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Can you make first 1-2 floors easier?
Also, why there's no cinematics in the game? That's the main reason I decided to download demo, but there's only gameplay. Gameplay is interesting but it is to difficult for me.
Overall, I'm enjoying the game and am looking forward to playing more.
What I like:
- A cardgame with a game board, reminds me slightly of duelyst, love it!
- The gameplay itself feels polished even through this is a demo, well done!
- The presentation (audio, graphics) is really good.
- The mashups between genre's works much better than I thought.
- It was nice to still discover new things after 5 runs in the demo
- The game is challenging, which I really like (with exceptions, see below)
Areas of improvement:
1. I lack too much control over my deck, making it too random whenever I win or lose and thus it feels "unfair".
2. The current sidedeck system (select a single card) is too barebones to grant meaningful impact on deck customization and/or control.
3. The boss that gains shield when you do can only reliably be defeated with a stimulant that breaks his armor or by having a very good run, which is not fun most of the times.
4. Not enough options to recover from mistakes, HP restore is almost unavailable if you don't pick the heal card.
5. I saw little use in buying patches, as cards provide me with a much better chance at surviving a run.
6. Doing multiple runs doesn't feel rewarding because I don't see a visual cue of something increasing or that I am progressing towards something.
7. Interactions with effects (weak, fragile, etc) is not always clear, especially not for beginners.
Point 3-4 are caused by point 1-2.
Ideas for improvement:
- Change the sidedeck system to deck-specific sidedeck cards you can unlock, which you can swap in/out before starting the run (think mtg/yugioh sidedecks).
- Add a currency that stays between runs.
- Add a shop in the main menu where the player can unlock sidedeck cards, new cards that can appear in a run and other things. The new currency could be used for this.
- Add a card enyclopedia, where cards/stimulants/patches you played / unlocked show up.
Fun ideas (would love to see these, might be more work to implement):
- An optional scenario puzzle ("win this turn") mode, it's a good way to teach mechanics of a game indirectly and gain some experience how to deal with scenarios you encounter in a run.
- An optional practice mode where you can run with a fixed deck that you can throw together from unlocked cards of any deck. That way you can try new (stupidly fun) combo's without the risk of killing a good run for it. Achievements and progression is locked so you still gotta do normal runs to unlock new things.
There are plenty of more ideas, but I'll keep it at this for now. Stellar work devs! Keep it up, my mate and I are looking forward to purchasing the game on release.
Senko-san especially thanks for the in-depth review and suggestions.
We will discuss all of your points internally.
I really enjoyed playing, but this is the most glaring aspect I noticed. I don't know if it's because the game starts on floor 2 and the first floor is planned to be an expanded tutorial? If not, that would be my recommendation so there's a little less guesswork required from players.
Thank you for the feedback.
Many people find it to complicated.
One thing that players seem to currently miss, is that they can click on the enemy and read about their effects, other than that they show 3 different attack types above their heads (melee, shooting in line, or magic which doesn't need to be in line)
This isn't currently explained well and will be definitely improved.
Working on improving the clarity of enemies and their effects is our highest priority.
I found the difficulty related to certain AI buffs/debuffs to be the main problem and issue I had with the game. I am not the best gamer in the world but it really does feel like the power of certain mechanics like the ramp-up of various effects (sword elite enemy with his shield mirroring and retaliation effects/brains buffing eachother exponentially) are really intensely powerful to the point where I only died in instances where those things ramped up to insane levels. I was trying to be as efficient and thoughtful as possible with kill orders and abilities/card synergies but it just seemed like odds were stacked against me. Otherwise the game felt balanced enough.
I thought the decks had clear goals and synergies, and for the most part I was able to build strong decks that worked well, and the permanent effects and special abilities are good. You're forced to think about what to upgrade, and when to spend energy. I didn't find any of the 3 decks to be overly weak, although if you go for the burn deck you end up having to use so much shield and heals you can fall behind on actual damage-dealing.
The visuals are adequate. The UI/UX could use some sprucing up - some things like the dialogue prompts and windows and things like that just seem kind of rudimentary or simplistic looking but it has no impact on the gameplay so I can give it a pass.
The music is GREAT. By far this is the biggest pro and elevates the entire game higher than if it had a standard run of the mill ost. This is a game I might actually end up buying the soundtrack for. Nice job.
All in all not a bad demo, just very punishing at times with some of the power creep from certain effects.
Looking to see more from this one.
Thank you! We have just pushed a small update (v0.12.1) with some UI improvements, balancing tweaks, making the elites a bit more forgiving as well as lowering the health of some enemies during normal encounters. I hope that helps a bit!
We will try and do a much better job in the full game and introduce battle mechanics better.
I think the UI could be a bit clearer, especially with respect to what the enemies can do. Often times, I was confused when an enemy followed me after movement or turned in my direction; it wasn't clear unless I actively checked the enemy's abilities to the far right of the screen.
The way shields decay wasn't very clear either, I wasn't sure whether they persisted or needed to be refreshed at the start of every turn. And the effects of Encore weren't always obvious, the card number would go up but there wasn't really any sort of UI effect to highlight that change.
In my opinion, this game could be a winner in the future. It definitely has something unique to separate it from the endless deck building clones constantly being released. Just clean up the UI, add some more quality of life stuff in terms of card effects and enemy actions, optimize it and you're on to something great.
As for players complaining that it's a card game? Learn to read and do your research, it's rather obvious on the store page. And I disagree 100% that these genres are incompatible, as shown in this demo they can work very well together.
I think the overall difficulty level is fine. StS is also difficult when you start, but in StS it is extremely clear what each enemy is going to do and why.
I also don't mind the lack of persistent upgrades across runs. It means the player has to improve their skills, instead of having the game give them an easier time. This does lock out players who can't improve, which sucks, but it also makes it more satisfying when you do win.
- The end boss was fun! Not gonna spoil it, but the gimmick was surprising and nice. It has a nice counter against the Jab deck, I think the burn deck might be hard against it.
- Paid more attention to events this time around. The story-related ones are good, I would love to explore all options in future runs.
- The game felt more forgiving and the starting heal card feels optional, which is good. I no longer feel that a single screw-up could end my run.
Areas of improvement:
- I really liked the ability to remove multiple cards in the shop and missed it this update (it was possible in the initial build, was this a bug?). It can be a nice tradeoff; will I go for more resources or a tighter deck to get the better cards more often at the expense for a lot of money?
- The old attack-shield boss got nerfed too hard, it was a very easy fight. I think it's fine for him to gain shields when you do, maybe lower shield gain from 5 to 1 or 2? This way he can never gain more shield than you do, but still makes him challenging.
- My macbook pro mid 2012 gets really warm within 30 minutes of playing. Being able to cap framerate manually would help.
Regarding demo completion:
I don't feel a need to go back to play it unlike games such as risk of rain 2 (RoR2) or loop hero (LH). I feel like I've mechanically seen everything possible without doing many many runs in the hopes of getting the cards to pull off a combos I have in mind.
Ideas for improvement:
I think what RoR2 did (artifact system, aka run modifiers) would work really well for this game. That way you can leave the game as-is without rebalance, but increase replayability by customization of difficulty and consistency by the player. Ideas for modifiers:
- prepared: build a deck of 30 cards from all starter cards combined from that character (the cards from burn, fragile, jab deck for l33) before you start the run
- guarded: enemies gain 3 shield each time you move
- rigged: you gain 1 burn/fragile/weak for each card you play
- autorepair: enemies heal 3 hp each enemy turn
- bounty: you gain an additional 5$ for each enemy you kill
- lieutenant: there is 1 more elite encounter this run
- high alert: you need to kill twice the amount of non-elite enemies to clear combat
- broad skillset: you can only have 1 copy of each card in your deck
- observant: there is 1 more event this run
- negociator: lower prices of the shop by 25%
- skilled: each time you can select a card, select from all unlocked cards in the game
Regarding game files:
I see that IL2CPP is being used for the game. I don't see the burst compiler or entity framework being used in the scripting assemblies, so I really wonder what the benefit is. Unless the game is trashing GC I doubt there is any noticeable performance improvement from using IL2CPP.
I would love to see mono being used instead (for pc target only if you're planning on releasing the game on other platforms), as this would make it much easier to make mods for this game (using bepinex for example). The game doesn't have to be developed with modding in mind, but by just using the mono target (literally a click of a button) it would make it much easier to mod the game.
If this was done for game analytics, then you can opt for moving the code into in a native dll and a wrapper class for your native dll in your game. That would also help to protect against the likes of IL2CPPDumper s well.
Regarding linux:
I've been running the game on linux, and it runs without a hitch! If controller support is available / would be added, I would be curious if it could run on the steam deck.
System specs:
- Intel i5-3210M
- Intel HD Graphics 3000 (1280x800)
- Kingston Hyperx 16 GB DDR3 1600MHz
- Intel 480GB SSD
- Ubuntu 22.04, Gnome 42.1 (upgraded from Ubuntu 20.04 mini iso, minimal server)
- Proton 7.0.2