit creature) in between two blocks of stone, and rolling back rolled me through the wall to the right, slightly down, and (with enough jiggling) into the "hidden" cola bottle.

The other Time was in one of the abandoned indoor buildings, I think maybe the elevator building or the building with the oil? In the upper-left of the building I clipped through the ceiling, got stuck, and had to reload

The third time was in one of the cave sections where you exit a train car and can explore before going into the next traincar.  I rolled backwards (maybe dodging an enemy) and through the wall, into the next cave section outside of a train car.

Sorry if that's too vague; if I catch the next build I'll pay more attention on my next playthrough.

Has anyone found a way to get into the vault or irradiated zone? Those both seem like full version exclusives.

Also, I'd love to know what the consequence is for hurting the radts. I couldn't bring myself to do it. (I imagine it has to do with the late-game encounter in the northern caves).

Really Great! Can't wait to buy the full version.

Bugs: there are some issues with clipping(?) through the walls while spinning forward or backwards especially in the cave areas (both the train tunnel and especially the hole). I was able to jiggle my way out in 2/3 cases, but one time I had to reset, and I did end up (inadvertently) skipping a lot of the hole because of it. Maybe something worth checking on. There are also some areas in the isometric areas where your robot can walk places it shouldn't be able to. Inside the ship, for example, there is a tunnel of walkable space on the far right going up that can put you into a tunnel that is hard to walk out of. The other examples I found were just being able to walk too far up into walls, creating a weird visual, but didn't affect gameplay.

Really fun!  I love seeing all stages of the dev process on itch, but it's nice to play a game/demo where the mechanics are already this well developed. I couldn't believe there were multiple bosses and so many different buffs and enemy abilities. 

I did throw mugs on the ground.  Eventually, one mimic mimicked one mug, but that was over the course of at least 20 minutes watching them walk around the mugs.  I might have just had bad luck, but I kindof suspect an issue is drastically reducing the mimic rate.

I loved the atmosphere, and the music and graphics.  It's a beautiful project.  If you keep developing it, I would love to spend more time in this cool mimic space once there is more to do.

Hmm, my mimics never mimicked anything. I'm on safari, and the game looks great, but they never mimicked any mugs or each other.  Weird.

I also never found any "Talos," but I'm guessing I just didn't meet some precondition for that, or didn't click enough?

The mills are the only piece that stacks.  That means you can build 3-4 fields next to a single mill, and keep placing new mills on top of the first one. This makes your fields way more productive, and gets you way more taverns.

Also, your piers seem to be choking your island. There are a couple ways to prevent that.  I posted one here, and another poster found a different way.

If you're willing to give it a second chance, there actually is a way to control the chance from the player side.  One of my comments above lays out the strategy, but it's more fun to figure it out yourself.

Wow, I've never had an island look so good, and I never thought of pier ponds!

My islands end up being a very basic wood-house block, stone-house block, one mill, and a huge line of islands going in one direction covered in piers.  Ugly as hell.

You need to use more taverns (multiplied with market if necessary) to grind through your deck if you want a guaranteed win. It also helps to manage your deck aggressively early on, which is kindof hard.  I just managed a complete game where my deck never exceeded 50, so getting the castle pieces was easy in the end.

There is a steep learning curve, and it can feel like RNG at first. I do also think you can get bum luck early on and lose within 20 turns with no chance.

BUT, part of the fun is realizing you actually have way more influence over your deck than it feels like at first. Here are some strategies that can get around the issues you mentioned [Spoilers]:

1. You can use a small number of island pieces to built a jetty (a line of blocks going in one direction). Then you can put all of your piers off to the side of your real island, so they don't clutter your coastline.

2. The location and placement of your wooden houses and lumber yards can significantly increase or decrease the number of cards they produce. If you want to reduce the number of lumberyards (and fields unfortunately), place your houses in a checkerboard pattern (they produce no new cards).  If you want to maximize production, put them in a square pattern.

For lumberyards, you can maximize production by placing your trees in a checkerboard and placing lumberyards *not on top of each other* so that two yards can use the same tree. 

If you want to minimize lumberyard production, you can just place them next to one tree at a time.

Finally, late game, using taverns and markets effectively gives you fine-tuned control over your deck.

3. This might be an exploit: if you place 10 houses together (getting a mill), then place one house next to the group, you can then use "remove" on two of the group houses. If placed properly, you can combine your new house with the remaining group. This both maximizes lumber/field production (because the final house played is in the center of four houses) and gets you a new mill with only two new houses placed! Same goes for stone houses.

Great game, really nicely made!

I've seen in the comments you talking about the issue of this being a solved game. Like you said, that's not terrible (as it isn't true for all modes), but I would humbly suggest that 3X3 + turn start isn't a great default setting, since it can be beaten by player 1 with classic tic-tac-toe play. That kind takes the special out of this game.

It might make more sense for the default to give player 2 some advantage, like letting player 2 pick all pieces or all except triangle.

If you do, feel free to leave a comment on whether it still works!  Playdate OS has been updated a few times since I've touched this.

I guess that's true; I never thought about using Deck Swap  to effectively increase your default hand size on the next turn. I was still thinking of it in the old usage, ie to replay a rare card twice in one turn.

Y'know, very low priority, but here they are:

Makes sense! Follow-up question: could the steam version of a game like this still be compiled for web-play even in the later, "complete" version that's sold on steam? Ois there some point where the complexity of the game crosses "can't be a web game anymore"?

Question for the dev: is there a reason so many devs go from web-version to windows-only for the steam release? Is there something about game-maker or html5 that makes releasing for Mac onerous?

It's just weird that I can play these games on my Mac online but not buy the complete versions :( I figure there is some reason devs do this though, you're not the only one.

Hmm, I'm 9 cards short of completing the library, and I can't remember or find any cards that are missing.  Does anyone have the complete library that they could share an image of?  Is the library completion bugged?

I know some cards (artists clay for sure) have issues entering the library, but eventually I even got artists clay, and I'm still 9 short.

I would add that I (very subjectively) disagree with the feedback above. I find the current version provides a *lot* of card removal.  Currently It's possible, maybe even likely, that the deck doesn't grow at all over the course of the game.  Not saying that's good or bad, but it's definitely already more forgiving than other deck-building games in this vein.

I'm pretty sure I remember this being different before, so I infer this is a (very reasonable) balance update.  However, after this change, some cards like deck swap, resurrection, and bent arrow become almost useless except under very, very specific circumstances. 

I would gently suggest those cards may require revision.

Hey, I wanted to throw out a suggestion for improving balance and expanding the game with absolutely minimal dev effort:

Currently the game basically ends after 12 turns or so if successfully cheesed (buying money towers and minimizing the progress per turn so you can build up a huge army by the end-boss, around turn 16-20).

You obviously don't want to put effort into making new units just for people who are abusing the game, but you *could* take a page from the 80's/90's era book and just make color-swapped massively boosted version of the existing enemies, to come after a few rounds of the shielded knights (maybe turn 12 or so?).

You wouldn't even need to worry about balance too much, because anyone still alive at that point has pretty much mastered the game, and such units could be avoided by winning more quickly.

The point of this would be to make an in-game incentive to win quickly, rather than just guaranteeing a boss-win by taking your time.

I think it would be really fun to start running into 8/8 grunts or, eventually, 15/15 knights, or things like that.

Lol, looks like it wasn't an easter egg after all; latest update took it out :'(

I respectfully disagree. The game is not easy to start, but very fair once you understand it.  That's not to criticize your skill, but I think having fairness hidden behind experience is a good learning curve.

I think the strategy element you're missing is that your units also grow exponentially, if you plan them well.  Getting four of the same unit combined unlocks insane powers, and boosting both power and toughness of a unit, especially shielded, gives exponential (geometric?) damage growth. 

As a result, sacrificing your low-level units or high-level bad units to get re-rolls is totally worth it.  Using the "freeze" ability to control your options is also key.

Succubus does have some very weird effects, including both glitches and secret(?) functions.  It makes me wonder if there's something weird in the code that could also explain the secret power.

For example, succubus enemies often flip 180 degrees when hit or when summoning enemies on death (presumably some of them don't have mirrored animations or a mirror effect wasn't applied to them).  Also, succubuses of any level appears to suck the shield off of the mini-bosses alongside the final boss, without actually converting them.

Maybe all of it is a payoff given that the succubus isn't allowed to use her powers on the boss and mini-bosses, but it would nice to have confirmed.

This is already a finished game by any standard for web-games.  Very polished; I totally forgot that it even has updated modes promised.

I'll play the heck out of them if you add them, but unlike some games I don't feel like this is inherently lacking something without them.

Question for dev: is the level3 succubus's secret effect in the final battle a glitch or an easter egg?

Really fun.  Some devs forget that a key part of the original "retro" games is a punishing difficulty that makes up for the limited (though extremely polished) mechanics of the era. 

Not this dev.  10/10

FYI, doesn't load for me on Safari, Mac silicon. (Works in Firefox though)

It happens after playing for a long time, but since it’s a long game, that just means about 2/3 of the way through the game (the third deck).

I especially mentioned safari since safari also crashes on Reddit for me after scrolling too far, and it’s the whole page crashing, not just the game; however, no other itch game has this effect. If no one else reports this, I would just ignore it, but it might hint at some memory leak issue.

This has gone from "cool idea" to "really fun" with the recent updates.

However...on safari (Mac silicon)  it still crashes the page after a while.   Maybe this is a me issue, but if other users experience it it might be worth looking into.