I am really enjoying this game, but you should absolutely reduce the default resolution for in-browser plays.
The game seems to start at 1080p, which is still larger than many modern (laptop) monitors. A lot of people might just see the start screen, be unable to interact with it, and never touch the game again.
Found a bug:
Sculptur didn't summon any scuptures for some reason. I don't quite remember the circumstances, but I had no other supporters when I bought it, and I had an Artificer rerolled to trigger adjacent follower start-of-combat effeccts twice.
Edit: I've disabled it again. There was no obvious answer, but I've rerolled a combat trait again, so that might be it no matter the outcome.
I really love this update. You're doing a really amazing job here.
I've also, through experience, noticed some more units that seem to consistently over/underperform:
Especially with Emissary, that interaction is actually not literal to the wording. As Emissary says "whenever faith is gained by another follower, gain 1 faith", which suggests that the Emissary is the one gaining faith (and thus should trigger Raven again). So as you've intended, the Emissary's wording should change to "when another follower gains faith, that amount is increased by 1". Although personally I'd recommend Emissary to be its own instance and trigger Raven an extra time since it's sort of a really subpar unit as long as Supplicant isn't nerfed and also doesn't scale well in general.
Overall though, I'd probably carefully recommend to make separate instances their own triggers. As it stands, triggers are unintuitive and also don't prevent abuse, as one effect still works while just one or two others don't. It's just a knowledge check, plus a bit more RNG involved.
On top of that the units in question don't really scale as well. They are harder to scale multiplicatively than just a stat-based strategy and they don't scale at all with stats gained inbetween rounds. Compare that to an Adaptive Familiar next to another Adaptive unit together with some permabuffs and you can easily gain +8+8 per round or more.
Ultimately, as far as balancing concerns go, I think you might actually be able to achieve the opposite with some clever wording. In permitting multiple triggers by default, you can then easily nerf overtuned units by making those triggers happen only "once per attack", or instead of being two separate effects, you can make the second effect increase the value of the first one, etc.
On endless, I also just noticed another soft-nerf option, which would be to put most of the special units in one of the first two spots so countered builds have the chance to kill them quickly. Except the Barricade, which should obviously be further towards the end.
There's a couple of bugs with the Mirroring Raven (deal 4 random damage when a follower gains faith):
I don't know if these interactions may be intended, but they should probably all work given they're nothing special. Except the "gain 1 more faith" unit (after all one might argue it just increases the faith gain) but I think that one especially should work since it's pretty bad.
Another notion on endless mode: I'm not sure how good it is to have random Doppelgangers, Barricades, Firework Masters, and Black Knights in there. They're hard counters to certain strategies (e.g. hyper-buffing a single unit) which leads to fewer strategies being viable there, exactly the reason why you hesitated implementing endless in the first place. I'd rather see enemy units with a lot of stats in the first place, and from there focus on softer effects like multiple attacks, revives, or not taking more than 25% of their HP in one hit.
I definitely agree that reroll is a hard decision. The game's limits, at least for the earlier parts of the game, really don't work well with a reroll mechanic. The best approach might just be abilities or shop items granting rerolls. For a guaranteed reroll, maybe if you skip a shop with 20 faith? That's a high cost, not easily achievable, but also exactly when you'd want a reroll. There's also always the option of banishing units to make the game a tad more reliable in the lategame.
As for supplicant, my personal opinion is that it'd work perfectly fine at just +1 faith. Whether you gain faith at round start or a unit's death makes little difference. The former is a bit more reliable and can be doubled up on but the latter actually combos with more options. That said, it might also be more unique to keep Supplicant on 2, and on death combos feel like they need that bit extra eco anyway. Alternative nerfs might be dropping Supplicant to 1 Faith but it gains a second Faith if another unit dies before or after it. Increasing the cost to 4 would go against the cost design but break the aspect of immediately going to 6 Faith. One really unintuitive nerf would be "buffing" it to 4hp since it'd be less likely to die, although that might also cause frustrations with players since it cant die round 1.
I really love the new update. There's some cool new combos, a bunch of great bug fixes, and overall the game feels a bit more challenging as well.
A few things that I've noticed still need some polish are:
In terms of balance I'd also like to add that the "on death gain +2 faith" unit feels too strong. It brings you to 6 faith immediately the round after, something only the 1-cost vanilla unit does, while also giving more faith per round thereafter than even most 6-cost faith generation options.
OMG that is exactly what's happening. This build wonderfully fixes pretty much every issue I've come across playing the game. Funnily you caught me in the middle of me writing a list of them which is now redundant.
Only pointers that actually stay relevant with that build:
A little bit of feedback, hope it helps:
I've very much enjoyed playing this and hopefully I'll come back ta bunch o enjoy it plenty more.
Sweet game, just a really chill implementation of the genre.
As for feedback, I can't really make good use of the laser. The upgrades only buffing damage is impractical and doesn't help. Lower cooldown or multiple beams would definitely feel better. The stunlock needs to be much shorter or have some other offset so you don't get surrounded or worse, killed when using it.
Good job, looking forwards to see where this goes.
Good work! Here's some quick feedback from my first impression, but do note I didn't get to see nearly all there is:
Sweet little game.
I like this, enough to give it a numbers crunch:
I know doing the numbers balance can be a chore so I hope this helps.
On second glance, the memory leak just seems to be very situational garbage collection. The RAM usage goes up to about 1.5 GB over the course of a dungeon, but apparently gets cleared if RAM runs out. Plus it's definitely cleared at the end of the dungeon. So all good there.
For everything else, I'll try my best to give some productive playtest feedback:
Witch Doctor's mind control ability should definitely be limited in the amount of uses. Everything else feels fine about it. I've noticed that about 3 uses is the break point where you actually run out sometimes, but not all the time. However 4 uses makes it hard to run out and 1 use would make the ability worthless to upgrade. So my recommendation would be to keep 2 uses, and instead of increasing the amount of uses, that upgrade could increase the range (since range is not that strong if you only have 2 uses anyway).
The Priest's extra turn eliminates Recovery, that alone makes it an incredible support ability. You can even chain it on consecutive turns (if you skip your Priest's extra turn), basically eliminating its downsides. The rest of the Priest kit is very meh though. The lightning attack is by far the coolest attack if it hits, but sucks in practice since it's just too easy for the enemy to make it hit yourself.
Mercenary's secondary abilities are meh. The bomb is just a basic attack with limited uses and the net is an average CC option. But its main attack is the gold standard if you ask me. Would be cool to see other characters with a reliable primary.
Barbarian is probably the strongest character in the game. A limited use instant 2-damage attack is better than most primaries. It should probably be more limited in range & uses. The grapple is great, since you can move enemies 2 tiles in an unorthodox way, but not broken. The part that makes it really strong is eliminating recovery. Here's a suggestion for an alternative: whenever the Barbarian kills a unit, it heals 1hp.
As for the base attacks: maybe I'm simply too obsessed with them because I try to take as little damage as possible and they become a lot better if you accept that you'll take damage here and there. I definitely like the underlying tactical idea though and once there's only 2-3 enemies left, they're pretty enjoyable. More enemies means that there's always someone in range to thwart you, with multiple abilities that can mess you up in different ways. Especially the AOE attacks suffer since it's actually really easy for the enemy to make them hit yourself. On most characters it also generally feels like I'm just 1 upgrade down to make good use of them. Either the damage, or the movespeed, or the utility of the attack is lacking, and that's also while not having upgraded any of the secondary abilities.
I'll hopefully get to play the game a bit more some of these days, and maybe get to pay some attention to how strong each character's primary really is when making best use of it.
That's indeed a nifty place for the ultimate description, and I absolutely love how it updates damage. Some more things I've noticed while reading through there though:
And just as an inspiration, you could also track lifetime damage, healing, and ultimates fired, as well as lifetime CC inflicted. Don't overwork yourself though with all those awesome updates you keep coming.
This is a lovely game that managed to enthrall me for multiple hours. It's very fun to experiment with different character combos and upgrades and see what works best for each dungeon.
I've also apparently found some memory leak-ish behaviour, over the time of a dungeon the RAM usage drastically increases (Firefox on Linux). Only at the end of a dungeon it's cleared.
As far as gameplay is concerned, there's really only 2 issues:
1) Mind control is too strong. 3 Witch Doctors with +1 speed and mind control upgrades are basically invulnerable. Meanwhile the most damage I ever took in a turn was when a Mind Flayer mind controlled my Mercenary from a mile away with no counterplay.
2) Most main attacks are too weak. The delay hurts too bad until only 1 or 2 enemies are left. Even the "strongest" ones like an upgraded Wizard's or Priest's are actually just as likely to hurt your own units as the enemy due to all the control available. It's much more efficient to use other moves to make enemies hit one another or drop into traps. So most of them need a little more oomph or utility at a baseline or on an upgrade to grant more incentives to use them.
I like the difficulty scaling. It's fun to get more upgrades in a harder game (and honestly, I'd love to see even longer dungeons).
Some of my favourite characters were the Barbarian with its great crowd control, an attack without delay and the ability to skip Recovery; the Priest with the potentially massive lightning AOE and an amazing support ability; and the Mercenary with the only main attack that doesn't have a delay.
Art & Music get a 10/10
Also I think the lategame could become a lot more fun if it wasn't all about comparing item stats. Would be cool if one could pay to upgrade the shop to have a better chance at getting high rarity items, and also if higher rarity items were guaranteed to have a significantly better stat total.
This game has a lot of potential given it's already this good with this little content.
My biggest issue is that accidentally placing villagers in an empty spot opens the building menu, which completely disrupts the gameflow and is pretty much the main reason for loosing.
Edit: also there's a this annoying feature where target selection happens before attacking, so you gang up on 2 enemies with 8 archers and 5 of them don't attack.
I like this, it's very entertaining and combines multiple unique challenges.
I've noticed that you're missing a menu button and a pause shortcut, and a small upgrade for the UI to display and explain more information would be nice.
The gameplay loop is really solid though and really the only missing feature I can think about is setting a custom item priority for individual units (so your tanks won't drop their shields for coins).
I skipped over this gem far too long thinking it was just another inventory management game. But this game is amazing!
The one thing I'd like improved is negative connectivity. My most promising runs all ended because I disabled my carry item either directly or by breaking mana connectivity. Those were some real tilters.
