was not sure what to title this lol

Right off the bat, wanna say, this game is so cool. I love the art and the vibe, and how every character controls the same but the pieces give them different gimmicks, it's all so sick. I spent like 3 hours just doing matches with my friend online, trying out characters and generally having fun.

Of course, after playing it for 3 hours, I have a few thoughts, so might as well give some feedback! First things I wanna say are what I consider the biggest changes I'm thinking about.

• Music - Obviously as it is right now, the game is a little quiet. Long bouts of silence, with the only real sound being when a piece kills another piece. I think if the game had something in the vein of Psycard, upbeat but "thinky" music, it would be really cool. Maybe a title theme and then a song for each character? Even just a handful of songs to play randomly during battles would be nice.
• Tutorial - When you open the game up, you're greeted with Single, Versus, and Online. A new player will pick Single pretty much every time. Then you see Story, Endless, and Puzzle. Story is the obvious choice. Then, before you know it, you're in a chess battle with non-standard pieces you don't understand, and the turns are Timed!! It's just a tad overwhelming. Puzzles are almost like a tutorial for some characters, seeing as they teach you to use their pieces, but it's still not perfect, and new players aren't drawn to them. If there was a Tutorial battle, maybe something like a Jupiter vs Jupiter battle with scripted moves and pop up windows explaining things on screen, I think that would really help people out!
• Escape Key - I noticed when you do anything in the game, you're kinda locked in. If I pick a character against a CPU, accidentally click Endless instead of Puzzle, or if a Timeout happens in multiplayer because someone took too long on character select, my only real option is either click random things to get to a battle then forfeit it, or close and relaunch the game. It would be nice to have reopen the game less.
• Puzzle Editor - Okay I know making a whole editor to make chess puzzles in this would be a lot of effort probably. I just really like the puzzles and wish there were more, but having the ability to plop pieces down, make a puzzle, and show it to a friend, would be really cool. I'd say this is less vital than the other three above.

That's the general, main game feedback out of the way. I guess next would be some more specific, balancing type feedback, but I don't have much, and plus I'm not even good at normal chess so I sure don't know how to balance XESS, so take it all with a grain of salt.

• Metonym - oh my god shes so weird. I know I shouldn't expect to understand a "Tricky" character right off the bat, and her whole gimmick is having weird moving pieces, but they are SO weird. Besides the weird movement, most of them also can't really move backwards or side to side very well, only forward in weird ways. And I know the flow is to go forward then pull back with Hook, but what that means is very often, if you want to use a useful piece more than once, you have to give up a lot of turns just getting a piece back in position. Also, her second power to just Win if she gets 50 blood, her pieces don't seem very capable of gathering blood efficiently. Using hook starts to use up the little blood you get, and usually her pieces are diving wildly long distances to kill things, and aren't able to move to safe spaces with blood on them most of the time with their weird patterns. Again, grain of salt, she's obviously a hard character, just my starting observations.
• Spectre - Normal chess but two special pieces, I can dig it. My one note: their first power doesn't make sense to me. Castling on Ancient King makes sense, but this one... you don't start with any pawns on your row, so to use this you inherently have to put your king out there in battle, not to mention pawns aren't known for being very versatile to position. That's my only real gripe with this guy though.
• Kristian Maria - is she wearing panties over her pants???

I don't have much to say about other characters, either from lack of playing or just nothing meaningful to say. I've played every character at least once, but that doesn't mean I fully understand how they work or anything like that. Anyway, last thing I have to note is a short list of a few bugs I noticed, or just weirdness I encountered.

• This happened to both me and my friend, on separate puzzles. We loaded up into a puzzle, clicked a piece to see it's movement, and the game crashed. Happened to me on a Metonym puzzle, and it hit her on a That Guy puzzle.
• In online multiplayer, multiple times, we would make a move right at the end of the turn timer and it would desync the multiplayer. It ended up just leaving a long wait at the end of our turns until it synced back up, but it was just a bit awkward.
• On the topic of online multiplayer, when you start a match, one player picks a character with a 30 second timer, then the other player picks a character and a relic on a 60 second timer, then player one picks a relic. What this leads to is a long period after player one's pick where it looks like nothing is happening. It doesn't really matter, but I think it would be nice to update between the second players character and relic picks, and give it all a consistent 30 second timer on every pick.

Uh, I think I'm out of things to say. Overall I really really love this game, sorry for rambling! Glad to see it come out, especially with the kickass art it has.

also i have no idea how to pronounce XESS lol

Two more things I just noticed while doing puzzle after puzzle while listening to anime music.

• Mazarin's Puzzle 4 is set up as if you need to use the few Demon Fire pieces you have carefully to reach the enemy king, but in actuality you can clear the puzzle in three moves by ignoring it all because you have the range to just get them from the other side of the wall.
• Metonym's Puzzle 4 SEEMS to be that the enemy king is unreachable, and you need to farm 50 blood and win using the instantwin ability. The ability doesn't work when you try to use it though. If there's a way to reach the enemy king that I'm just not seeing, ignore this.

Thanks for the feedback!

Music: This is the part of game making I can't really do well myself... Maybe someone else at Ludosity can do it for me, but they're all pretty busy at the moment.

Tutorial: I feel that as long as you can learn a game by playing for a while, a few matches, then no tutorial is really needed (there's a joy in learning after all)... That said, some pointers might be good like "these are your spells" or things like that. Perhaps the first story battle should be untimed and have hints. Unfortunate that Ancient King isn't the first match in story.

Escape Key: Literally pressing escape or backspace could be a good option to add... You see, the reason there's no back arrow on character select is that it visually doesn't fit anywhere without ruining the screen visually... lol

Puzzle Editor: Actually might not be that hard to do, I could see it happening in the future.

Metonym: A lot of characters are mostly made on a whim, hoping to balance them after they've seen some play... So she could totally be bad right now!
Maybe she could benefit from Gogo Stones (puts more blood on the board) or Sacrifice (to pull units back without blood cost)?

Spectre: True, I hadn't really thought that one through... If Spectre turns out to be bad, that would be a good target for a buff then.

Kristian Maria: Panties on top of tights is the new thing, you heard it here first!

I've had this puzzle crash reported from someone else as well, it's very puzzling.

I'll look into the near-timeout desync, I have a decent idea of the problem there.

As for the wait there, the thing is this online (my first!) is built sort of on top of the "play by message/e-mail" system where you send codes back and forth. It's too annoying to fix, but I've learned my lesson for future games.

And it's pronounced Excess! Because there's just too much of it ^^

As for the puzzles...

You're right, I guess I didn't consider Mazarin has extra HP... I'll see if I can fix it.

But Metonym 4 is doable without the spell! There's one unit that has exactly one way of reaching the king...

Recorded the two ways I've found to cheese Mazarin's 4th puzzle 👏

Found a few more things I noticed!

• In online multiplayer, the game doesn't properly display how the opponent uses blood. It usually doesn't increase the counter when they pick it up, and it doesn't show the price increase when the use a skill. It does work properly on their screen, so they can't cheat or anything, but it does mean unless you pay the utmost attention, you don't really know how much blood the opponent has and what they can do with it.
• Spectre Puzzle 4. I love this puzzle... but, even though the proper solution is to use Ghosting and move the pawn so you can win, you can also get 12 blood and win using Ghost March. Or, you could do that, but the game doesn't let you use Ghost March.
• On that note, a lot of puzzles you can get enough blood to use a skill but the game won't let you use them. It would be nice if it had like, a big red X or something over the skill to show it's not legal for the puzzle, but then I guess that has the side effect of giving the solution away a bit if a puzzle allows a skill.
• Tokinko Puzzle 2. The layout of the puzzle implies a need to move the silver piece around killing things, then moving up to the top right to be a gold piece, but in actuality, all you need to do it move silver up right, move the lance up, then take out the enemy king. This puzzle can be fixed by moving the king and lance section in the bottom right over one tile to the right, so that even if the silver can get in, it can't take out the king, only a gold can.
• Cosmo Dragon Puzzle 3. I don't actually know how this puzzle is meant to be tackled, because instead of using most of the dragons pieces in any clever way, in four moves you can move a right claw up into a pawn, the king attacks it, then do the same move with the other claw and take it out immediately.
• Kristall Puzzle 4. Instead of tackling the absolute chess army, you can swap a sentinel to the front, zap the three center pawns and the rightmost knight, and the the sword in the center can just walk in and take the king out. Not sure how intended this is, being able to use a sentinel without the opponent taking turns will pretty much always make a puzzle go like this I think.
• Wildstar Puzzle 4. Move the center piece a tile to the left. Move the right slash to where it used to be. Now it can slash up twice and take out the king, bypassing everything. Potentially intended, but pointing this one out just in case it isn't.

Oh and as a general update, after playing more matches, Metonym's best and most versatile piece is definitely the skull piece, and I would say her worst piece is the wet fish. The fish basically only exists to awkwardly stab a faraway piece, and then after that is almost never worth hooking back, can't attack again, and will probably never move again. Not to mention its horizontal movement at your home base is so small compared to all the other pieces doing big wacky jumps across the board to kill things, it just feels to me like the weakest link.

Some stuff was fixed!

I'm assuming the Summon Anything bug was related to the "opponents spell costs are wrong" bug that was fixed, which could cause a desync in what the game though each players blood amount was (as players would use spells, but the cost would differ).
But if it keeps happening, do report it.

Wow an update! Haven't played a match with my friend yet as shes still asleep, but quick notes:

• Tokinko Puzzle 2 works perfectly now and can be solved with smart promotion or smart use of powers, which makes it a great "tutorial puzzle" for a character.
• Mazarin Puzzle 4 can still be cleared in two moves, the range of the Demon Fire lets it just walk forward and shoot the enemy king immediately.
• Anna Ban Puzzle 3 was unclearable before due to the spell bug, but now its clearable! Yay
• Metonym Puzzle 4 can now be cleared using the 50 blood ability, but it still takes smart play to be able to get that much blood, so it fits as a secondary solution.
• Haven't played a match with a human yet just CPU, but the Tokinko changes feel good, and having only two artillery feels right for UE, looking forward to playing it more to feel it out.

I know it's not "puzzle" anymore but "level"  but Mazarin's 4th is litteraly just: advance 2>win