itch.io

I've played with the latest update a bit. I am far from reaching the end of whatever content is here presently (I am still wrestling with the many many sheeps), but I'vefound some things, as one does when poking an early build. Here they are, in no particular order:

• The tier unlock restrictions in the blacksmith trees don't seem to actually work. I am not sure how to earn more than one globe thing at present, but that hasn't stopped me from tiering up gear that requires two of it once they hit level.
• Splatting fireflies is a fun easter egg (and the bonus shards are nice too), but I think the dead bugs leave their light sources behind indefinitely, perhaps even upon leaving and returning to the map due to retreat or death. It didn't hinder my actual experience much, but I could see it tanking framerates on low-end machines, and regardless it's visually odd.
• Switching tabs in the shady shop while a potion is on cooldown will leave the cooldown meter over its respective place over the new list. Switching back to the potions tab will update the cooldown meter properly, including any time elapsed in the other tab, so everything is tracking fine, you just forgot to hide the thing.
• bonus chests appearing and disappearing on the battlefield during cutscenes can be pretty frustrating, especially if you try to click on one that looks visible but is actually behind the UI layer, which in turn steals the input and advances text you may not have read yet. Freezing that all while dialogue is present may be preferable.
• If Auto-Return is enabled and an event is triggered that starts a cutscene meant to play back in town (ie. after your first loss in the second world), battle will advance as normal while the cutscene rests above it. (There is a possibility this could result in two scenes playing at once?? I did not experience nor test for this. Fixing the bug is good, knowing what weird shit your engine might get up to in unexpected situations is also good, so it may be worth investigating what occurs and how direly you need to work to prevent it going forward.)
• Not sure why I cannot buy upgrade potions from the shady shop even when I have the shards. Unlock conditions unclear.
• There's some text run-over conditions, especially in the church and blacksmith.
• I am encountering the apparently oft-reported bug of Groug just getting locked into attacking one target in a softlock scenario, though I've yet to test if disabling same target stops it from occurring. It has always been accompanied by the "X[number]" pop-up spawning pretty wildly (frequently enough that it just looks like a bunch of yellow streaks streaming up over Groug's bald little head) so I suspected it might have something to do with criticals or his parry skill, but I have no way of being sure. Sometimes it happens after a hundred floors, sometimes it happens almost immediately after starting. I think his pants are on too tight. I'd be freaking out too, in that case.
• The need for proofreading is still pretty dire (iunno who told you "reward" is spelt "reword" but I vote you slap their silly little face), but I do find things far more legible this time around, so that's a huge plus.
• Am I meant to only be able to jump to floor 76? Also, am I meant to be able to jump to floor 76 even before reaching floor 76?
• I could swear the goddess is red one second and then blue the next. Groug then says her hair is purple. I suspect this might be intentional somehow, and Groug is the one seeing the truth.
• Groug can unlock clothes that are not pants. This seems like it would anger Groug. Groug would not wear a helmet or glasses! He would wear pants on his head and then fashion goggles out of the cuffs of each leg. This message sponsored by the Pants For Groug Committee.

Alright. I've spent a couple days toying with this, so here's my thoughts.

The core design here isn't half bad. The early power curve feels a bit stiflingly slow, but it's a story-based tutorial chapter, and it does its job well (even if I'm miffed I didn't get to recruit the precious little kitty cat to my party). Though the game doesn't introduce players to its more interesting systems presently, the unit summoning and merging have some interesting merits and trade-offs to consider, and overall progression feels nice, even though the game itself often feels ploddingly slow, even with a full party. Some sort of speed-up option would be deeply welcome here, especially since combat is, at present, extremely hands-off. The progression carries the whole package for now, which is extremely important for the genre, so that's good.

On the presentation front, though, the whole thing is sort of a mess. The assets don't mesh well, and when scaled up for dialogue the pixellation is pretty wild. The calligraphy font chosen for titles and such is extremely difficult to read, and the spelling seems out to create an entirely new written dialect of the English language. Some items, such as the topmost upgrade at the blacksmith, are simply hanging out of frame, obscured by the UI. Flavor text that most games would save for hovertext tooltips is abundant to such degree that it's often hard to parse what an actual upgrade even does, and the text that actually explains that tends to be cramped into a much smaller chunk of screen real estate even though it's the important information. The value of health, mana, and anything else tied to meters doesn't clamp, resulting in action bars spiking out of bounds and health meters entering wild negative values so long that they can sometimes obscure a neighboring unit's meter entirely on your status summary. Sprites in combat are extremely tiny, and they and the field are in an entirely different style from everything else in the game. Screen real estate on a whole seems partitioned off haphazardly on all fronts. It feels like bloom lighting and shadows won out over legibility and basic, functional UI no matter how I slice it.

In terms of actual bugs, you can merge units so long as you have the RP to do so (a number that seems completely separate from the RP used in the church???), even if you have no units to merge. This basically just resets your guy to level 1 with no benefit. It seems like that shouldn't be an option to begin with? The text windows that pop up after clearing the first chapter also do not scale to screen size, which I found out because you're using a lot of it, so I had to zoom out the web page to do much else with my screen

I feel like there's a lot of promise here, or I wouldn't bother with it for so long or have so many thoughts. There's a good, solid foundation here, even if most of the assets are almost certainly sourced from elsewhere. I know the project is early on, so I can be forgiving of a lot, and I've already seen that the next update involves someone playing spellchecker for you so that's already a good start. I hope to see this improve and live up to its potential!

Bunch of these comments are just people skipping the whole description saying that the game being slow as dirt is literally the joke.

The concept is brilliant, but as things are I feel like it peaks pretty quickly. It takes very little time for your balls to clear out entire screens so quickly that click upgrades are effectively useless (clicking as a whole sometimes is, given that powerups spawn behind ball and block objects and cannot be clicked on if obstructed), and since clicking is so unimpactful it's easy to look away until you have an absurd excess of money, which leaves me desperately wanting something like a "BUY 10" option.

BB points are entirely too easy to accrue in bulk far before they are useful in such numbers, and the boss fights just require way too much time to earn even a single skill point. I cannot be bothered to work towards the high-end skills when it takes a solid ten+ minutes of halting all other progress to get one, not because the bosses aren't dropping dead comically fast, but because it's not just fighting one or two phases, but rather like... fifteen?? It's sort of an absurd gauntlet, and not well communicated in any way that lets the player know what kind of progress they've made towards the stated goal (how many fights? which one am I on? Does it save progress between attempts? I've been on this all day and I am still unsure). Unique boss strengths and weaknesses hardly matter when the player is constantly swimming in BB to just neutralize the problems, and you can't really prepare an ideal build for any given boss since they're all just one element of a seemingly randomized larger pool. There's some very cool ideas present there, but they don't get to shine at all due to the implementation.

It's a shame, because a lot of the more interesting gameplay decisions seem to be locked quite a ways into that skill tree. I wish some of it was present via more traditional upgrades instead (ie. get basic ball's powers or quantity to x to unlock upgrade y), especially since it could make for a more interesting mid-game where presently things feel a bit railroaded into building up your power multiplier to mow through the aforementioned boss slog.

Also, the sound effects are absolutely farty. If you blared some mid-game audio in a preschool, you'd have kids rolling. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing, but it's certainly a thing.

I want to like this. I think it's a brilliant idea and a decent start, but I can see so many ways that it can be improved that it's hard to not feel its shortcomings pretty quickly. I hope you stick with it.

Managed to get an orb to abscond from this reality into the nether realm. This feels like the foundation of something better than it is, but it's not bad at all.

I'm not sure what the exact difference between normal and easy is. I think the balls are bouncier? (That's what she said.) There were a few times where my board erupted into springy chaos, and tbh that's the most fun I had in the whole thing. I think having some sort of rare orb spawn that just drops a big fat weight down whatever line you send it through to cause chaos would be a fun double-edged sword to have, though I doubt that would mesh well with the game ending if a ball leaves the screen. The bounce, is what I'm saying. The bounce makes it. Embrace the bounce and I think this'd be a winner. No, not just on the titties (though if those started bouncing proportional to the chaos on the board that might be quite enjoyable). It's about the bounce.

In terms of presentation, it's obviously a simple game, but I wish there were a bit more zest to it. Some sort of effect / bonus for making chains would be nice, maybe a bit of movement on the girl (either just in general or in reaction to how the game is going), things like that. Having a mode with a timer you have to content with (ie. keep matching to fill a meter that's constantly draining) would probably give it a nice added difficulty curve beyond what one will experience in figuring out how best to combine ze orbs and help keep the mid-game from feeling a bit stale.

I hope to see this one get an update. A bit of love. Maybe a music track that's not maddeningly short (albeit easily muted). I wanna

I wanna see it bounce back. >:3c

Yee, on the stage where you go around a big square loop pushing blocks into corruption. It's honestly longer to grab the key and go back around than it is to just use the key the intended way because you already need to grab the disk right next to the door, but if you do decide to double back around you just have that extra key for a bit.

On the upside, you don't carry it on to the next stage! But it might work just as well to only put one key in the loop and replace that first locked door with another corruption you can fill, effectively just making it a "shortcut" sort of one-way gate. Either way, it doesn't have a huge impact on the end result, it's just something I noticed while going through it.

Fun! Puzzles were a touch easy (at least one had a completely unneeded key even, I think), but difficulty doesn't seem to be the goal here. The visual style does its job well, though I admit that in the case of the parents' corporate town plans I had no clue what I was supposed to be seeing there.

I enjoyed it and look forward to the finished project!

Fun concept! Wish it controlled with anything besides the mouse though :s One of the sword shards spawned up behind the itch buttons in the corner and if the mouse crosses over those the slime just stops moving. Hosed by the site layout lol, but also I just keep tracking my cursor instead of my slime, so I keep getting stuck on things!

Interesting, though very basic.

Would've been nice to have some reason to stop shooting, maybe more movement speed when you ease off the trigger or something. I feel like the barrier player has more say over the overall strategy, so it's a bit sad that both AIs tend to simply target the enemies closest to the line.

Honestly though most issues seem to be in the presentation overall. The game plays fine, the concept's decent enough, it just could've used more punch. The third gun really felt like a downgrade, in terms of enjoyment. It seemed powerful behind the scenes but just didn't feel it, especially after losing the second gun's rapid fire. Every gun sounds the same, and enemies don't really have any visual feedback for if you're hitting them or not. A simple flash or sound cue would've done wonders, even under the time crunch.

You added checkpoints and then I immediately stopped needing them lol though I definitely came close a couple times. Must be a psychological thing, I'm terrible with stress.

Game is rock solid, though the fact I gave up before even hitting the halfway mark does tell me that adding checkpoints was the right decision. (If anything, they might be a bit more frequent than need be, even, though I doubt anyone here for the horny will complain. I was expecting just one for each scene so I didn't have to go through them all again, but every phase certainly works too!)

Art is solid, HHHNGH bunny is a cutie of the highest order, and I would not mind seeing more of her in the future.

This seems well made but honestly I'm way too bad at this shit to not find the lack of checkpoints to be super infuriating.