itch.io

Neat concept, bit tricky to get the hang of at first!

Cute, simple and fun!

Absolutely love the art style, and dinosaur + golf club puns.

Very neat game!
I agree with many of the other comments about needing some sort of visual grid / boundary to make certain levels more readable. It can get a bit hard on the eyes to keep track of where the groups of 4 are in binary mode.

Super addicting and easy to understand!
I loved the overall challenge of how to layout and optimize the workloads given the limited space and workers!

Great game end-to-end, I only really wish there was more to play! Really well done!

Polished and fun! Simple to pick-up and play, and easy to understand!

Thanks for the feedback! The food is most definitely gated due to the offline / idle resource gathering system, if there were more things to sink resources into long term though I would absolutely add some upgrades or systems to get food faster.

Thanks for the stream + review! Means a lot to me that people are finding my game and enjoying it!

Thanks for checking out my game!

Thanks! Yea the best way to think of the skull tiles is a type of meta-game or mini-game, you'll have to deal with them eventually but the when and how really determines how much of an impact they have.

Additionally, to help with the smaller boards, 1-1 to 2-3 all spawn twice as many shields as they do skulls. Prior to that change 1-1 and 1-2 could get really rough if the player got bad RNG the enemies could really take over haha.

Thanks for the feedback! Matching 4 or more only provides a bit more resources (linearly), I had a nice-to-have todo to make 4+ matches spawn a 'super tile' that would provide bonus resources if matched, but it never bubbled up in the queue before the deadline.

Both enemy balancing and upgrade cost balancing were pretty rough to get just right in the short time of play testing the final values towards the end, there were a few last minutes tweaks to try to ease the difficulty a bit, but I also wanted to avoid making it too easy breezy.

Thanks for the kind words, I'm glad you enjoyed it so much! Really makes the work all worth it!

Haha thanks, a few of my friend also got pretty hooked on it for a while too. Something is magic about the simplicity of match-3 games, really gets the dopamine going!

Thanks for the feedback :) the original design idea was to have the tower defense, and upgrade systems be a bit more involve, but for the most part it was meant to be a bit of a slower game you can play while waiting for a bus, or when using the restroom. But it's perfectly understandable that its not the pace everyone would enjoy. :)

Thanks! Yea balancing the game loop throughout the development was rough. My intent was the have players replay levels once or twice, but I didn't get a lot of time to limit test resource acquisition ranges as solo developing this between work, family, and life was a pretty tight schedule.

My other hope was that the idle resource trickle could eventually ease some of the resource gaps as the player worked/slept/etc.

Thanks! Yea it became clear that I should've left the "manage workers" button disabled until the player built one of the resource buildings after 1-3 to make the system more self explanatory.

Postmortem for Rogue Reflections: https://fanlix.itch.io/rogue-reflections/devlog/250425/rogue-reflections-postmor...

As a follow up to this I've also posted about what I am planning to work on in regards to the game going forward.

https://fanlix.itch.io/rogue-reflections/devlog/250275/rogue-reflections-v20-pla...

I'll probably post about updates over on my Twitter, ( https://twitter.com/david_brad ) not sure what options itch.io provides for notifying folks about updates, but maybe I'll post a devlog about the update (if I can remember to).

Thanks for the in depth response!

This game was surprisingly time consuming to make, around 100 hours all in (which when also having to deal with work, life and a toddler, was basically every free minute I had), and stuff still didn't make the final cut unfortunately.

The biggest one was a bulkier tutorial, and another was more time balancing the loot / crafting numbers and enemy / player strength as I only had a couple hours of play testing the full game loop to try to tone things down a bit.

I am considering making a post-compo v2 with the full tutorial, the gem skills being more limited, and an end game challenge mode.

Thanks, that worked, great concept!

Seems like an interesting idea, however the game will not let me progress through the tutorial, the "- Next -" button doesn't respond to clicks. Looks like some other folks are having a similar issue.

Holy moly, I love what you've made here.

I can tell a lot went into making this, it felt a lot like playing something like minit / Link's Awakening as I wandered around trying to figure out what I could and couldn't do.

It feels like there's a ton to explore here, really well executed!

Lowering crafting costs was something I intended to do prior to submission to help speed things up for the other jammers playing it, but other bug fixes took priority.

The costs were originally quite a bit higher believe it or not, as the goal I set out for myself with this game, for better or worse, was to have a game with a meta-progression system with a save system.

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks!

I did want to add more of a tutorial, but with work, life, and family; the dungeon tutorial got dropped. I managed to squeeze in the few short explanations of the smithing and general flow, but didn't have time to squeeze in a few more about movement, room indicators, sanity and the like.

You didn't miss it ;)

Thanks!

I try my best to create a cohesive / consistent mood and atmosphere in the games I make, even though I tend to target 8x8 and 16x16 pixel art graphics.

Part of it is a hold over from doing the js13k jams where large art assets are a disadvantage, I think it has influenced my art direction across the board.

I'm glad you enjoyed the atmosphere!

A big focus for me during development was to ensure the game was both Desktop and Mobile friendly, which meant I completely ignored the possibility of controller / keyboard input. However I can totally see the benefits of a hybrid control option on desktop.

Thanks for the feedback!

Done and done!

Thanks! I did manage to code the engine in a way that adding new player or rift cards is relatively simple (a couple JSON file updates, add some art, add functions for any new card mechanics, add to deck generation algorithm). We'll see if the motivation to continue development on this manifests itself for me going forward!

Thanks! I agree about the lack of music, I really wanted some ambient music in the background but it fell to the way side to make sure the core mechanics & a decent amount of the card content got done.

I took a couple of stabs at it, but I'm a terrible at getting song ideas out of my head and into any composition tools, and nothing I found online with the right licenses quite hit the mark for me tone wise. :(

I know deck builders aren't everyone's cup of tea, thanks for giving it a chance!

Thanks for the feedback Auer!

The game does unfortunately lean a bit on mechanics established by other deck building games, making it hard to know how much needs explaining. I lean towards not over tutorializing games as I feel like players naturally discovering mechanics and interactions within the game themselves is part of the fun of gaming.

Because of this I'm actually glad that the lack of over explained end-goal led you to work towards the end goal naturally (don't get overrun by cards from the rift deck). There is a help section available in the corner of the game screen that will explain some of the verbs / actions the cards perform, as well as high level objective information for those who want it however.

As for the discard pile, this could've been more clearly indicated to the player through animations on my part.
When your deck runs out, the discard pile is shuffled and made into your new deck. This means cards you buy make their way into you deck / hand after that re-shuffle (the base deck is only 2 hands long [12 cards]). This mechanic is to have the player think more about what cards they will need going forward, not just what they need right now, since this game can last 40+ turns.