itch.io

Hi there, thanks for the feedback. We released this game a long time ago, so I can't really see us making any balance changes at this point!

However, if you're finding that the 2nd area feels like a brick wall there's probably lots of room to improve how prepared you are when you leave the 1st area. To have the easiest time in later areas you want to try and leave the previous areas well prepared (i.e.with as many good cards as possible), which might mean deliberately (but safely) killing more rascals, or it might been holding out and exploring more even if you've found the exit.

I am quite confident in the difficulty curve as it is, but it does expect you to try an make the most out of each area, which might not be what you're expecting.

If you do decide to give it another go (I hope you do), good luck, godspeed :)

Hi, I live in the UK, but I am on an extended stay in Ireland at the moment. So when I try and buy a game I fill in my (UK) billing address for the VAT regulations, I hit this roadblock:

Confirm payment

Sorry, we can't accept your purchase at this time due to the updated 2015 VAT regulations. Your billing address does not match your purchase location (IE).

So, I can't buy anything on itch until I'm back in the UK (presumably aside from cheekily using a VPN or something)? This is less than ideal. Notably, other platforms where I might buy games (Steam, Humble) don't seem to have the same restriction. Is there some solution I'm missing?

I think I found/fixed that crash yesterday. My bad, sorry! My fix will be in the next itch build.

Yeah, you saw a bug there, sorry. It'll be fixed in the next itch build.

Yep, exactly why I made the change :)

Yep, was able to have a better attempt at this, the results feel a whole load better to me. It'll go until the next build we do, would very much welcome your thoughts when that happens! Cheers.

This is some very smart feedback, thanks! I'll see what I can do.

For sure a 40 ATK 4 DEF build is faaaaaar more useful than a 4 ATK 40 DEF build; but you wouldn't find me running either. Sometimes you just can't help but take a hit, so all attack builds are hella risky.

About the ratio in general, yep, attack is generally more powerful than defence. I've come to think of this as a positive though, if the two were balanced the answer to "which do I want more of?" would always be "which do I have least of"; this way, you need to decide how much more valuable ATK is to DEF for you.

We definitely want to keep the cost of token uniques fixed throughout the game. The alternative would be too weird and confusing.

Healing is definitely the strongest of the ability cards, but we try and compensate by making the charge time really very slow. A seed with a whole bunch of them is definitely helpful, but I'm not convinced that it's completely dominant.

Yeah, we've been gradually softening the introductory turns. I'm dead set against removing all difficulty from them, because the challenge of playing with low stats is interesting, so there's a balance to make here. For what it's worth, I find a single full heal is enough to recover from a slightly rocky start, and we've just made that first heal cheaper.

The reveal map card is super powerful, especially in the boss-less game we're currently playing. It's a bit more expensive to use now.

Yep, you're totally right. Without playing the boss, you're definitely going to be missing the final punch. I'm trying to tune it towards "a solid final challenge" but not "the place where your otherwise perfect build is now useless". Success in FTL always felt a bit luck-based and arbitrary (maybe because I never figured out the end game), so I'm definitely hoping to avoid that.

Yep, I think there's a respect to which this game will end up a little "here are your cards, now play them right" rather than "here are your cards, how do you want to play them", at least at high skill levels. I think I've made my peace with that; there's certainly no changes I can think of that will clearly disrupt that.

A prime influence for me is nethack, and I think my ideal curve is influenced by that, a challenging (but low investment) early game, that eases a little when death is scarier, but with sharp "do this right or die" moments punctuating the regularly. How close I can get to that remains to be seen.

Thanks a lot for the insightful commentary so far. Looking forward to your fuller account!

Yeah, it does sound like you've been pretty lucky with the health cards! Five in one run is seriously lucky, frequently there's none.

I've been having some doubts about the difficulty of carrot myself lately. Maybe just a bit too much. Would be keen to hear your thoughts on them after you've interacted a bit more.

You certainly won't have seen everything there is to see yet, but you've probably seen a good deal of it. I'm afraid while there's still some things in the pipeline (most notably a final boss stage), we've currently have no plans to expand what we have substantially.

I'm really glad you've been having a good time with the game (and personally, _especially_ glad that the balance is feeling good!)

Thanks!

Yeah, I'm clearly veeeery used to the game now, but it takes me 30-50 minutes for a full playthrough, depending on luck and how much I'm hurrying.

Our comparison points are Spelunky and Downwell; which take a similar length of time to play, and don't allow saving. A reasonable argument could be made that this is a different sort of 'roguelike' to those games though.

Yep, I'm afraid you're correct, there's no mid-game saves at the moment.

An opportunity to leave a game at the end of a stage, and resume it later is on our "things we would definitely like to do, but can't promise" list. The last time we looked into it we discovered that there's a whole bunch of complications that could make it difficult to do well.

Thanks for asking! Either is good, and I should see it either way, but:

If it's just a quick observation, the in game feedback might be easiest (for you).

If it's longer form, or something you'd like to chat about, that'll work better here.

Hey folks, I really want to talk to you about how difficult this game is!

So, balancing a game like this is pretty important, and I'm the person responsible for that bit. Getting this stuff right is difficult, so I'd really welcome your input! Is something particular to hard? Did something feel unfair? Do you waltz through the game with no difficulty? I want to know!

A note on where I'm coming from balance wise. I want this to be a game that you have to work to get better at. A game that remains interesting (challenging), even for reasonably experienced players. Converse to that, I want the game to feel 'fair'; when you die I want there to have been a better way you could have played to survive it.

What I'd most like to hear about are:

• Recurrent problems i.e. "this monster always kills me!"
• Bad seeds i.e. "I played seed 51251555, but I'm pretty sure it's impossible"
• Feelings about the ebb and flow of the game in general "Getting to World 3 more or less guarantees I'll win the game"

Thanks!

Hi Friendly :)

Yep, this is a limited beta. It will, of course, become a full version when we release properly. As long as you want to play on PC (not PS4) you definitely won't need to buy another copy on release. As per any beta thing, if you'd rather play the fully polished version, it's best to wait.

We're use the itch desktop app for auto-updating. You should be able to download the game from itch without the manager, but I'd recommend against this as you'll miss out on auto-updating. We'll be patching/improving things a whole bunch, and it'll be worth staying up to date.

We wont be putting builds onto Steam until we release; you _will_ get a Steam key at that point.

I don't have a full list of the statistics we send to hand, but they are solely game related things "which world you died on", "what killed you", "what was the game seed" things like that. We're taking these so that I have more information to help balance the game.

Cheers,

Jonathan