I liked it. It really captured the essence of this type of games without adding anything overtly fancy.
Drayce Marshal
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Hey thanks for playing!
By design the key of playing Daybreak against Cadence is to find openings and try to stagger as much as possible to interfere with the Appeal build-up (Subdue is a very useful card, despite having 1 windup). Cadence's defense is very weak so basically if you land every Ruthless Strike you would win. But the intention is that once you get familiar with the mechanics and all the other characters (I'm planning to add more characters in the future) you wouldn't use Daybreak again. He's not meant to be weak, but he's meant to be a tutorial character that is very basic.
Could you elaborate on the bug a little bit? Was the timeline indicator consistently wrong during that round? It could be an async issue.
I like this game overall and the production value is high. I appreciate the addition of practice mode, but still I have no clue how to predict the direction the ball would be bouncing towards even after observing them in practice mode. Is it the expectation that I'm supposed to react after the ball starts bouncing back from the table?
I think movement speed and dodge cooldown is pretty crucial cause sometimes you just cannot outrun the enemy - more specifically the ghost. I've lost to the ghost every single time. Maybe there's something I'm missing here.
(Edit: the game seems a lot easier on full screen? Maybe I just get stuck around the corner of the wall a lot when the game is too small)
It's an interesting premise for sure, though I think for the existing levels the difficulty the shadow imposes on me was diminishing as I went further. I hope to see this idea developed further with more complex levels, and maybe allow the player to restart a single stage and re-plan their movement from the start after learning what the later levels look like.
(The fourth stage was not meant to be beaten right?)
The opening sequence is really cool. I like bishop the most cause it has the most chess motif going on. The game bugged out and quit after I plugged in my switch pro controller in the Queen fight (moving with keyboard was uncomfortable) and Continue didn't work for me so I stopped before beating her. I hope I'm not missing out on too much.
(Edit: I figured the game kind of auto-quits on start if I have my switch pro controller plugged in.)
The idea that you need to focus on breaking parts is solid. But to make meaningful decisions I'd need to know what the enemy is capable of with each of their moves/body parts. It could be as simple as a line of text showing <x> used <body part> to <description of the move> whenever they do something.
Since there's a heavy focus on breaking parts maybe it could get rid of the general HP bar, and only have HP for each part, but have one of the parts be "critical", and you win by destroying that part specifically (like where the central operating system is for the mech and vital organs for the kaiju).
The stability is better compared to last time. Although I did completely lose connection at the end and had to wait for an enemy to come around to end the game. It can really benefit from some sense of progression, like adding more enemies over time or have the map become more complex to traverse. It was fun until I got good at the game, at which point it became really repetitive.
I like driving and drifting on water, The bit where the police showed up was interesting. Maybe that section could be longer and involve the other racers, too (I didn't see them on the tracks, but I did still have a ranking during that part so I don't know if they're there). I'm also a bit confused at a certain intersection where there's no sign telling me if I should turn there or at the next one. It doesn't tell me to get back on track whether or not I make a turn there.
Thank you for the very solid advice around the rulebook. I was trying to not scare off players by showing them a large chunk of text of all the information at once, which is why I broke them down into sections with hyperlinks (also no need to worry about the explanation of terms). Having "sneak peek" tooltips over the terms would certainly be helpful. I'll make sure to add some examples for Staggering and try to fit some images into the Game Flow page.
I like the gameplay loop and music. It's aesthetically pleasing as well. I'd like to see more diversity in the regular enemies. Right now there are spiders and bats but they behave pretty much the same way and the loot drop seem to be identical, too. The end screen calculation seems a bit buggy and I'm always asked to store more items than what seems necessary. When I start walking or change direction the character seems to always need time to speed up. it makes it a little bit uncomfortable in boss fights as I wouldn't be able to dodge very effectively. Is Anasi (or however it was supposed to be spelled) the only boss fight right now?
It's neat. I don't think I particularly understand the bubble/fans/spikes level but the others are fun. I find that in the puzzles where you're supposed to go through all of the buttons without repeating your path, you can actually throw the item you're holding onto an adjacent grid to activate it. Don't know if it's intended. Probably an exploit.
The knock-out time seems a bit inconsistent. Sometimes a cookie that's knocked out would wake up almost immediately despite me having knock-out timer at level 6. The collision box on the puppy sometimes stops me from reaching the cookie on top of it, too, and by my experience of the game I suspect even if a cookie is knocked out, it still halves the TPS if its collision box is still on the puppy (if they're actually knocked out when I think they are). It'd be helpful to show a timer above their head or something for how long they're going to stay stunned or more visual cues for if they're stunned in the first place.
Because the penalty of having cookies walking around is very high, it's hard to see progress unless the knock out timer is buffed. It'd also be helpful to have an upgrade that improves "tamale per click" so the player would have more control over the situation when the knock-out is too short. Or maybe a power-up to make the puppy less helpless and fend-off the cookies once in a while.
Some visual changes when items are leveled up would be nice to have, too.
I'm not sure how to stop the assassination. Since every character is a grey box (at least that's what I'm seeing) there's no way I can tell who's the guy that shot the bullet the next time they come around. Even if I can figure out who they are ahead of time I don't know what I'm supposed to do to stop them as it seems the only interaction possible is talking to people.
It still feels pretty jittery on my end so maybe the sensitivity can be toned down a little (my phone got a notification on vibrate when I was playing and the maze responded pretty aggressively). I was a bit confused what the "neutral" position is supposed to be in terms of visuals so it just looks like the ball defies gravity. Maybe some visual reference in the background would help (like floors or a table that's assumed to be even). Also not sure how the enemies are supposed to move? Sometimes they seem to be static relative to the screen and sometimes they move along the paths.
It seems to be the same as the prototype version? Let me know if you're going to update it later. On top of that, the movement seems to be very slippery (either the player has high inertia or low friction between the player and the ground). I ended up falling through the hole because the player wasn't stopping when I expected it to. It could be the intention, which I'm not sure of cause the game seems to have something to do with weed.
It's interesting that three players can come together to solve the game. Though I tried pasting the copied code in a notepad and it did not work for me. I guess the copied text stayed within unity player? The pencil level felt pretty smart cause (SPOILER) you have to use one of them as a stopper to align the other one with the entrance.
Thanks for the review!
Yes the freezing/crashing issue seems to be a common one. I personally could not reproduce that consistently in my local environment, but I would try some measures like preloading assets instead of loading them on the fly for better performance.
A slay the spire-like was not part of my vision. The end goal (if the game ends up being "completed") was to add multiplayer. I would need at least four fighters available for that to happen, so each player would get two random fighters to pick from in the beginning. I do plan to have a "story mode" and make a story line for each fighter to characterize them a bit more.
Staggering is pretty powerful. I added the staggering cap of 5 to nerf it. Maybe it could be lowered more or the resistances could be higher. But most moves that are good at staggering require high stamina or a long time to finish, so you're not likely going to lose from just being hit by a single staggering spree (two or more would definitely do it though). I'm also planning to add a draw pile and discard pile view for both the opponent and the player (only draw pile count for the opponent), so it will become more predicable what cards the opponent would have ready in their hand (if you're familiar with their deck, which is ultimately how the player's expected to get better at this game).
It's a fun game, a bit hard for me cause I have problem figuring out when the ping pong was going to land at the middle of the table. The music and visual style go together very well. The audio cue when the opponent is exhausted overrides the "hit" audio cue, so I mistakenly thought he didn't hit the ball back and wasn't prepared to hit the last one.
Yeah you're right the HP and Stamina values on the cards holding the tokens are not supposed to change cause they're "printed out". I was a bit obsessed with the idea that the game should be playable as a physical game... But it does break the flow when you have to hover over the token spaces to check the updated values very often so I think I can add a configuration option to show token counts at all times.
Hey thanks for the comment! A couple of things I want to check with you about, if you don't mind -
1. Did the crash happen shortly after you opened the rulebook? Or otherwise for how long have you played it until it crashed? I've noticed that happening but I was using a very bad laptop (temporarily) so I wasn't sure if it was just performance issue on degraded hardware.
2. Were you informed that discarding ("strategizing") by right clicking on a card and clicking on the buttons under the figurine to reposition were things you could do instead of playing a card?
3. Could you elaborate on which values are not updating appropriately?
(P.S. Will check out your game tomorrow when I wake up. It's a bit late in my time zone right now.)
Thanks for playing! It's my general experience with board games, too where the rules sound complicated and the only way to learn it is to start playing. I'm thinking about ways to tone it down in the "rule book" in the finalized version to not scare people away. Both HP and stamina will be upped in real characters that will make it to production.
The puzzle design is pretty nice and the player can easily figure out the conditions to solve them by themselves. I imagine it must be tedious to repeat the whole trip if someone makes a mistake at the end of the last puzzle, luckily it didn't happen to me. Personally would do grid-based movement instead of free movement considering the nature of the puzzles.