A few suggestions

[Arisu]

Allow us to choose what analog stick to use when targeting the bombardment spell or moving things around with telekinesis. To me it feels a bit weird that for these spells, aiming is suddenly done with the movement stick. (yes you could argue telekinesis is technically moving :P)

Better spell selection method. The flex spell is really cumbersome to use, especially when the list of spells becomes larger. And while I appreciate that we have the ability to customize this list, it really discourages the use of niche spells. Some suggestions for improvements here :
*A quick select wheel. while holding the flex spell switch button, not only does it switch to the initial spell, but it would also show a wheel with all the spells available that you can select using one of the analog sticks/mouse.
*Loadouts. Give us a few loadouts with different primary/secondary/flex spells set. Switching could be done by pressing the favorite app buttons while the wand is drawn
*Hotkeys. This one is for the keyboard + mouse users. While the mouse wheel is a lot faster for selecting flex spells, there are a lot of unused keys on the keyboard. All of which can be used to instantly select (or even cast) the exact spell you'd want.

Better info regarding upgrades. I already saw this mentioned somewhere else on the forum. But the spell upgrades are really lacking in letting us know exactly what is being upgraded. It only mentions "increased effectiveness against more powerful foes".

Fix the text for the chess puzzles. I know it may seem a bit nitpicky, but "checkmate" is not what the puzzle is actually asking us to do.

And finally a question regarding shield health. Maybe I missed something in the tutorial, but I really don't get the purpose of this. Yes it allows you to get hit more, but that's what normal health does as well. And normal health can get recovered with pickups, while shield health can not. So it just seems like worse health.

[silver]

Shields have a high upper limit (I think 6) -- normal health can only be healed up to your max health, but if you pick up a shield, it adds 1 shield no matter what your current health or shields. Also, the "talent" pursuit points you get for "completing levels without taking damage" only count health damage (because shields are just protecting your health, they aren't health, see?). They may seem redundant with health, sure, but they're basically extra health.

And you *can* get shield pickups in the castle -- once you buy the right upgrade from Emil and Anton's store, you occasionally find shields in bags, and you can buy one shield per floor in the shop, and there's always a shield pickup after you defeat the floor boss (or bosses). Sometimes when I'm doing really well on a couple levels, I get up to 5 or 6 shields.

[roka_robert]

Hello, thank you for your extensive feedback. ❤️❤️ I have made a note of the whole thing and will pass it on for discussion. Thank you

[Arisu]

Originally posted by silver:

Shields don't have an upper limit -- normal health can only be healed up to your max health, but if you pick up a shield, it adds 1 shield no matter what your current health or shields. Also, the "talent" pursuit points you get for "completing levels without taking damage" only count health damage (because shields are just protecting your health, they aren't health, see?). They may seem redundant with health, sure, but they're basically extra health.

And you *can* get shield pickups in the castle -- once you buy the right upgrade from Emil and Anton's store, you occasionally find shields in bags, and you can buy one shield per floor in the shop, and there's always a shield pickup after you defeat the floor boss (or bosses). Sometimes when I'm doing really well on a couple levels, I get up to 8 or 9 shields.

I see what you mean. However I haven't really seen any of this so I didn't know this was a thing. My question was about the permanent upgrades to your character. You can upgrade health, and shield health. They both cost the same. I expected shield health to be some kind of automatically regenerating shield (that's what shields tend to do in most games I played, but I understand it's not fair of me to put this expectation on other games). But in terms of these upgrades, health seems to be the better choice. Though I'm not really sure what "talent" pursuit points are, so maybe those are worth starting off with some shield health for this purpose?

[ebaG-gamma]

These are excellent suggestions, Arisu!

🧙‍♂️
I have suggested something very similar on the rokaplay Discord[discord.com] under Spells & Secrets > #magical-forum > Suggestion Multi-Thread.

I like your suggestion for holding RB to bring up the quick select wheel (QSW) (which I called "radial menu" in my suggestion on the Discord) a lot. I'll tweak it a little bit though: What if RB retains its functionality of selecting the first spell in the list as flex spell and holding LB would bring up the quick select wheel? If both is on RB, you'd need two delays. With the QSW on LB, you could keep moving your character with left stick, hold LB, move the reticule over the desired spell from the QSW, release and be good to cast.
Very important detail for a QSW: The position of spells should not change with flipping the extra spells with LB and RB. You should be able to drag a spell to the QSW in the spells app and they should stay where you put them. I should be able to just bring up the QSW, swing my stick to the position where I put, e.g., the shield spell and have it selected, w/o having to look for its new position first.

I like your hotkeys suggestion too. At first, I envisioned that for simplicity's sake the spells in the QSW should be the ones that get hotkeys (they'd share the assignment of quick select spell 1-8 or so), but more customizability is more betterer, so why not allow 19 spell hotkeys, one for each position in the extra spells queue? The QSW assignment could be separate.
Speaking of the extra spells queue, organazing it would be easier if all extra spells, including the current flex spell, were always on display in the list in the spells app. Now the list has a neat grid of three rows and eight columns. For my suggestion to work, we'd need one space more. (I can see the UI designer/s crying before my mind's eye.) The current flex spell would be highlighted in the list in some way, colored square around it or so.

♟ You mean it should say "check" instead? Yeah, most of the time, the king could just move out of the immediate threat. And yeah, seems quite nitpicky, but I know how it feels if someone gets a detail on something you somewhat care about wrong.

I don't really see the benefit from loadouts, because of how the artifacts I pick up usually change which spells I use during a run. I'm not saying I'm against it, just that it would be waaay down my priority list of changes.

Shield health tricked me too. 😤
I also thought that it maybe regenerates over time and was quite disheartened when I found out that an additional heart would have been a much better choice – not least since from Emil Goldfuchs, you can unlock normal hearts dropping from bags long before you can unlock shield hearts dropping from them. Anton Goldfuchs will always sell you one 💝 for 25 gold and three additional ones for 50 gold each. You'll only get one 💛 for 100 gold – some of that stuff has to be unlocked with Emil first aswell – I don't remember in which order and at which stage, and I'm too lazy to look it up in the game.
Well, lesson learned, I guess.

Note to the UI designers at rokaplay and Alchemist Interactive

Please don't be disheartened by our critiquing of the spells UI. I believe I speak for everyone who leaves bona fide suggestions for a game, when I say that we do it because we really enjoy the game and don't want little things like a bit clunky spells selection process holding it back.
Your love and passion oozes from Spells & Secrets (and I'm sure your other games too). It's always nice to see how small studios can create such beautiful and enjoyable games.

[Arisu]

Originally posted by ebaG-gamma:

♟ You mean it should say "check" instead? Yeah, most of the time, the king could just move out of the immediate threat. And yeah, seems quite nitpicky, but I know how it feels if someone gets a detail on something you somewhat care about wrong.

Indeed. And it's not even that I care about chess per se. But I recently had a bout of youtube chess puzzle recommendations for some reason. And the first puzzle in this game absolutely stumped me because there was no way I could checkmate. I just tried check because that's the best I could find, and it worked. Once you know, you know. But the difficulty of a puzzle shouldn't come from an incorrect premise.

Originally posted by ebaG-gamma:

I don't really see the benefit from loadouts, because of how the artifacts I pick up usually change which spells I use during a run. I'm not saying I'm against it, just that it would be waaay down my priority list of changes.

If there's a better way to select spells, indeed this would merely be a nice to have addition. Just as a way to get certain spell combos done even easier.

Originally posted by ebaG-gamma:

Note to the UI designers at rokaplay and Alchemist Interactive

Please don't be disheartened by our critiquing of the spells UI. I believe I speak for everyone who leaves bona fide suggestions for a game, when I say that we do it because we really enjoy the game and don't want little things like a bit clunky spells selection process holding it back.
Your love and passion oozes from Spells & Secrets (and I'm sure your other games too). It's always nice to see how small studios can create such beautiful and enjoyable games.

Agreed. There's already quite a lot of good customization in the controls, like the detailed targeting settings. An actual game-pad button configuration (something even Nintendo refuses to support in a lot of their games). I just know that with the current flex spell selection method, a lot of spells will become forgotten due to being too niche. Which is a shame because being niche is exactly what makes some spells fun. But it's just not something you can afford to deal with in a game like this, and it's often just better to pick a "does everything adequately" spell instead of searching for the best one.

[silver]

Originally posted by Arisu:

I'm not really sure what "talent" pursuit points are, so maybe those are worth starting off with some shield health for this purpose?

there are 10 "pursuits" that you get little ribbons for after each run - they don't really lead to anything useful, just more clothing options, but they are:
wizard - kill enemies using multiple different spells during the run
collector - collect unique artifacts during the run
explorer - solve secrets during a run
student - get experience during a run
investor - spend gold during a run
schoolmate - rescue classmates during the run
talent - complete floors without losing health
athlete - complete floors in under 15 minutes
challenger - complete floor challenges during the run
champion - get to and/or conquer the fourth(top) floor


while these only lead to clothes, they are treated as super important in the game as evidenced by their being the first thing to pop up when you finish a run, and their having a whole slot in the "smartphone" (the "pursuit tracker" button)

so, no, talent points are not "worth it" (at least to me) to start off with extra shields for, but the other thing I pointed out: that shields are unlimited and thus you can only get more of them instead of being limited to a maximum the way health is -- as far as buying upgrades at the griffin statue, you probably want to focus on health first and get shields after, but eventually you want to max both. However, since the early levels of each are so inexpensive, I staggered them out