itch.io

I've found this game very addicting! Nice theme and use of HTML instead of an over-powered web gaming framework.

Some observations if you're looking for bugfixes/improvements:

• You can't disable a Misc shop entry if you don't presently have as much money as it costs daily, meaning you can't prevent yourself from going bankrupt and resetting to homeless if you don't catch it in time. Instead, you should always be able to disable shop entries.
• It would be nice if the various tabs gave you some indication that a change has occurred, e.g., on your certain birthdays in the Amulet tab or when a new job/skill/item becomes available in their respective tabs. So much as highlighting the tab in faint orange would suffice.
• Auto-learn and (to a lesser degree) auto-promote have significant delay before activating. Why don't these trigger immediately upon completing a level?
• I second Spychopat and Anonymous-02's opinion that auto-learn should switch to the (non-skipped) skill that will complete the soonest, or specifically the skill with the least (Xp left) / (Xp/day).
• Clicking on a job/skill when auto-promote or auto-learn is on should either (a) disable their respective auto or (b) leave it on but not update the selected job/skill until its level completes.

There is a bonus that lets you earn money much faster after reincarnating, especially after reincarnating a few times. I'd recommend reincarnating as soon as you can, crafting and selling gun powder to raise funds, and then dumping what you earn into research until you can afford the explorer drill set. From there, you should be able to get back to where you were pretty quickly. As you need more money, it's pretty quick to build up and sell a lot of bronze once you can hire some forge workers.

I see this all the time, too, since purchasing the trail runner upgrade upon resurrection. I'm pretty sure it's being triggered by trail runners generated for sulfur:

___________________________________________

############################################################################################

ERROR in

action number 1

of Draw Event

for object o_bonus_ore_trail_runner:

local variable spr(100546) not set before reading it.

at gml_Object_o_bonus_ore_trail_runner_Draw_0

############################################################################################

gml_Object_o_bonus_ore_trail_runner_Draw_0 (line -1)

I had something similar happen. When I had two stacks of coal in my inventory, if I attempt to put the second stack in a chest, it instead moves an amount equal to the second stack from the first stack unless the first stack is smaller than the second stack, in which case it adds an amount equal to the second stack to the chest without removing anything from the inventory.

I've noticed that weapons dealing both normal and vampiric damage trigger spikes twice, which makes it a bit trickier to use vampirism as a means of mitigating spikes damage, even with Cleansing Flame. Is this the intended behavior?

To be fair, you have an awesome energy build that would be rare to assemble as shallow as depth 9.

This was a very silly build, but I enjoyed finally milking letters for all their worth. You can move them as many times as you want in the same turn and, provided they're still adjacent to the same weapon, their bonuses stack. You can even reorganize to reset them mid-turn if you have enough energy to spare!

This game is just beautiful!

Overall, I think the polish and atmosphere are great, but I keep stumbling into weird little bugs. For instance, I just nabbed a golden whetstone from a star potion, but promptly thereafter my glass bottle decided everything in my inventory was adjacent to one or the other of the two hats I'd shoved into the corners until after I used the whetstone. I've also had gem effects not update properly after mining yet another one with my pick axe and, likewise, books forget they were connected to adjacent mana stones until after I moved them around. These glitches seem to have something to do with the mini-reorganize phase that occurs after an item/curse is created mid-combat.

It even happens if I don't click too quickly (I've had it happen on the very first click). It's when there's a ton of stuff going on in the background, which seems to drag frames out a bit.

For example, say I amass just enough ore to purchase 'anchovy cove'. The upgrade menu then updates to show the upgrade as purchasable, but just as I click, the iron lored finishes its task and reduces the available ore to below the cost. I've even seen the menu item go dark gray right as I click, and then the game crashes.

I suspect what's going on is that both events manage to trigger, i.e., they both first check if enough resources are available, and then, seeing that they are (because neither has deducted any yet), they both deduct their share of resources, resulting in a negative number (which presumably breaks something, e.g., the display routine or some other computation). If you have actual concurrent programming going on, where one thread can be doing *anything* while another thread is running, you'll have to use mutex to prevent that kind of thing from happening. If not, you can just check again right before you actually change the value to make sure it doesn't go negative. Alternately, you can find the code that's actually crashing (probably a log() or something similar) and adjust it to permit negative numbers. (Assuming my suspicion is correct, anyway).

Wow, stage 2 was bigger than I expected!

Another bug: I pretty regularly crash the game when I buy an upgrade at the same time as it becomes unavailable due to resources being consumed otherwise. This happens pretty frequently in later stage 2.

Came back after a good while to see some pretty awesome updates! I'm excited to play through and explore the added content.

Found a pretty significant bug, though: If you click to metastasize, select a few upgrades, but then cancel metastasis, the malignancy is still spent but the upgrades remain unpurchased. It's super easy to go, "Oh, I can grab another (formerly locked) upgrade if I just had 200 more malignancy, better cancel," and then bam! An hour of progress lost.

"Let's put one of those beefy arms back on him for good measure"!  Terrific concept and very satisfying game play!

If you're interested, here are some ideas for further development:

• Movement on the ground is a bit awkward.  The dragon clearly lands (and aims differently), but moving left and right periodically causes you to take off again (adjusting aim downwards).  It would be nice if you more consistently walked around, preserving useful aim.

• Ground-based threat is very minimal.  It would be nice to see, e.g., some knights riding around down there with lances that can stab you for instant death, etc.

• Castles are basically the same as other structures, but take longer to destroy.  They're drawn with ramparts---why not dot them with archers that can't be killed until the structure crumbles?

• There's essentially no reason not to just hold Z/C down constantly.  Breathing fire could come with a trade-off: perhaps it could slow you down considerably, or could exhaust rechargeable energy (or even life for a real challenge!).

• You have a whole unused X/V button that could add some interesting game mechanic.  My recommendations would be (a) a different attack, e.g. claws, that is better vs certain targets such as castles, (b) moving without adjusting aim, such that one can fly backwards while holding X/V, or (c) adjusting aim without moving (perhaps even allowing you to breath fire straight up or straight down, etc.).

Anyway, thanks for a great game!

Revisiting this game, I still can't figure out the computer.  There are plenty of plausible messages that can be copied and subtly modified from the poster on the far right, some exactly 24 characters long, but nothing that I've tried has worked.  As far as I can gather, the input is meant to be general commentary on the setting of the game: a ruined planet Earth devoid of life.  Alas, the English language is too flexible to guess the right wording!

Or perhaps the real twist is that you didn't code an ending, leaving us instead to ponder the last lamentations of a wizened digital elephant.

This game is very interesting and I think has potential to be very strategic.  So far, I'm finding it necessary for my heroes to always advance all of the stats, the main challenge being deciding what order and getting a feel for how much is enough for a given level.  If one hero gets stuck after losing too many challenges, the other gives you another chance to go rescue it, but otherwise I mainly stick to one hero if I manage to level it enough to complete the map.

Some ideas for further hero–hero interaction are as follows:

• When one hero beats a specific challenge type, it suppresses the difficulty of that challenge type by one level for one turn for the other hero.  This lets a hero powerful in stat X help a hero weak in X if X is that hero's next step.  Determining which hero to advance becomes a significant factor in bringing the heroes together.
• Given the above, it might make sense to have more than two heroes on a map, possibly with some totally isolated from the others (existing only for the purpose of helping other heroes beat specific challenges).

I remember this having been playable online.  Kinda miss it being that way, but from what I recall it was a fun, well-made little game.

Wow, this is quite a compelling story, and well delivered in an immersive, interactive medium.  And is that Bitsy inside Twine?  I had no idea one could do that.  Well played!

I believe you can just enter the launch code from that screen.

I've noticed an mildly exploitable bug: the heroes available to be recruited are not kept as part of the save-state.  Accordingly, if you don't like the batch of heroes presented to you, you can just save and reload to get new ones.

Just wanted to follow up to say thanks for all the quality-of-life improvements, including addressing the ideas I mentioned above.

The interface is starting to feel really nice, like I was a militia's quartermaster or the mayor of some besieged village.  I'd say the only thing missing is a bit of flavor text expressing a greater sense of objective and urgency—what really are we trying to accomplish in the woods, mountains, swamps, and ruins?  Is there some specific lost artifact?  Some Big Bad we aim to slay?  Even if the goal is just to build an empire of scrap, seeing it put to opulent use might be fun, a la the various Dwarf Fortress megastructures: palaces, giant statues, even gateways to the Underworld if you're into that sort of thing.

Very excited to hear about your renewed effort to work on the PC version of this game!  I wanted to mention that the link to your Patreon account above doesn't take me anywhere useful, just to a list of things you've supported.  Are you accepting donations there?  I'd also be curious what your funding needs/goals are to continue development on Slipways, in particular if you plan to hire more developers.

Thanks again for a great game!  I'd love to see it reach it's fullest potential.

Wow, fun concept.  Dying on the last level and then respawning with just 1 heart and no medkits on the floor makes for quite the challenge, but doable nonetheless.

Regarding the bug, upon completing what I could of the map, three tiles remained that would highlight if I moused over them, but could not be selected and didn't have any graphics indicating a challenge to face there.  At first I presumed these being empty was just the result of randomization, i.e. that some lands could generate with no challenge and that was fine, but upon subsequent play-throughs, I've noticed it was the same lands that were again highlightable but not selectable (though most everything else had randomized).  Perhaps there is some problem generating content for certain tiles?  If it helps, these are the village three tiles northeast of the starting castle, the shire to its immediate west, and the mountain on the northern edge of the northeast corner of the map.

Experimental though it may be, this game has a nice concept and is surprisingly polished.  I may just be missing something, but there seems to be no win condition: eventually, there were no more regions I could select, and as a result, the game stopped progressing.  Also, while I understand the mechanic of not being able to idle, I found myself at times with no heroes available and still being forced to engage in doomed quests.  Perhaps idling should be allowed (i.e. ending one's turn without selecting a region), though with quests on the map having a maximum total number of turns they can sit unaddressed before failure.  Lastly, I think it would be neat if one could add adventurers to quests that have already started.

MILD SPOILER ALERT.  There, you've been warned.

Finally got around to playing this, and wow.  The dark humor may be a bit over the top, but for me what really did it was the catastrophic collapse of the fourth wall, and then the wall behind that: the highest moment was easily, "This little endeavor isn't for you.  It's for me"—interestingly on only one path through the true ending, and fortunately the one I chose first.

I'd say this game's deep commentary on our inability to change has given me a lot to think about—enlightened me, even made me a better person—but then, reflecting on its message, I suppose I know better.  We are all Merkle: if you come away from this game thinking you've learned something, you haven't, and yet if you think you haven't, you have.  This game is a koan.

I love the concept of this game, plus the shadow puppet sequences give it a nice storytelling ambiance.

I would like to comment, however, that game progression and the cost/value balance for upgrades seem a bit off.  A simple winning strategy is to build about equal parts houses and windmills, plus enough extra houses to cover lost vikings (that won't already be recovered by empty houses), with the occasional bazaar thrown in.  It doesn't take long to accumulate 100 coins for an easy win.  Most upgrades, e.g., to longhouses, are much too expensive (and actually *worse,* given that they don't refill as reliably).  By the time it makes sense to start buying them, say because the map is full, you already have enough coins to win the game.

As simple as it is, this game is really quite silly fun.  I'd love to see more of the "wait, there's more?" aspect, as occurs when the shop and dwarf show up, as in, it would be fun if all of those useless items actually turned out to be useful somehow!  It's a bit slow to start, so I suspect a lot of players quit before noticing there are more mechanics than clicking a button to reveal a sentence; the sentences changing are at least a clue.

Nice use of straight HTML5 (complete with responsive layout!) to implement this one, by the way.  Tons of games like this are done in Unity or whatnot for reasons unknown and have a habit of turning my laptop into a noisy fingertip warmer.

This game is silly and fun.  I keep wondering, are they ever going to learn to put on some clothes? =)

I wish the auto sell/replace features ran about 3x faster, and also that they'd affect the second tab as well (or at least not sell people that could help there).

FYI if you're using Firefox, go to about:config and edit browser.backspace_action to 2.  This means, "really, backspace is *just for text* thx bye."

I have so lost, like, actual work I get paid for to that one.  It's the first setting I change.

I've really enjoyed this game.  The depth of play is just terrific.  It's a bit slow to start, but once you've figured a few things out you realize how much opportunity there is for strategy and customization.

I realize and appreciate that this is a work in progress.  I think it would be neat to see a bit more information available about combat in progress, perhaps after purchasing an upgrade in town.  You can sit and watch to learn what abilities are common in the different areas, but a log of some sort or stats on the current monster would help inform how to outfit your heroes.  Also, it took me a while to realize that the hero stats you can see only pertain to the hero you're *about* to send out, not any of the heroes currently questing.  Perhaps the stats panel specifically on the Battle tab should pertain to the hero in combat for the selected area (like how the right-hand panel does).

This was lots of fun, and very true to the theme: Hades, the original underworld!

There are lots of ways to "solve" each room, but that doesn't detract from the puzzle-rpg cross-over feel.  Along those lines, perhaps there could be an extended-play mode with randomly generated rooms; I suspect you can find the right balance between "can just make a bee-line to the stairs" and "no way to walk into the room without taking damage".

My only complaint was that it was a bit unintuitive how to "aim" things like charge and boulders.  I didn't realize at first that charge actually needs an open space between Heracles and the first monster, nor was it immediately clear that boulders were targeted by clicking one of the four tiles cardinally adjacent to Heracles.  (I at first tried to click the monster I intended to hit instead.)  A visual cue like always highlighting tiles a selected action can affect could help with this.  Also, I found myself clicking an already selected action in attempt to deselect it; that might make sense as an alternative to right-clicking.

I too found the sfx quite pleasant after a few upgrades.  Thought this was a clicker, but turns out it's a synth rhythm game!

This game's concept is a lot of fun.  I could totally see it as a single-player or multi-player-cooperative board game, too!

This is a terrific game!

The encroaching darkness as well as the gradual maxing out your tile upgrades adhere strongly to the theme, but what I really love about this game is the gradual reveal of its depth and the different strategies you might be able to use to win.  Just when you think you've figured out, "OK, so I can also build cities for a research victory," you discover, "whoa, there's a potion factory?"

I got stuck there, too (the crystal in the little square box with one opening), though I think I had gravity pointing to the right, such that I could fall through the opening, but not jump back out.

But man is this game neat.  Nice job figuring out all kinds of things to do with a game element most just think of as a necessary evil: the edge of the screen.

This is just awesome.

I'd love to see a "mate in k" puzzle mode, where the sequence of available cards is fixed and the player must win in k turns.

I'm enjoying this game so far and look forward to further development.

The difficulty level is about right for casual play and I like the reveal-to-inventory-to-deck mechanic.  There are some balance issues with cards, though nothing game-breaking: both Anticipate++ and Apple++ pale in comparison to simple (and common) Green Tea, etc.

One thing that's really throwing me though is that cards are drawn with replacement, meaning that my hand sometimes fills up with cards that are difficult to play—in particular things like Slam in the Barbarian deck, which can easily get you killed.  If cards were instead drawn without replacement, I could at least rest assured that, e.g., both of my Slam cards are already in my hand and I won't see any more.

Edit: Corrected card name from Bash to Slam; guess I'd confused it with another game.  Same idea, though.