itch.io

Excellent game!

Do you know what triggers this behaviour in the mods?

Nevermind, saw it in the changelog you posted.  Thanks, will try your version, didn't realize what I was playing was the modded one.

Finally got 5 stars on Reasonable.  Now to tackle harder difficulties.

The game force-sold almost all of my cards simultaneously and autosaved, ruining a save file after months of play.  This is a sad time :(  I have no idea what instantly sells all your cards, but I sure have never sold a card on purpose!

Has any progress been made on this?

Pickpocket discards credits only.  You need to use Rushdown to discard the other cards.

They're fine.  The game is very close to Settlers of Catan, and I would describe it as a puzzle game much more than a roguelike.  The unlucky wheel is a good addition.

This is exactly as stressful as using a nokia in highschool with friends+family+other friends+girlfriend was in real life, except in real life my friends weren't all huge assholes and I wasn't nearly so good at typing.  You are missing the separate individual chats with each person that go simultaneously with the group chat, though, but the game is stressful enough as is so that's probably for the best.

Sounds good!

It was fun.  The abilities that provide consistent income seem always to be worth it to me, since losing is mostly a result of getting unlucky.

Nothing, I just think the bar sliding side to side instead of only moving left would look slightly better, and I figured it would be easy to implement.  I was mostly just trying to engage with the prompt.

Appears to be a worse Vanguard Monsters with ads. Vanguard Monsters is pretty great, though, so it's not a bad space to try and build something in.  I don't get how the purple guy is a llama, but the rest of the designs are at least okay.  I would recommend noting in the description which features are things you hope to add in the future and which currently exist; there is no significant inventory management in this game currently, for example, let alone mid-battle management with effects.  

I would also recommend not doing difficulty the way you are currently; I beat the first mission, then could not possibly ever make progress thereafter as the second mission is all but garunteed to have ranged attackers that kill my guys before they can move appreciably no matter how many times I restart, due to my not having any ranged attackers unlocked and ranged attackers being incomprably better than melee.  Also I have 1 guy and they get 3, so there's that too.

After the heist starts we receive: "The (else:) changer should be stored in a variable or attached to a hook", then when we enter the house we receive: "I need useable code to be right of '='", "There's no (if:) or something else before this to do (else-if:) with", and "There's nothing before this to do (else:) with".

Also, you say there's no way to win but:

"You crack the lock without much issue, but the door swings on by with an awfully loud creaking sound, causing the master of the house to begin to stir..."

followed by a black screen after resisting that consequence (going to 7/10 stress, 0/4 alert) sounds like winning to me.

Victory!  Note:  If you want to skip some levels on replay, you can always run around the outside of the maze to win.

From simplest to most complex:

1. Reverse the slider at the end of the bar rather than restarting it.
2. Change the zone location and distribution per enemy
3. Add new kinds of zones into the pool with various special effects
4. Procedurally generate zones based off of past generations in accordance with some type of story-telling balance system ala Amorphus+ et al.  At the simplest level, reuse only previously-seen zones until its time to introduce a new one and separate zone options into tiers, delivering an option from the correct tier based on total round number using a cycling structure like t1 t1 t2 t1 t1 t2 t3 t2 t1 t1 end, for example.
5. Add a non-combat system part of the game, for example (in similar order):
   1. Add an overarching plot
   2. Have that plot delivered incrementally rather than in one opening and closing screen-card, with updates between some/most battles.
   3. Add encounter-specific game over text
   4. Add encounter-specific text variations related to things like the player winning with hp over or under a certain threshold, the fight taking more or less than a certain amount of time, etc.
   5. add graphics for the enemies and cutscenes/dialogue.
   6. allow the player some optional choices with a small amount of impact on the game, for example some optional levels that unlock a second ending.
   7. allow the player more robust choices, such as (in order again):
      1. optional sidequests that don't meaningfully impact the plot
      2. a relationship system with npcs approving or disapproving of pre-determined choices
      3. general systems in which the player acts and in which individual choices are categorized, so that npcs approve or disapprove of categories of behavior rather than specific acts.
      4. character-specific quests
      5. character-specific ending modulation (ala Fallout New Vegas)
      6. sidequest/main-plot integration
      7. have no characters that cannot be interacted with as NPCs.

   8. Add a map on which a player avatar moves when not in battle

6. allow the player to interact with/affect the game mechanics (e.g. zone distribution and effect, slider speed, slider number), e.g. by equipping items or receiving boons

7. Reflavor the combat system to be something other than physical violence.

8. Add additional combat systems and logic to switch between them (e.g. based on enemy type, or based on choosing a random one each level)

Dealer can get impatient with your slow play during his own explanations and cut scenes, which significantly lessens the drama.

Beat it!  Good thing the difficulty was adjusted, but it's too bad there's no strategy involved.

It was fun, but after beating level 20 then it showed the loading screen for the two rivers again and then still said level 20 but no cards came out so I was stuck :(

Neat!

The game is alright, but it softlocks after using the hand when the door needing 4 gems is already open.  I think I probably need to use the hand to pull the lever in that room so I don't get trapped and can progress in looking for the eye, but I can't because every time I push r the character's movement is disabled but no hand spawns and the movement never is re-enabled.

Quite fun.  Wish it was longer.

Very fun!  There should be an achievement/unlock for defeating the Grandmaster in a single turn.  Maybe a Tactic called Accelerated Dragon that Purges itself, increases the current turn's heat gauge at the cost of the next turn's heat gauge, and draws some number of cards, or Draw by Agreement which wins a non-boss encounter but adds all enemies that were left alive to the next encounter or something?

Beat the demo so far, but only with 2 days to spare (cause I wanna talk with Isaiah, and I grabbed all the evidence since I wasn't sure if it was optional).  I really like the art direction and premise, though I found some of the decisions very frustrating.  Particularly, while in the first layer I thought our protagonist mostly seemed to have the option of being intelligent and competent but naive, uninformed, and out of her depth, the second layer I felt she got stuck with the idiot ball a bit much and I didn't like that.

Characters from my favorite to least favorite, though I have been avoiding side stories except Isaiah's in the hopes of building up enough time before execution to do something dramatic later, so I'm sure many characters will have been missed which is no fault of theirs:

Most Liked:
- Gardener

- Lucia Trattoria

- Niemi

- Prof. Naysmith

- Ms. Sable (protagonist)

- Marciferous

- Kieran

- Overly helpful tutorial guard

Neutral:

- Walraven Kask

- Irene

- Avery

- Alma

- Isaiah

- Aunt and Uncle

- The general populace of the city, onscreen

- Grandfather

- Trial Judge

- Quayle

Least Disliked:

- Mr. Lutwidge

- Guards at the bridge to the Faith district

- Guards drinking on the job who then also assault you in 2nd layer Bad End.

- The general populace of the city, offscreen

- Myrra

I quite liked Trattoria's devotion to actual justice and good civic governance, despite her position as an antagonist.  I really don't like how unintelligent, incompetent, and arrogant Fen Myrra is, and how unwilling to reject her idiocy the main character frequently is.  An example is the conversation after the 3rd blood harvest-- it's pretty clear that Marciferous two days ago wouldn't do that, and if it was any of the options suggested certainly wouldn't have chosen Quayle.  She also recently drastically changed her behavior after being taking into a private 1-on-1 space by the obvious villain who's promoting racism. And, like, we should be keeping an eye out for someone with mind control powers, obviously, after last time and the introductory exposition about what we're doing wrt the corruption.

Anyhow, the game is good fun regardless and I look forward to chapter 3.  I just hope that this doesn't end up suddenly ruining all the characters and subplots and turning terrible like Medieval Cop :(

the +15% regen speed spell is completely busted.  On its own it may not seem very impressive, but it stacks with itself multiplicatively, meaning once you've played it 2-3 times the limiting factor on what you can do is how fast you can click the rapidly shuffling cards in your hand.

Beat it!  Had to leave it running overnight on two consecutive days and check in periodically to skip through fuses, but the clock does in fact stop at 99:59:99!  The game keeps playing, though, albeit at around 10 FPS due to lag, so that's a bit unfortunate, but still, there is a maximum time!  Now, if only there was an end screen...

Yes I understand it, thanks for the reply :)

Pretty fun so far!  I beat it on the first run by using the deal damage equal to block card with the triple block card.  I'd probably recommend changing triple block to double for balance.  Also it would be nice if there were things in the abandoned buildings and such; sometimes you can enter them, but there's no reason to presently (at least that I could find). Thanks for the game!

Any way to tell mirror mines without upgrades and without making a 50/50?

I liked it quite a bit so far, but I think I've softlocked in the mines. I've killed every enemy except the cannoneers that are out of reach, but as far as I can tell the switch at the far left of the mines only lets you use the rising platform to go back one room, and the path past both the crucified man and the door with three glowing pedestals in front remain blocked, and the door above the two fire guys is still locked from the other side, and the path bottom left from the big room with the two flying imps and the chest with the invincibility potion at the bottom is still accessible.  Because the slope leading into the mines is kinda glitchy (you can't walk down it, only slide, and only at certain angles, despite it looking like you should be able to walk down no problem), and because there's a semisolid platform just barely too far to the right to be able to jump through to leave the mines near the entrance, I am wondering if there was supposed to be a way to leave the mines and being unable to leave after entering is unintentional.

Very eerie atmosphere.  Fun to explore for a while.

Game was fun till I softlocked in the sewers by being unable to jump out of water.

Thanks! Beat it :)  If I am less broke some time, I may get the full game.

Dang, nice! That makes the double sided card a LOT less useless.

Enemies seem to have a lot of trouble targetting fast-moving aerial targets, even when they are on a linear approach.  This makes strafing runs functionally unassailable. Neat engine, though.

Nice!

But exploiting doesn't trigger the 4 mana 7/7, does it?  I thought only hitting did.

What does magic do?  Can you ever get abilities back?

Ok, trying to play it, problems so far:

When generating a character, I'm supposed to roll for a weapon.  There's no weapon table.  Currently using the sword style table instead, since nothing calls for that that I can see.

When rolling for a room there's no indication how to tell what kind of room is next.  Currently assuming that the list on page two with the pictures is the order for the rooms and it's the same every time, contrary to what is stated in the first paragraph of the text.

When doing combat there's no explanation of how that's supposed to work.  Currently assuming all combats are like the 'example' on page two, which uses a bunch of rules that come out of nowhere.  Specifically:

• Combat occurs in rounds. On each round the player rolls 2d6 (always) and each enemy rolls 1d6.
• The player then assigns enemy dice in any order to either of their own dice until they can't assign any more without the total assigned value to a player die exceeding its value.
• The player then loses 1 motivation per unblocked die and all blocked dice are discarded.  The round then ends and the next round starts.

Even so there are a lot of things that aren't specified:

• How often can sword style abilities be used?  Currently I'm ruling:
  • Mugai-Ryu : up to once per die (twice per turn in combat unless you wanna double an enemy die for some reason), and on tables that have only 6 results the result is mod 6 if over 6.
    
  • Niten Ichi-Ryu : Activates when the sum of your dice equals the sum of all dice for all living enemies, once per round calculated at the end of the round.
  • Iaijutsu : 1/combat
  •  Ninjutsu : 1/round
  • Jigen-Ryu : whenever you want.
  • Kenjutsu : 1/round in combat, 1/die outside combat.

• How does midboss combat work in general?
  • assuming the <3 column in the midboss table gives dice that work like enemy number does in normal fights currently.
  • assuming 'result is 6' means the midboss rolls a 6 on any die.
  • Currently not worrying about abilities like the Storm Naginata that seem like they do literally nothing (in that specific case) or close to nothing (in some other cases).
  • How does midboss+enemy combat work?
    • Currently assuming the midboss <3 dice and enemy number dice are pooled together and both the enemy special ability and midboss abilities apply on all dice for the duration of the combat.
• Are chests before or after midbosses?  I am currently assuming after.
• Does the pit trap deal an additional 1 damage on a failure to escape?  Does the amulet of Fujin get another roll each failure?
  • Currently guessing Yes and No, respectively.

• Are items consumable?
  • Currently assuming yes for all.

So it's pretty confusing and feels like its missing some explanation/rules.

I've done one run so far with the above interpretations.  I rolled Ninjutsu, grappling hook, blinding powder, amulet of Fujin (which seemed pretty funny because I rolled for sword style last since I couldn't figure out what weapons were supposed to be, and Ninjutsu makes too much sense for grappling hook+smoke bomb+trap evasion. Guess my guy is batman XD ).

First room I assumed was a trap (following the page two pictures), and rolled spikes.  The amulet failed to activate so I used my grapple hook.

Second room enemies were 6 Ashigaru.  I would have taken 2 damage, but I used Ninjutsu to take only 1, then dispatched the final enemy the next round.

Third room was a trap, which rolled spikes again.  This time the amulet activated and I safely proceeded to the next set of enemies.

Fourth room was 4 Sohei.  They dealt 9 damage to me before I could take them down-- not being able to use Ninjutsu was painful here; the first round I couldn't stop even a single attack!

5th room was a Temple Warrior with an imported musket.  He rolled two 6s which would have dealt 4 damage, but I used Ninjutsu to swap one of his 6s for a 1 I rolled, and managed to take him out in a single hit, suffering only 2 damage from his remaining 6, bringing me down to 38.  I acquired a Prayer from the chest.

6th room was a pit trap, and the amulet failed to activate.  Furthermore, I couldn't roll a 5 or a 6 for ages and took 5 total damage before escaping with 33 remaining motivation.

7th room was a Jujutsu master who would have had double nunchucks but thanks to my prayer had a Perfect Yumi Bow instead.  With him were 2 Ronin, bringing the total enemy life to 8 and insuring I have to roll twice for potential damage whenever I take out one of their dice (first -1 on 5,6 then -1 on 4,5,6).  The first round I only managed to take out a single die even though I rolled a 6 and a 5 because they rolled so many 4+s that my dice were reduced to 5, 0 before I could attack (it didn't help that I couldn't lower the number of 4+s, having to settle for trading my 5 for a 6). Luckily blinding powder prevented damage that round, and I rolled no damage from either source for the 1 damage I did deal.  The next round I rolled a 6 and a 3 and could swap my 3 for one of their 6s to reduce the bow's effectiveness somewhat.  I managed to take out 3 dice but still took 4 damage, lowering my motivation to 29.  The revenge dice dealt another 4 damage, lowering my morivation to 25.  The following round I got lucky and the bow, after Ninjutsu, had no hits so I was able to finish off the fight, taking another 3 revenge damage for a total remaining motivation of 22.  This being higher than 12, I won without needing to check the final item (it was another Prayer) or fight the boss.

All in all, it was reasonably fun, but could really use another page in the explanation document, and probably some effect tweaks.  Sword styles 2 and 5 seem pretty trash and style 6 seems very OP. The momentum amulets (Oni, Rebirth) are significantly worse than 1 copy of Healing Herbs. Arrow traps can heal you if the 1d6 is bigger than the 2d6, which isn't that unlikely if you are a Kenjutsu or Mugai-Ryu user, especially if you have a prayer.

Looking at the midboss table now, it looks like I was very lucky to roll a 1 and then a 2 for type.  The other midbosses have a lot more health.

Game is fun, but by area 2 the lag is too intense in the online version for the game to be really playable.

yeah my bad