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Promising! I don't love it (yet), but I definitely don't hate it, either. The VS influence is very, very obvious, but that's not entirely a bad thing. Things that I think would help make it a bit better: slightly better early game ramp, better visual distinction between what is an ally and what is an enemy (especially bad with ally ships vs enemy ships), perhaps synergies between upgrades (ie. increasing your ship speed increases ally speed, increasing ramming increases shark damage, etc.).

Also: If I try to enter a code and I don't have a code, I end up getting softlocked.

Edit: Oh. And Naval Ram is basically a mandatory upgrade. To the point that the game is a LOT harder if you don't have it. Feels pretty iffy? Maybe include it by default, but scale the damage slower, or something..?

Exceptional. Short, sadly (but I understand the time constraints), but really interesting mechanics. Would be keen to see if you ever do anything more with the idea.

While this is still at an early stage, I'd recommend thinking carefully about your input scheme. Obviously, I don't know everything that you have planned, but at the moment there's no reason for space to be jump, so I'd recommend using W/Up to be jump. Similarly, your projectile only goes in the direction that you're facing at the same level, so there's no reason for it to be on the mouse - you can't aim, and there's nothing in your game design document to suggest this will be implemented. The mouse input is totally wasted. If W/Up is jump, shoot can become spacebar, or J, or... Something else. As a general rule, if a game expects me to use the mouse, then I expect to be able to aim/manipulate things with the mouse somehow.

The art is nice. Did you do it yourself?

Unsure if bug or just unclear wording: When Martyr's Blade is discarded by another card (notably Card Launcher, I haven't tried it with other things yet), no Ethereal Daggers are created. Is this only meant to happen when manually discarded, and not when discard is forced by another card?

If you drop a stack of coins on a used move dispenser, it eats them and give you nothing. (v3.2.0 and 3.2.1) It'll also eat your coins if you drop them on it when it's not your turn.

I also entered a shop and was presented with no choices, but refreshed and continued and there were choices again. No idea what the trigger was.

And the game also froze on completing a run. Screenshot of logs for your perusal, Screenshot of game would just be a screenshot of a completed screen, lol.

Can confirm.

Lightning strike appears to work correctly, however

Another one: When something has fire levels added to (at least, by both Fire Arrow and Flame hand) it they don't visually appear until the first round of fire damage hits the card.

Found another minor text mistake. "Training Course"'s description says "Add +2 damage to a summoned golems" - judging by its behaviour that should be "golem" singular.

After some faffing about, I can do you one better. A gif of the bug in action. Hope it helps!

Enjoying seeing the development over the updates!

3.1.9 - Using Artist's Clay (there should be an apostrophe, btw. It's the clay belonging to the artist. If it belongs to multiple artists then it's "Artists' Clay". Ditto for "Warrior's Buckler", etc. Not a biggy, I'm just a pedant :P ) on a card can result in a another card being cloned if they overlap and are both valid, even if the AC is dropped on an area where ONLY the intended card is present.

Looking a lot better on the black-screening, and it seems like coins are no longer going missing (maybe? I think?) So that's really good!

On the other hand, Mean Dagger isn't discarding, or using actions, or even returning to hand (but is damaging the player as expected. Would be nice to know exactly how the self-damage worked, too...). It does seem to return to hand at the end of turn, though.

Edit: No luck on the disappearing coins, actually. Ah well.

no flashing black, just cut to black no coming back. Pretty sure it was a game crash and not a hardware issue. Thanks, though!

Seems like there's a chance whenever you get coins, tbh. Usually only if there's more than one.

On a much less important note, there's also a minor nitpick that I have that sometimes coins go flying off the screen and I can't stack them. Not a biggy at all, though.

I couldn't pinpoint it exactly, but it seemed to be something to do with interacting with the discard pile? Either clicking on it, or the spectral arrows being discarded..? Take that with a significant grain of salt, though - I was only just starting to look into the console logs+debugger as you reverted. :)

Browser build, Chrome v123.0.6312.106

Running into a bug where the whole screen just goes black randomly, since the bugfix+code changes ...4 minutes ago

I'd recommend looking at how Dire Decks does it. Simple, but great.
Interesting take on the OG game. Curious to see where you take it.

Nice.

I come back to this periodically, and it's really interesting to see the changes you make. Personally, I find the current unlock system pretty frustrating - it's pretty limiting, and forces you into playing particular strategies that you don't otherwise want to, purely so you can unlock other things, rather than feeling like you're progressing. I've also found that you now (moreso than before) need to have some kind of discard mechanic, in case you fill up the board and can't play anything, so can't get new cards. Deadlocks are not fun. :(

A decent little game. Have you considered including a death counter on the final screen?

An interesting and frustrating game. I enjoyed it, thanks!

Oh. So that's what my computer goes through whenever it's in recovery mode, huh..? I guess that checks out.

I ended up getting to the start of year 20 with 63000/9750 coins, and no particular indication that I'll ever need to stop for any reason other than deciding to stop. I think that'll do. Genuinely really enjoyed this!

Updates working nicely! Unsure if you made any changes to the deck shuffling - it mostly seemed to be behaving better, but seems to still break down a bit if you play a couple of games in a row without refreshing..?
I also managed to get that combo to go off. I need to sleep, but I'll probably see how far I can push it tomorrow.

I dig this game a lot. I've been playing it a bunch over the last few days trying to get beyond Year 6 - it's tough. It's a lot easier once you figure out some of the hidden combos, but still challenging. (I've only found a couple, I'm not sure if there's more.)

There's one strategy that I think is overall more sustainable long term, but requires a bit of luck getting a good deck for it.

I've noticed a couple of issues you might like to be aware of, though:

1) The discard gets reshuffled into the deck every turn. This can lead to you picking a card and then not drawing it for many, many turns purely because of bad luck. A better (more intuitive) system would be drawing through all of the deck, moving things to discard as you play them, and then shuffling the discard into the deck when you need to draw a new card and there's nothing in your deck. This means you're guaranteed to see all the cards in your deck within 2 deck rotations from when you've bought it.

2) There's a couple of hitbox issues. The status tracker in the top right appears to prevent you from placing tiles easily in the top right tile, and (more obviously) the top second-from-right tile. So you can click on space that's within both the box of the 2nd-right tile that doesn't appear to be covered by the status tracker and it won't do anything, but if you click in the bottom third or left third that's entirely outside of the tracker hit-box then you can still place tiles there. It's pretty annoying.

3) A similar sort of hitbox issue comes up when you have the cards raised to read details and you try and place tiles in the bottom row that aren't visually covered by the cards, but would be within a plain rectangular hitbox area of the hand overall.

Fairly minor issues, but would definitely make the game feel a lot better!

Cheers for making a really neat game.

Although it's a little bit like running up that hill, sometimes, it's me, I've come home and completed it.

Nice.

I really dig this game. It took me longer than it should have to realise that you can move and delete tiles, which would have made a huge different earlier on (but I guess that's on me for not reading tutorials fully...), but I managed to get up to village before realising.

I don't know if they're meant to work like that, but it seems like research tiles like Causeway and Glacier say that they should synergise with themselves as neighbours, but end up providing +0% benefit to any of the tiles of the same type. Is that right, or is that a bug..?

Not bad. So how have you been enjoying Snow Crash..?

A nice wee game. Nothing too complex, nice core mechanics. I occasionally found that the hitbox of objects wasn't quite where the image was, which was a little annoying, but... A solid job for a first game!

I want to like this, but I just find myself stupidly frustrated with it. The core mechanic is kind of interesting but kind of hard to figure out, but ultimately it's incredibly frustrating to actually do anything. I got up to the chamber of invisible wall bounce pillars and gave up. Clamber behaves kind of inconsistently, wall bounce is rather unpredictable about how it will behave and when you've successfully performed it (even just a sound when you hit it correctly would be a huge help), the tax for failing the jumping puzzles is fairly steep which discourages people from experimenting or taking risks (which they NEED to).

Switching between mechanics could be far better if they were hotkeyed, or something..?

I feel like you've made something where the mechanics make sense to you, but you've not really thought about the average player who doesn't already know the secrets, and doesn't know how your movement system is meant to work. My recommendation would be to get someone who you know to playtest it. Don't tell them anything about it, don't give them any hints, just give them the game and watch them play. Note down every time they get frustrated, or fail to make a jump, or when they say that they want to give up.

I'm not saying that you necessarily need to make your game easier, but I do think that you need to make it easier to become skillful enough to take on the difficult challenges that you've set up - if that makes any sense..?

I note that it's "in development" at the moment, so I hope to see updates that make this a bit more playable. It's a cool idea, and I'd like to see it work.

What if something that seemed like an unambiguously good thing wasn't entirely good? Maybe try some things that shouldn't seem like they would help you, and don't forget to occasionally go back and re-read the notes.

(I also got stuck here for a while. This mechanic is... Not intuitive)

Nice! And thanks for the talk link, the whole thing was super interesting. I generally agree on trying to avoid dexterity puzzles, but I think there's some potentially interesting variations that you could work with here. At very least - platforms that you need to be carrying enough coins to weigh down far enough could be an interesting inversion of "don't collect too many coins or you won't be able to jump high enough". It's kind of the same as eating enough to avoid the roof spikes, but I think it would feel different enough to still work well.

Interesting idea, I kinda dig it and am keen to see where it goes. May I recommend and intro area that shows the mechanic to the player without describing it with words..? Perhaps a series of three progressively shorter jumps, each with a coin after it, and then the chest? After that making a bit clearer and introducing them to more order-of-operations puzzles should seem a little more obvious and you won't have to have your written disclaimer or answer as many questions.

Other things that could be cool to see incorporated into puzzles: trampolines, teleporters, moving obstacles, moving platforms, reverse gravity. Curious to see what the end product is like!

I kept coming back, felt I could do better. This'll do.
Final score: 385,960

I'll admit that I was expecting a 2048 clone when I clicked on this, but was extremely pleasantly surprised to find a game with a lot more nuance.

I may have gotten a little carried away.

Quirky and cute! Genuinely brought a smile to my face multiple times.

After the passives update:
Took a few runs to luck into the right cards and upgrades, but I became functionally immortal and chose to die. Overall, I think this is more fun, and better balanced. Genuinely interesting additions, the QWER UX is really nice, and I'm liking where it's going in terms of new cards and variation.

Inconsequential bug, that's probably easy to fix and was likely only introduced with the QWER addition: Whenever you play a non-attack card with QWER, the player object turns to face due east. In fact, the player only turns to face the mouse when you play an attack - which is probably fine, but I would lean towards either having the player object always tracking the mouse or (if you're concerned about efficiency) allowing allowing the player movement function to exit early if a non-attack card is being played (and so not move the player at all).

This is a really nice game, and something to be proud of. Really fun puzzles, good incremental mechanics build. Short and sweet. Good job.

A potentially nice feature for this one would be able to see the state of your overall deck when you're trading your cards - but not being allowed to trade anything but three. Though I do kinda like that "nah, you have to remember/do it by feel", and it keeps the UI less cluttered - I guess sometimes it would just be nice to have a better idea of how balanced your deck currently is.