Feedback after 100%

[DragonByDegrees]

Well, at 16 hours and true 100%, I'm done for now and feel I've played enough to give some useful feedback.

First, great game! Gameplay is simple but with depth to it, characters feel distinct, powers are impactful enough to drastically change playstyles, card design does a lot with a little (MANY different interactions with a handful of mechanics), art is charming, overall 10/10. Very impressive product, even more so given that it was made by a single dev.

Difficulty:

• The difficulty of the game is in a great place right now. Runs on Classic are fairly easy for me but not a guaranteed victory, Expert is available if I want more of a challenge, and Journey can be used to tweak settings individually.

User Interface:

• The in-game menu (Resume Game, Settings, Retry, Back to Home) needs to have a confirmation prompt when selecting Retry, because currently it does not. This means players attempting to select Back to Home and misclicking reset their run, which has the potential to cause a lot of frustration and is easily avoided by adding a confirmation like "Are you sure you want to Reset?"

Accessibility:

• Journey is already easily unlocked (3 wins, I think?), but I recommend having it unlocked from the start. Players who find the game extremely challenging might not be able to get those 3 wins to unlock Journey, which means they might give up and refund the game. Having Journey as an option from the start helps them, helps you, and also gives more options to players who want increased difficulty without having to play through an easier mode first.

• Related to the above, I think Expert might also be gated behind wins. If so, I would open this up from the start for players who do not find Classic challenging and want to skip right to Expert.

• Corrupted cards have a different frame, making them easy to identify at a glance, but the card rarity indicator for all cards is just a difference in color on a small section of the card and for particle effects. I recommend either picking colors that are easier to distinguish from one another (for users with color blindness issues), changing the background color of the card depending on rarity, making the rarity indicator a symbol that changes with rarity, or some combination of the above.

Possible Additions:

• Something when the game is cleared with all possible power selections, including those of the secret character. Nothing happened when I cleared Classic with Medusa-Awakening after clearing the game with all other character-power combinations, and I was a little disappointed.

• More uses for deactivation, possibly gated behind game clears. At the moment it is limited to 3 out of 159 cards, so players can disable only 1.88% of the possible cards. Maybe increase this by 1 the first time a player clears with all power selections for a class, which would bring the total up to 11?

• The options for run customization are nice, but I think you can do more with this. For example, if the player has every rare card in the collection, you could add options to only include rare cards in the run, or to not include any rare cards at all in the run. You could also do this for common, legendary, and corrupted. At the far end of this level of customization (and also the easiest thing to do related to this) you could simply boost the uses of deactivation up to 159 so players can choose exactly what cards they want to see, but I like the idea of filling out a collection *meaning* something. It gives players something to chase, you know?

• Another class. You already have portrait art from the Challenge mode, so that's covered. For the powers, I can think of one right now: literally all of them. Just have the power use select a random power from the existing pool, with 24 possible options. Or, counting this new class, 26. Why? Because it would be funny! I love the randomness of Medusa's Tornado, and this would be that but for powers!

• More achievements, since they come with card unlocks. Many of the number thresholds for achievements are low. For example, "You are rich!" and "What to do with all this gold?", at 100 and 200 gold. I get that they're probably low to make them easily accessible to players, but maybe some harder to reach numbers for people who have done pretty much everything else in the game? 777? 999? Possibly something that tracks how much a players spends in a game? The unlocks could be something like:

(777 saved) Lucky Ticket: "Inflicts 1-7 damage to visible enemies when you start a level." Recolored ticket art.
(999 saved) Golden Stone: "When your gold total is odd, reduces the price of purchases by x gold coins." Recolored Yellow Stone art.
(100 spent) Fool's Gold: "Enemies will not attack you if you don't have gold coins." Recolored something. Some stone? Jester's Hat?

• If not already present (I can't search cards by keyword and I'm too tired right now to go through them individually), a card that allows players to use their power for HP instead of mana.

• Infinite mode. This has already been covered in another thread you responded to.

Other

• The Progress Bar fills to 100% before 100% completion is actually reached. Not a fan of that.

• The number for Unlocked Characters and Unlocked Powers in Progress is not accurate. This is most likely intentional, but is also something I would like changed to accurately reflect how many characters and powers there actually are.

That's all I can think of for now. Again, 10/10, highly recommend.

[DragonByDegrees]

Actually, now that I think about it, Lucky Ticket should be related to gold coins. So maybe "Lucky Ticket: You gain x gold coins per visible enemy when you start a level." 7 per enemy might be a bit high given that Golden Contract gives 5 total, so maybe 2 per enemy?

[Twotinydice]

Bravo for the 100%! I didn't realize how long it would usually take. 16 hours seems reasonable.

And thanks for your feedback, it's really interesting.
I agree with most of your points!

It's a good idea to make the journey mode accessible from the beginning. I see it as a late game mode but it can also work in terms of accessibility indeed.


In fact, originally I saw Medusa as the reward for doing the 100% (that's why it's a pretty fun character that you can easily break the game with ^^). But it seemed too hard so I only activated it on all achievements. I should clearly do something for the 100%. At least a congratulatory message.

I like your item ideas, I'll write them down (I'll mention you in the game by integrating them as it's already the case on some items).

Thanks again for your feedback and for buying the game. I'm glad you liked it!
You can surely play it again in a few weeks, there will be new stuff :)

[DragonByDegrees]

No problem. I enjoyed the game a great deal, and it's nice to see a dev interacting with the community.

About an hour (maybe 90 minutes) of that was me trying to find the last card I needed, which was the Cursed Ring. Another hopefully smaller chunk of that playtime was on Black Knight, because Dragon Wing's effect kept tripping me up. It's a fun item that changes up the gameplay, but I was so used to running up the middle that I kept stepping into 3-on-1 fights! The game warns the player, both in the inventory menu and also on the arrows on the enemies themselves, but I just kept doing it and being briefly surprised until I remembered XD

If you've got a text copy of the card collection you could post here, I'd be willing to look through and come up with more stuff. There's a guide on here with a picture of the filled collection, but I can't keyword search a picture!

[kikivikikiwi]

Woaaah a soul mate who wants a character with the power to have them all at random <3

It would be great to have a sort of alter ego to the blood mage doing it for example ;)

I'm almost at a true 100% too, just unlocked the secret character, which by the way, partly cover the "random stuff I love" in a very smart and fun way .

I miss 4 cards but it took me a little more time 'cause I play exclusively Expert Mode as I find Classic Mode is way too easy (but really good to learn).

By the way I'm not a fan to gate content behind difficulty but I think it would be great to get something by completing the game in Expert Mode with all characters/powers as it is truly an other game.

Also, preventing swords to appear in shops would be a great thing as they are useless there (even replace it with shields when you have the item that replace health potion by swords but I dunno if its is easy or not to do).

Maybe just something purely cosmetic.

As DragonByDegrees says, the difficulty is in a great spot right now, so is the time a run take (about 10-15 min which is perfect).

I hope to see an Android version one day, you can be sure I'll buy it.

Thank you for that gem !!