If you play again, it is down to 200 seconds, and there is a visible timer. I still don't have a lot of tutorialization and there is no sound, but these are all things I'm currently working on. I may release a new demo in a month or two. This was just for a local contest, but I intend to take it further, allow for full controller support and more than just one button, and do a lot with the project.
I would like to see Adjacency bonuses be a thing from the very start, and be based on how many sides are touching. Maybe a 1-4% production bump per building that is touching the other building. When I realized it doesn't matter if they touch at all, I was pretty disappointed. I feel like not encouraging tight placement from the very beginning is basically taking that "tetromino" shape and wasting its potential, but meh, it was still pretty fun for a while. I still don't feel super compelled to finish as I don't feel like I am doing much other than placing the pieces in the correct order to get the stats to go up. If there was some way to demonstrate mastery through placement mattering (especially during the super long tutorial) I would keep playing.
I think that you guys do impressive work with a very limited time frame, but this one was not really ready for release. A lot of bugs here. I'm pretty disappointed. I literally can't play the game after the last update, not because of an error, but because there is no board, and pressing escape doesn't bring up the start menu.
Some sort of bug happened with the 1.0.3 release. When I open my game, there is no board. I believe I was on Moon 12, as that's what it says I am, but the timer doesn't move. It is like it's trapped in a weird save state, like the time running boolean is turned off. No board, no cards. It says I have 30/20 cards, so maybe the game is waiting for me to sell 10 cards or something, even though it's in the middle of the Moon cycle, but either way, no board so.... what's a brotha to do?
I did it. It made for a really cool "Spell Caster" run. You can get the book set up with a bunch of Beacons by the second season, and then it becomes a game of trying to get a bunch of magic and engineering dice. It's interesting because I realized early on that I needed Lightning to handle air units, which was an interesting wrinkle in my plan. Very interesting build.
Hey, I know this isn't probably an important issue for you guys, but I'd really like to see Floating Tome work with Beacon. This is probably not how you intended for the Floating Tome to work, but I think it would make for a really interesting "Spell caster" build where you can make a single Tome effect half the board with spells. That would be super cool IMO and would add some build diversity to your game. I know you guys probably benefit more from moving on to a new project, but implementing this would be so much fun. Thanks you.
As you can see, the casting range of the Floating Tome implies that a spell might impact that entire area, but unfortunately it does not T_T. I would really like it to. If you don't think that this is a behavior that you want, then you might want to make the Floating Tome's attack range not increase when near a Lamp
Hey again!! Another great one. One problem though: THE LAMPS DON'T BUFF FLOATING TOMES T_T!!!
I built a bunch of Lamps around a single Floating Tome, and it seemed to increase the Tome's range significantly, but when I went to cast an Ice Spell, no one in the range was effected. I think it was intended to work that way, but it seems like range was not coded into the spells maybe? IDK.
So at this point, the only "glitch" I rely on is the "save and load" glitch which makes the Lich set his new home wherever he is standing after he makes a tentacle when you quit and load back in. This places him over the river so that I can get him whenever I am ready. It turns out that Wind Cutter has an insane attack rate, so all I have to do is train slash to level 7 and I have all the damage I need. I do the two wolf quests as soon as possible and those get you all the way to level 20 (because the Alpha wolf gives a huge, perhaps oversized reward). Then all I have to do is fight the Lich with Windcutter, a bandana and the random drop that comes out of the Alpha Wolf (unless it's the helmet drop. The bandana is always better IMO). I actually think Wind Cutter is so strong that you can almost do it earlier than this, but your health and mana are too low until you get the huge level bump from the Alpha Wolf quest. Fun speed run.
I will say, I just did a run where I think I completed every quest in the game, killed the ghost king, bought all the dope items from the mountain smith and then killed the Lich early with a blizzard build... This game really is a great game considering how compact it is. You guys really crammed a lot of stuff in here. A lot of it is trial and error and normally that wouldn't be for me, but learning to route through the whole thing and getting better each time really was a lot of fun. Good job guys.
I believe this crash is happening when I case Blizzard (or Inferno as well probably) when all the enemies are dead. It does a randomization based on the number of enemies but if there are technically no enemies alive, you end up dividing by zero.
Hey, I found another glitch: *I got caught on a collision box between the corner of the repaired bridge (on the north side of the water, on the right of the bridge). My character got stuck and I believe it perma-locked that save. I can't manage to get out, at least on Keyboard. It's possible with 360 movement from a joystick I could find the right angle to escape but not with 8 way keyboard movement lol. It was such a good run too T_T.
Have you ever played the board game "The Quest for El Dorado"? It's a hex tile based game that might be interesting to look at for inspiration if you wanted to take this project further (which I really think you should). El Dorado is a board game with a modular map system where you can build "maps" which are essentially race courses out of these hex clusters. It might be a good way to think about how to do procedural generation: have hand crafted areas that are stuck together procedurally by less intentional "hall way" paths.
Yea, I imagine it could simply be the first upgrade you have to get, that is literally the base of the skill tree. While I was writing that comment, I did kind of realize that teaching how to target resources in the way you did was actually very elegant. And now that I think about it, the thing that eventually made me buy the auto-picking upgrade was when I bought the sight range upgrade, saw that that unlocked another sight range upgrade, and thought that maybe there was another more interesting upgrade hidden behind the auto-picking one. I think if you were to take this further, probably a skill tree that shows the player "hey, you have to buy auto-picking, but it will be the first in a long line of upgrades" really would be the perfect solution.
I just wanted to comment to disagree with Rob Hoff (no offense Rob). I think the dynamic of picking which places to harvest from was very interesting, especially when you discover that only one area can be farmed by one type of guy (which the desert actually does a great job of teaching me about). I actually think that it might be good to make auto-farming happen right away, and tutorializing the ability to choose targets early in the game instead of making auto-farm an upgrade, because "pro" play will involve saving the 2 wood and 2 food to optimize resource gathering. But I think something of the secret sauce of the game would be lost if you removed having to pick which resources to collect, and would become especially annoying if you had a farmer who selected the least optimal resource to farm every turn for 3 turns in a row and costed you potentially one or two extra farming opportunities.
Another way to teach players about selecting where to farm might be to leave the cheap auto-farming upgrade in the game, but make it a prerequisite for the rest of a skill tree branch, so players didn't feel bad losing resources due to their "laziness" as that upgrade is necessary to get to more powerful upgrades in the future. (You can tell I was repulsed by the idea of paying for that upgrade lol. I'm the type who would rather just do a little extra work to be optimal though.)
Ah, I just encountered another frustration: If you die while you have an ally, the ally stays and the fight continues without you, so not only are you unable to play the game, you have to watch sadly as your doggo dies T_T. I don't know exactly how to address this, other than to maybe create an exception for solo play that allows you to respawn so that you can get back to your dog and save them, or at least set a timer so after 10 seconds or so, kill the dog and set me free. The dog can survive for like a whole minute while I'm not able to play, which is a lot of time lost in a game that's all about speed running.
So I love this game now that I got into it. I've played it for like 8 hours now. It's really addictive. I did want to give you a quick report of some bugs I've found which have not ruined the game necessarily, but have made the process annoying: *Goblins who seem to be able to summon allies can still summon a 4th ally if you're alone. *If you spam the "pick up" button at the end of combat, you will pick up any items that are dropped before they scatter away. This would be a neat and interesting technique that players get to learn if it wasn't for the fact that sometimes this doesn't delete the white glowing orb that was meant to represent the item. The orb just sits on the board forever or until you restart. When I'm speed running, I have to keep track of them so I don't let them distract me lol. *You can buy a Bandana from the farmer in the first town for 2g and sell it back to him for 5g. I suspect this wasn't intentional. IDK if it's even bad for the game honestly, because at this point, having that money glitch let's me test out the game in a deeper way more quickly. I love having early access to the Bandana, but I sort of have to decide each game if I'm going to do a "real" run or a "infinite money" run which feels meh. In general, sell prices seem off somehow. I noticed some people will buy stuff for more than others. It's as if each person buys goods at different prices, which I suppose is kinda cool actually. *The three mercenaries glitched after I helped them with their fight. They seemed stuck on a bounding box or something. I had to reload to make them interactable again. *OH, there's this INCREDBLY ANNOYING spot to the left of the lower exit to the mountain that I keep getting hung on. You can't see the exit door while you're in the cave and so you run into this little corner that takes forever to get out of and will screw you up if you're going for a risky cave run during the day. *After fighting the lich, I started a new game and the game started with the lich already active and I got sucked into the final fight at level 1 LOL. You have to turn the game off and turn it back on to make this bug go away. I suspect you guys left a Boolean flag on as a global variable or something. It was pretty funny :P *IDK if this is a glitch but I once had a lich that simply gave up on doing his quest. I was up to day 22 and he had only done 1 tower (I believe I even reloaded the save file at some point). When I walked near him, suddenly he "woke up", teleported all over the map, finished his quest in a minute or two (at that point, he had only lit one tower), and then the final fight started. It was really weird. I was doing a particularly good job of removing all of his tentacles that game, so IDK if that slows him down or what, but it was still very weird.
All this said, my favorite strat so far is to buy the dagger so you get it's quick stab ability, then use the Axe and eventually the L. Sword with the quick stab, wearing the bandana of course for even more speed. Because it's incredibly easy to get crits with the quick stab attacks, the Axe is practically as good as the L. Sword, and is better against plants.
So, is there anyway to turn up the difficulty? In skirmish mode, my opponent seems to only be capable of playing one sort-of-strong unit. I'd like to earn more cards, but if the cost of earning them is that I have to grind through miserably easy AI opponents, I don't really see the point of playing. My opponent should have 6 units just like me, and maybe just make it so the "quality" of the cards in his hand mirrors mine.
As a suggestion, this is a mini-bite sized game. Maybe don't make me have to EARN cards that I essentially paid for by buying the game. Please, unlock at least SOME of the cards so that I can get the experience that was promised: a team build card tactics game... Just give me 6 of three different cards and let me customize a team right off the bat.
TLDR: Make AI opponents follow the same rules I do (having 6 cards in their starting hand), and unlock at least 3 units at the start so that I can actually get to experience customizing my troops a little.
Can you more clearly describe what you mean by "Mashing breaks the cards showing up." There's a bug I already know about where if you press the buttons too fast, the deck runs out of cards, but usually that just crashes the game (I never tested the bug on browser)
I don't even get the game. I get the 1 bit thing, but I think you're "plot" is waaaay too computer sciencey for the average person to understand. I have no idea what was "out of control".
The combat is insanely frustrating. I had that you have to run up to enemies who are just simply faster than you and will disappear when backed into a corner. Maybe I was actually killing them? IDK.
In a "room" based dungeon game like this, it's sort of expected that when you enter a room, the enemies in that room are the only ones there, but I think enemies were spawning the whole time? I'm not sure if it's that, or if enemies I thought I killed where actually reappearing after disappearing?
On a fundamental level, you're not doing enough with the game to signal to the player what's ACTUALLY HAPPENING. Did I kill a bad guy? Did it teleport away? Did I get a damage boost, and what is it for? Did that laser just hit me, or not? I can't tell what's going on at all.
I know this is a harsh review, but I wanted to give my honest feedback. I'm not sure how to salvage this one, but it's a really confusing game as it stands.
Man, pretty addictive. I can't tell if I want there to be a stronger tutorial, or if the experience of learning how everything works myself is rewarding enough that a tutorial would take away from the game. This game is incredible though. My only nit pick would be that I had a hull breach I couldn't fix that opened up over the Ziggy spawner. I'd also say that it would be nice if hull breaches maybe released sparks or had some other effect that made them a little easier to see. Also, the sound seemed ok, but the CONSTANT alarm sound going off drove me INSANE and drowned out all of the cute dialogue that I'm sure you worked hard to add. I think you could probably stand to turn that alarm off :/.
That said, this game is practically ready to ship. I'd maybe widen the ship and add multiplayer (which I know is a huge task), but frankly I could see this, as a multiplayer game, being released as is on steam and doing alright. Great job.
Ok, here's the direction I could see this game going:
1) Take out the "random weapon firing" mechanic and replace it with weapons randomly falling from the sky that you can pick up.
2) Extend the arena, and maybe even add several arenas with different pitfalls to avoid.
3) Make the players only slide when they've been hit, otherwise, make their controls sharp and snappy. The slipping around is not fun. I kind of like it, but my girlfriend hated it (Also, I've made a multiplayer game similar to this before about fighting on ice, and a big reason I gave up on the project was because people consistently hated sliddy player movement).
4) Add controller support and up to 4 players (this will necessity a 4x or 5x increase in the size of the map AT LEAST). With controller support, allow the players to aim their weapon with the right joy stick, and fire with the right trigger.
5) Instead of "life", do a smash brothers style "percentage" system, where the amount of knock back a player experiences is multiplied by the "percentage" of damage they have accumulated. Give the players some number of lives. When they fall off the map, they lose a life. No more lives, and you're out. Basically, turn the game into top down smash brothers.
That's exactly the direction I would take this game. I don't think this is necessarily the "correct" direction to take this game, but having worked on a EXTREMELY similar project before, that's the direction I was going to take it before I scrapped the project (because local co-op doesn't sell, and online multiplayer is hard to implement). Good luck my friend. I hope at least some of these ideas help you decide where to take the project next.
I think there's a lot here. I'll basically second what Xascoria said. He really nailed it. The controls are ok, but still somewhat difficult, and the tutorial needs more work. Literally, you need to add arrows pointing to the rope things and a glowy border around them, so players can understand what they're for. That said, the game is pretty funny. Good job.
This game is one of those games that you look at and you're like "meh" and then you play it and you're like "man, this is fun". I actually think there's a lot of potential here. I do have some suggestions:
1) The arrow is meaningless and in the way. All it does is tell you what you already know, and actually it does a bad job of that because it's actually pointing in the OPPOSITE direction that gravity is being applied to you. If you were going to keep the arrow, I would say that you should have it tell you what the NEXT gravity shift will be. Also, invert it so that it's pointing in the direction that GRAVITY WILL BE DRAGGING YOU IN!!
2) The player and the coin stay in the same place, but the map rotates, and the player's gravity direction rotates. I find this combination very disorienting. This one is more of an idea and not necessarily "the right way to do it" but here's how I would do it: The gravity should rotate, and the players' controls should shift, but everyone else should stay where it is, including the map. You could add "wall jumping" as a way to allow for vertical movement when the gravity shifts right or left. Again, this is JUST A SUGGESTION, not necessarily what I think would be "correct".
3) Decide if you want black borders for your sprites or not, and make that the standard. Obviously your platforms need some polish, but the coin as well as the platforms, in my estimation, would look better if they had a black border around them. When I do pixel art, either everything has a black outline or nothing does, and I find that really helps to make the game look cohesive.
All this said, I know this was probably a harsh review, but I actually think that if you added some levels and a little more depth to the gameplay (WALL JUMPING), that this could be a very fun game. Good luck.
Thank you man. I appreciate the support. I donno if you've received a link to this discord chat, but I'm in a chat with a bunch of people from the GMTK jam that are trying to encourage each other to keep improving our games post jam. You will probably see me there.
I'll take your suggestion about the speed boost card to heart. I'm still not sure what direction to take movement speed. As of now, your speed slowly increases over time indefinitely. I may just lock it to a top speed in the future, and then the boost card will only be a temporary speed boost. Yea, it depends a lot on how difficult combat is. If combat is frustrating with this control scheme, then the game will become more "explorer" based. If combat works, it'll go more of a traditional rogue-lite route.
In all seriousness, this game is great. My main suggestion would be to tweak it a little. I'd simply remove the time limit, and modify how much HP the city has and/or how much HP it loses for breaking smaller things. I was able to run up the left side of the island 3 times in a row before you finally put enough buildings in my way to make that strategy non-viable. Maybe widen the streets juuuust a little.
I say all that criticism because I think the game is legitimately good and has a butt load of potential. I hope you keep working on it.
Thank you very much. My girlfriend picked out the music. They're all free songs, so check them out in the description. You can use them for your projects as well.
And hey, if you're interested in my project, give it a follow. I'm going to be working hard on this one after the jam. I was surprised by how well it played and I'm aiming to make a complete product out of the prototype.
Yea, I've found that to be true as well. I'm adding both ways of control in the next patch. You'll be able to toggle "click to play" on and off, and you'll also be able to use the number keys (or maybe ASDF) to play them. Give me a follow if you're interested in seeing this game evolve. I'll be working on it for a while.
Damn, nice time. I'm playing with some updated controls and got just under 3 minutes. Come back in about a day and I'll have it updated with slew of control options and a few new cards in the deck (... and Survival mode will be working).
