Had fun, but waaaay too much is left to chance.

[sevey13]

Enjoyed this game. Give yourself a pat on the back, dev. It's hard to make something, and even harder to make something enjoyable, and you've done both.

But there are definitely issues that need to get ironed out before the game's ready for prime time.

Take a run I just finished, for example:

- Every single military card I had the option of adding to my deck the entire run generated archers. Never once did I have the opportunity to buy a card that made swordspeople or axepeople. Not even when, in desperation, I hit "trade a random card" from my deck at a trading post. It took away an archer-generating card and gave me...a different archer generating card. I've played plenty of roguelikes and understand randomness is part of it, and sometimes RNGesus is mean to you, but this just felt like punishment. The game's randomness served me a literally impossible challenge. There was no way I could win with only archers. Some tweaking to however card options are generated would fix this.

I ran into some other problems.

- It wasn't always clear where a piece would fit. In Tetris, you can sometimes massage a piece around other pieces to get into a position. In this game, sometimes you could and sometimes you couldn't, and there wasn't an obvious rhyme or reason to what worked and what didn't. As a result, I screwed myself over a couple of times trying to get a piece to fit, only to find it had snapped into place in an greatly sub-optimal position.

- Admittedly, this is a player issue, but I accidentally hit "drop now" at least a dozen times, which really screwed up my boards. Since there are a like eight or nine different controls you have to remember, and they're all keyboard mapped and not controller or mouse mapped, it was easy to hit the wrong thing when I was trying to figure out 'wait, does this button rotate it?' It got to the point that I mapped the drop away from space since that's such a big, tempting key. But maybe an option (that could be toggled so if people don't want it, they don't need to have it) that requires a double tap of the drop instantly could fix this? Or some other solution?

- The flow of battle confused me. I kept forgetting what order I should go to make the units convert from one to the other. Does moving into a camp change the units moving in? Or the units already there? The tutorial showed me, but after that there was no reminder or tooltip that I could find, and since there's a lot going on in between battles I would just flatout forget. Also, nowhere in the tutorial (that I saw) was it shown that you could get the enemy to come attack you if you wanted. How does that change the flow of battle? It's an interesting system you have in place, so I wouldn't want too much tinkering, just some ironing out of the details.

Been keeping my eye on this game for a while now, excited to see what happens next.

[Sleepy Mill Studio]

Hello! Thanks for your feedbacks, glad you enjoyed the game :)

I agree that randomness can screw you over a little bit, and at first when there are very few unlocked cards, it can feel unfair. Did you try selecting « military buildings » in the Guild? I’ll look into the algorithm and improve it, right now it avoids giving too many duplicates for instance.

About the controls, what do you mean « not controller mapped »? There is gamepad support in the game if that’s what you seek.

Fair points for the battle system, I’ll make sure to improve the tutorial for the release. My intention was to just show the basics with the tutorial and leave it to players to discover the nuance, but that might be too obscure. The rule in case of merge is that you keep the type of the largest group, and if both groups are the same size, you keep the type of the destination group.

[gigabyte]

Originally posted by sevey13:

Also, nowhere in the tutorial (that I saw) was it shown that you could get the enemy to come attack you if you wanted.

Could you be more specific about this because I don't understand it too much.

[Daremo]

What do you mean by "when there are very few cards unlocked" ?
Are there unlockables in the demo ?
Or is just a side sentence for the final game which will have cards to unlock ?

[Sleepy Mill Studio]

Originally posted by Daremo:

What do you mean by "when there are very few cards unlocked" ?
Are there unlockables in the demo ?
Or is just a side sentence for the final game which will have cards to unlock ?

Both! So the way the demo works, you can’t encounter some cards in your first few runs (most notably the river) so you’re not overwhelmed with everything right away. Still, the demo has only 21 cards in total, when the final game will have 110. Not all are unlocked by default, but that’s still more variety!

[sevey13]

Originally posted by gigabyte:

Originally posted by sevey13:

Also, nowhere in the tutorial (that I saw) was it shown that you could get the enemy to come attack you if you wanted.

Could you be more specific about this because I don't understand it too much.

When doing a battle, you can move any unit to any other unit. So if you wanted to, for example, start by clicking on an enemy archer unit and move it to your sword unit, you could.

[sevey13]

Originally posted by Sleepy Mill Studio:

I agree that randomness can screw you over a little bit, and at first when there are very few unlocked cards, it can feel unfair. Did you try selecting « military buildings » in the Guild? I’ll look into the algorithm and improve it, right now it avoids giving too many duplicates for instance.

Yes, every opportunity I had to try and add military cards to my deck, I took. All of them ended up being archers.

[Mountain Man]

Speaking of bad luck, I had one battle round where I got zero military buildings and lost literally without a fight.

[daredevilrules666]

I really like the idea of double tapping the drop key to lock a piece especially if the first tap just brought it to the bottom and the second locked it in giving us a "soft drop"

[derw4tz]

yeah i feel like you need to have either more than two options to go to or first choose the event type and then have multiple options regarding terrain

[Kuriboh43]

Originally posted by Mountain Man:

Speaking of bad luck, I had one battle round where I got zero military buildings and lost literally without a fight.

Shouldn't this be literally impossible because you start with a watchtower?

[Dead Tired Poss]

Originally posted by Kuriboh43:

Originally posted by Mountain Man:

Speaking of bad luck, I had one battle round where I got zero military buildings and lost literally without a fight.

Shouldn't this be literally impossible because you start with a watchtower?

could have lost it in a random trade since you lose a random card for another, which would be hilariously unfortunate.

[Jathrek]

RNG is indeed an issue. but the combat system can lead to more depth than you might expect. I did beat the boss with almost only archers. By combining his swordsmen with his more numerous axers it made a large axe army that was easier to fight with the archers I had.

The order you get pieces in was what got me the most. starting off with farms/watch towers without any other pieces to place can severely reduce their effectiveness. I still enjoyed the demo but it lacks variety in the demo, the finished game should fix this.

[Askyndr]

let's be honest, in the end you'll never have enough resources to prepare for each strategy/terrain. so it would be nice (even though maybe "unrealistic") if you somehow could influence the terrain (which is in my opinion the biggest factor) of fights, so if you have mainly focused on wood-military and buildings you can "terraform" battles ahead in your favor (for a price). with such speciific decks would make sense, and the chance factor a bit decreased.

[Sleepy Mill Studio]

Originally posted by Askyndr:

let's be honest, in the end you'll never have enough resources to prepare for each strategy/terrain. so it would be nice (even though maybe "unrealistic") if you somehow could influence the terrain (which is in my opinion the biggest factor) of fights, so if you have mainly focused on wood-military and buildings you can "terraform" battles ahead in your favor (for a price). with such speciific decks would make sense, and the chance factor a bit decreased.

You can decide after each act which terrain you want to specialize in! Don't think I've announced this anywhere, but you guessed it correctly. During a given act, you need to plan ahead by checking the terrain types that are the most frequent on your way to the boss. Bosses themselves have equal distribution of terrains, so the challenge remains that you place the correct terrains where you need them to optimize

[Askyndr]

Originally posted by Sleepy Mill Studio:

Originally posted by Askyndr:

let's be honest, in the end you'll never have enough resources to prepare for each strategy/terrain. so it would be nice (even though maybe "unrealistic") if you somehow could influence the terrain (which is in my opinion the biggest factor) of fights, so if you have mainly focused on wood-military and buildings you can "terraform" battles ahead in your favor (for a price). with such speciific decks would make sense, and the chance factor a bit decreased.

You can decide after each act which terrain you want to specialize in! Don't think I've announced this anywhere, but you guessed it correctly. During a given act, you need to plan ahead by checking the terrain types that are the most frequent on your way to the boss. Bosses themselves have equal distribution of terrains, so the challenge remains that you place the correct terrains where you need them to optimize

ah i see, thanks for the clarification. with the limited possibilities of the demo this was not clear to me, and i thought it might get a potential problem. glad to hear it, and i wish you all the best for the future of this interesting game.