itch.io

I tried this out for 2 games. Here's some quick feedback:

1. I found the rules/explanation kind of confusing before playing it. It turned out to be simpler than I initially thought, so maybe you can clean up the rules a bit. One confusing thing was you didn't say what the player does. Instead, you say things like, "One of the three bottom cards is played", and I couldn't tell if that meant I would play the card, or the game would do so automatically. 
2. Overall, once I played a few rounds, I understood what was happening, and I could start making strategic choices.
3. I felt things were pretty slow most of the time, and I wanted the system to count up my score a lot faster. It takes quite a long time to show each of the conditions, and the score. 
4. After two games, I still didn't have enough to buy anything. And the "vanilla" version isn't really interesting enough to make me want to play a 3rd game with just the base rules. I imagine 50K score comes easier later, which is why those points are so expensive. But maybe consider making the first few points cheaper, so I can get an upgrade after one or two games, assuming I play reasonably well.

Enjoyable. Kept me going until (I believe) I did everything I could in this version. 

Something I didn't really understand: Tiles sometimes have a red border around them. I was guessing this meant that their requirements were no longer being met, but I couldn't really tell. I also wasn't sure what the impact of that would be. 

I was also a little confused when I'd make a new tile, and not see the use for it. I expect this means it's a dependency of something I haven't yet unlocked, but it might be nice to get some hint in the description. Something like: Require By: X, Y, Z. Or "Required by: Unknown" if you haven't discovered that thing yet.

Overall, I didn't have any real sense of whether I was doing well, or just doing things. Not sure if there's an ultimate goal. Aiming for a high score? Aiming at completely unlocking everything?

I think the main issue I have with aiming is that the projectile seems to collide when I would have expected it had enough room to make it over/through. If you put more work into this, one potentially simple way to improve this would be to interrupt the aiming arm at the point where the projectile would collide if thrown at the current trajectory. That's a bit of work to compute the collision along the entire arc constantly, but it would definitely mean I know whether or not my shot is about to hit something unintended. Another approach would be to trim down the hitbox of the projectile so it doesn't clip so many corners.

As for the level design, I think the only major no-no I felt was when things would happen that I could not have predicted in any way. Like pushing a button and finding that an obstacle appeared and blocked my path, without me having any way to predict that this would happen. That design approach basically means you're forcing every player to restart at that point, and replay the level. A lot of people will feel that's cheap, and get frustrated. Better would be if the red obstacles that will appear are already visible in some way, so you could have predicted this might happen when pressing a button. 

I'm also not sure if I've just really unlucky, but coming back since sometime under version 0.8, I don't think I've been able to get further than night 5 or 6 with the Archer. Max level, and Mastery is at 19. I've tried different load-outs, but the outcome is pretty much the same thing each time. No matter what skills I pick up, even under best-case scenario talent trees, there just end up being too many enemies around day 5 to keep up with. The best run I've had gave me piercing shots and 3-hit mechanic on about the 3rd day, but even that wasn't enough. 

I'm not sure what else to try with the Archer. The only thing that really seems to matter early on is attack speed, and unless the talent tree is loaded with it, I just die.

The orbiting arrows mechanic on the Archer is feels frustrating because it essentially "misses" the enemy I was trying to hit. For example, try shooting an enemy that's getting close. If the arrow orbits instead of being a standard shot, it's very likely the enemy will get through and hit you. (Orbiting arrows seem to be very unlikely to hit a target in the direction you're facing.) This has resulted in many cases where enemies get through.

Not sure what the best approach would be here, but that skill should definitely not negate my normal shot when it randomly goes off. I've had it go off a couple of times in a row, and that's pretty devastating. Maybe the orbiting arrow can be an extra arrow in addition to the normal one you fire?

Really enjoy the game. One thing I wish the game did a better job with is showing the Event impact that any card has. I realize that's pretty overwhelming initially, so maybe it's a setting to show extra details about the card, which is turned off by default? I'd like to see the +/- for various events, to avoid needing to go look in the encyclopedia each time I forget what a card's effects are. 

A couple of reactions:

 - Longer nights (by 15%) seems to be really beneficial. More enemies to kill means more XP per level, so you stay ahead of the difficulty curve more easily. No real downside?

 - The blue sword ability (+25% speed after a special attack) seems to stack too well when using many abilities at once. Use all four abilities at once, and you're a machine gun. Maybe some wrong calculation here?

 - Wizards get trivially easy as soon as they unlock a bit of lifedrain plus the skill that turns it into magic drain. You basically don't run of out mana anymore, and just get as many +Cooldown skills as possible to spam attacks. Seems that damage done by magic spells triggers lifedrain, which is maybe too strong?

 - Summoner's basic attack feels pretty boring and incentivizes just spinning in a circle sending snails in each direction to kill enemies off screen. Maybe a different play style, where you can rapidly send out several snails at once, but only so many per second? For example, imagine a progress bar that goes from 0 to 100. Sending a snail costs 25, but the attack speed is 0.1 instead of 1.5. Send 4 really fast if you want, but then wait for the progress bar to refill. Means you can address sudden big attacks from one direction. Anyway, I felt the summer felt dull, like I wasn't reacting, just preparing.

Did this get fixed already? When I try the warrior, their sword doesn't do anything. Enemies just kind of die when they get in the middle square, but not always. Maybe I don't understand how the warrior works...