Have you thought about creating a list which I can view that stores the group of winning companions after every time I beat the dragon? The artwork is wonderful and I would also like to see how I won later.
every upon death effect is not working when i used a follower that gained damage and hp(dowloaded version) and i losed cuz it gained nothing and i losed
Is that only for that one run or every run? Either way that's really weird. If it's for every run, then the game should create a log at Users/username/AppData/LocalLow/DefaultCompany/HolderOfPlace. It will be super helpful if you can send me your log right after a death effect failed to trigger! (e.g. just start a new run, buy a supplicant and make it die in combat)
You can just post it here or email me at zittacheng@gmail.com
I think either it's something I'm completely not aware of or it has something to do with your language setting messing up with parsing numbers (e.g. your language use comma for decimals). I think I had solved it in earlier builds but maybe the newer codes messed it up again. If that's the case, the web version shouldn't have the same problem. I'll double check all my parsing code later.
as for what's YOU, uh...future narrative content will help with that
I'll have to double check but there's a chance that prospector's trait doesn't interact with familiar at all, nor does familiar interact with other familiars. This is for the most part a technical constraint, and I haven't decided on what to do with it yet
We'll probably start working on factions only after reliquary, but current plan for second faction is to have a hero card and make everything else revolve around the hero. Third faction is followers with magnetic tag from hearthstone.
2nd thing i've noticed, is that normal units have their cost shown in the top right, but support units don't. Idk if its intentional, but it just feels inconsistent.
I don't write comments very often, but I just wanna say that I love the game. Love the pace, the art and concept of dark fantasy with sci-fi is amazing. I have great hopes for this project, hope you are well, sleep well, best regards and good bye.
1 thing i've noticed through-out all my runs, is that it always seems to be that on the 1st Hunt, you either you have no trouble beating the boss, or you'd lose even if you chose to skip. So i find it rare to get a build with the power to lose to the boss, but still beat the enemies if you skip, and since theres no extra risk to the boss fight other than the difficulty, then i see no reason to skip it.
Absolutely love this game started with the demo now here perfect please be sure to update often and if possible please make sure all features are available in the itch version a lot of games usually fall short there
if you're targeting Steam, pls make this cross-platform. I will wishlist and buy it as soon as available, on Mac. And pls, build it for M-arch. 32bit is being deprecated everywhere, nowadays.
Just pure Peak, absolutely love the atmosphere and game feel, endless mode is a no-brainer, only complaint is that i wish there was a way to speed up combat. Im very exited for everything thats currently in development
Both Lightkeeper (far left) and the sanctuary (far right) duplicate and the seeker (middle left) attacks twice.For Zitta: I love how this has improved since the prototype which I honestly thought was all we were going to get. I like how the resource management has changed with the side areas and shop limitations as well as bosses being optional except the dragon of course.
Looking forward to seeing what else you do with this game, you clearly know what you want from it.
i had 4 dancers, 1 with swarming, 3 with charging in that order. on the first attack, all 4 will light up with animation to show ability trigger.
afterwards the animation of the next 2 dancers will skip the last dancer.
just to add on, chaser is meant to drain 2 attack on all newly recruited followers.
i see it does that to followers with less than 2 attack. and brings their attack to 0.
i do not see that working on support followers.
chaser can drain gladiator for 2 dmg but gladiator passive will fill it back to full hp. unintended synergy.
adaptive chaser drains 2 from new recruits but gains 4.
Pretty amazing! I basically became immortal after the 30-ish depth. Didn't really upgrade for anything after the thirties. The familiar is unstoppable with a team focused on buffs.
Love it! Got lucky with the following combo on first attempt and became unstoppable once it happened. 2 * 2x stat gains on the axeman and 2x attack on the mechanical dragon. (Forgot their actual names, cards are not clickable on winning screen)
pretty fun! a suggestion would be for there to be a "number of followers you currently have" thing under the "number of troops you can potentially have"
really fun but I did not have a big enough screen so after beating the dark knight or whatever I could not start the battle buuut realy fun would recommend
Fun game with good replayability. It also looks and feels really polished, congratulations on making a great game.
Thoughts/suggestions/opinions after playing a solid 20+ runs:
-Re-roll feature at recruitment camps
-Ability to scroll back through combat log
-Damage meter
-Events could have a 3rd choice where you pay faith for something better. e.g (gain 1 attack, Gain 2 health, or pay 3 faith to gain both)
-Sometimes you can fall into a "lose more" spiral where if you lose poorly once then you don't get enough faith and you continue to get weaker and weaker relatively speaking. Maybe if you lose you should get to replay the same depth instead of moving past it so you don't miss out on faith.
-It would be fun to be able to buy more than 1 thing per turn though maybe breaks the balance/core gameplay
-Having an Obelisk either side of a follower doesn't trigger their ability a 3rd time. Not sure if intended but it's not clear from the description
-If its a draw (e.g against fireworks boss) it feels like you should still lose core health
-An aspect or support follower that boosts combat traits would be cool. (e.g "double the power of combat traits")
-"Give random follower X" as a powerup rarely feels like a good choice as you often have disposable followers. Being able to choose might be nice.
-The "revive all followers with 1 health" support seems to end the opponents turn even if they all haven't finished attacking. Makes it even more OP than intended haha.
-After beating a boss the faith option seems underwhelming compared to extra capacity.
-Chaser seems to drain all attack from new recruits, even after hotfix.
-Familiar doesn't trigger off Duelist. Not sure if intended but could be fun if they interacted.
-Familiar doesn't trigger off Reaper. (maybe because permanent gain?)
-Stacking Sculptors, +2/+2 for summons with the fractured aspect seems to be the most OP combo I found. Pretty easy to get 15+ 8/10 statues.
-Familiar can also be pretty OP. On my first try I got him to 74/52 against the dragon.
-Some of the phrasing on the aspects isn't clear, specifically the "gain double the amount of stats" vs "double base stats" distinction isn't obvious at first.
I've always loved this game. This feels very different than the former version. Smart of you to lower the Initiate Faith gain from 2 to 1 and kept the Supplicant the same.
Some critiques because I LOVE this game and want to see you make a ton of money on Steam. I really don't like the 'support' followers that aren't even a wall like in the old game.
Big idea: REGAINING CONTROL AS THE PLAYER
1. Allow players to choose between recruiting attributes/upgrades or followers...
1.5 Or at least add the ability to reroll followers given a Faith cost (similar LOL's TFT or Dota 2's Underworld). You could also have similar followers combine.
2. Limit the amount of Faith like in the first game. Now the more Faith, the better the options even if you have 20 Faith in the first 4 rounds.
3. Showing followers out of your Faith range... that was the case in the first version but now you are limited to what you can buy which PREVENTS long term planning using the lock mechanism. (Maybe limit to 1 out of range per showing).
4. Be able to speed up the game (skip the first battle as well).
Big idea: ARCHITYPES
I miss the architypes of the original game. Generally, you would get some low level followers and hope to get the higher ups that made the architype. The architypes in order of power were:
a. "Upon Death" - Stacking Conscripts, Supplicants, Ghost, Flagbearer and others, would combo into the the "Upon Death" Hellhound for easy wins. Put the Incarnator in front of the Hellhound for some stupid stats. Combine with Speaker to spread the love. (SEE BELOW)
b. "PUMP UP / Cleric Stacking" - The +1/+1 from the Cleric was so much stronger in the old version as it was for EVERY NEW FOLLOWER (but only once each turn, not that that mattered). Whole teams were made of 4 Clerics giving followers a +4/+4 boost. Worked really well with Conscripts. Mix with Alchemist for potions to dump on Conscripts. Or use Sanctuary. (SEE BELOW)
c. "Double Attack" - Pump your Turret with Archivist/Alchemist and then put it behind a Incarnator. (SEE BELOW)
d. "Faith Based" - Nerfed correctly (but not in this upgraded version) by working only if all followers were unique. Since Faith is buying power, it needs to be nerfed in order to create balance. Still, it was a very hard architype to pull off as you needed the follower that gains faith per attack (Seeker) and the follower that attacks again each time faith is gained. (Never got Crusader to be good enough)
e. "Defense" - Try to make the Templar, Herald, etc (+1 attack damage per attack) to work by having high levels of defense. Not easy in the slightest since the final boss attacked 3 times. This is much easier in this version of the game.
You have added some new architypes that I really enjoy. I'd love to make a broken "random" damage team. But it seems so random what followers I receive and I really don't have any control over it. And I love that you have made "Medic" actually viable. Medic was terrible before. It allows for a weanie win team comp like seem below.
Thanks for the feedback! Glad you love the game and like, these are all really valid feedback and I really appreciate it! I want to follow up on several points you raised: not to say a certain piece of feedback is good or bad (they're all good!), just to provide some context as to how we made some of the decisions for the new version.
A lot of your feedback is somewhat tied to the faith/core health rework, which is probably the most impactful change we made. In the old game, faith is intended as a checklist mechanic: the player will have different faith caps at different points of the run, and are expected to more or less cap their faith; although they can achieve that through different means, and maybe increase their faith demands with certain cards like apprentice, but the game is designed around the player having a specific amount of faith income each round.
But this created a lot of problems when we tried to expand the game and add more cards. If we balance the game around a faith cap, then it means that the player should always have ways to reach their current faith cap, which will force us to design the faith generation cards and non-faith cards separately, and always keep them at a consistent ratio (which is exactly how we designed the cards in the old version). While it's easy to design a bunch of unique non-faith cards (with mechanics like random damage or summon), the design space is very limited for faith generation cards. I suppose we COULD have gone the route of having temporary/permanent faith, having followers interact with faith cap, or using other means to make faith more complicated, eventually, the decision is to make faith, or at least those generated by followers, to have the same weighting as other mechanics.
So the idea of the new faith system is that recruiting faith generation followers should be a strategic choice rather than a necessity and that the player should be able to beat the game without any faith generation from followers. We tried to achieve this with enemy faith drop being more substantial and random event options. Ideally, there should be builds where the player will buy high-value cheap cards with enemy faith drop and afford expansive core cards through skipping and faith injection from random events; or, to recruit tons of faith generation followers, BARELY winning every fight due to recruiting another supplicant instead of a templar, and get to big tech cards while still in early game (we'll still need to analyze the playtest data from the past few days to see how viable these playstyles are). We want to get to a place where we can design faith generation cards just like any other type of card, and don't need to worry too much about having an imbalanced number of faith and non-faith cards.
Only showing affordable cards is a byproduct of the rework. If I remember correctly, in the old version the game would occasionally show one card that costs more than current faith but less than faith cap. The assumption in the old version is that the player will be able to afford that card next round if they try. At some point, this feature existed in the new version as well, but I removed it because it constantly made me feel pressured to have a positive faith income, which is not the goal. But this 100% makes locking and planning build worse. I'll probably need to try a lot more things before I can decide how to solve all this. Maybe like occasionally having a recruit event that only shows high-cost cards or something.
Refresh is another thing we struggled with. Having refresh as a basic mechanic works best if the player knows what exactly is in the pool. But we really don't want to pressure the player to memorize every card, or even to constantly check a menu listing all the cards. This is one of the design goals for this project: to create a card game that is more fast-paced and free-form than, say, a deckbuilder. The current plan for refresh is to make it like Hades 1, where you can use tokens to refresh. For example, maybe a follower with "When recruited, gain +3 refresh tokens", so it's less of a basic mechanic and more of a situational/preference thing.
Tbh permanent buff and support follower is more or less the same as faith rework, where we are trying to make something not a necessity. Permanent buff followers definitely still need a lot of tuning -- it seems like they are still somewhat necessary for perfect runs. For support followers, the idea is that we want the player to keep getting more capacity throughout the run, but also want to make follower count part of the build, so that aoe effects like flagbearer can have variable value in different builds. We end up with summons and support followers, which is essentially trading 1 capacity for passive effects. This idea will definitely be further explored when we get to factions, where we plan to create archetypes with maybe just one or two active followers.
Generated around 15 faith per round by itself lol. Fourth card from the left (forgot its name) had the duplication effect. Somehow managed to kill the dragon without losing any core healths by having the three cards on the right all have double stats.
Funny moment when the firework master killed my last follower upon his death
Very op run where the 4/6 had aspiring so it would gain the attack of the 20/20. Then the 13/15, which had double attack, would kill the buffed 4/6 and gain all its stats. Dragon was absolutely shredded.
this is a really cool upgrade to the first version of the game, can't wait to see how it progresses! (also, have you considered making a discord for the game?
Glad you enjoy it! We decided against having a community discord because managing that will likely be a lot of extra stress :( Maybe when the game is in a more complete state!
This is an amazing. I've played the previous version extensively and can say this improves on all the aspects of the original. Can't wait to see the new updates you have planned. I'll make another post with some feedback soon. Great job!
a great game, there is a glitch worth noting though: when taking a totem and assigning it to someone who already has it, the game will take your faith and let you do it like it was valid, but it doesn't stack
If you are talking about aspect, then yes: they won't stack but the new aspect will replace the older one! We received a lot of complaints on this so will definitely add a more explicit/noticeable warning on a later update!
prevent it *unless you have an archivist*, then. as a new player I made the mistake of taking a totem one of my hunters already had and putting on them, thinking it would stack, and lost a good chunk of faith without realizing I'd made a mistake until the next fight.
Valid suggestion! If a big warning sign is implemented and it still can't sufficiently inform players aspect can't stack, then maybe we should just disable applying duplicated aspect. But doing that will certainly make the game less intuitive and make some effects weird (like archivists, or "the next aspect will have double the effect" -- this one not in the game yet). But hopefully a big warning sign can solve everything!
really nice game, good balance. the fact u can fight the boss again after losing once is a really nice touch. managed to try different builds.
the art colour schema that hints to the unit’s effects is great.
Gorgeous rework, well done!! Love the way bosses make you think. I wish certain modifiers (attack 2x, +1/1 per round) weren't *so* strong they warped the game around themselves, but that's what you get at the top of the curve, I guess? Looking forward to seeing what new challenges you come up with :)
The support that gives summons +2/+2 (in description) only gives +1/+1
A surrender option would be useful in certain scenarios. I got into a weird setup with the witch where I kept on getting hp but I couldn't do any damage to her so it was locked in a near stalemate.
Amazing. Loved the original version and will play the heck out of this one.
Might be worth making the warning a bit more explicit when you try to replace a trait? I lost my first run because I accidentally overwrote a trait with a new one. It's a learning experience, I guess.
Omg I'm so happy but I just accidentally ended a run at depth 45 cause I didn't know escape would immediately close the game :'( please add a confirm screen before quitting with escape key
Love the new look and the longer gameplay / mechanics! The modifiers seem super OP they're very fun. I'm sure I'll be playing this a lot in the near future, thanks for the continued effort!
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Have you thought about creating a list which I can view that stores the group of winning companions after every time I beat the dragon? The artwork is wonderful and I would also like to see how I won later.
Wonderful mechanism and game by the way. Love it.
every upon death effect is not working when i used a follower that gained damage and hp(dowloaded version) and i losed cuz it gained nothing and i losed
:(
Which follower's death effect is not working?
actually everything related to death effect isnt working
Is that only for that one run or every run? Either way that's really weird. If it's for every run, then the game should create a log at Users/username/AppData/LocalLow/DefaultCompany/HolderOfPlace. It will be super helpful if you can send me your log right after a death effect failed to trigger! (e.g. just start a new run, buy a supplicant and make it die in combat)
You can just post it here or email me at zittacheng@gmail.com
right now i tried dowloading again and i did get a a follower that gives damage to all units on DEATH but it gave none
(just a silly question what represents "YOU" in the game some kind of bishop?)
i tried on another computer and the problem persist (now on the web version)
I think either it's something I'm completely not aware of or it has something to do with your language setting messing up with parsing numbers (e.g. your language use comma for decimals). I think I had solved it in earlier builds but maybe the newer codes messed it up again. If that's the case, the web version shouldn't have the same problem. I'll double check all my parsing code later.
as for what's YOU, uh...future narrative content will help with that
do you pretend to put this game into steam??
Eventually yes
This unit didn't copy familar's nor templor's stats
when the flag guy dided 5 other followers +1 attcak, prosoector didn't copy.
when familar copied highest attack, prosoector didn't copy.
when templor increase increase attack form attacking, prosoector didn't copy
I'll have to double check but there's a chance that prospector's trait doesn't interact with familiar at all, nor does familiar interact with other familiars. This is for the most part a technical constraint, and I haven't decided on what to do with it yet
Love the game, it's so much fun! Keep up the hard work!
I do have one question. What will the other factions look like?
We'll probably start working on factions only after reliquary, but current plan for second faction is to have a hero card and make everything else revolve around the hero. Third faction is followers with magnetic tag from hearthstone.
looking forward to it, keep up the hard work! One last question, what is the reliquary?
Check the devlog!
2nd thing i've noticed, is that normal units have their cost shown in the top right, but support units don't. Idk if its intentional, but it just feels inconsistent.
Support:
Normal:
Yep! That's a bug
I don't write comments very often, but I just wanna say that I love the game. Love the pace, the art and concept of dark fantasy with sci-fi is amazing. I have great hopes for this project, hope you are well, sleep well, best regards and good bye.
1 thing i've noticed through-out all my runs, is that it always seems to be that on the 1st Hunt, you either you have no trouble beating the boss, or you'd lose even if you chose to skip. So i find it rare to get a build with the power to lose to the boss, but still beat the enemies if you skip, and since theres no extra risk to the boss fight other than the difficulty, then i see no reason to skip it.
So making the boss take like 2 lives, or making the enemy encounter easier/non-existent when skipped, or anything like that would be great.
yeah you have to kill the level 13 boss, lossing 1 life is nothing but losing the +1 capacity early is huge.
Noted! tbh I have never received feedback on skipped first hunt before. Will definitely look into it.
Absolutely love this game started with the demo now here perfect please be sure to update often and if possible please make sure all features are available in the itch version a lot of games usually fall short there
Also if you could code an endless mode as the next update you would be an absolute legend. I absolutely love seeing how far I can ramp just for fun
I've been playing this for a couple of hours everyday, for the last 2 weeks, now. This was my strongest end-game boss-fight roster yet:
Nice! tbh I was expecting to see some sculptor shenanigans, but I guess incubating does make more sense
if you're targeting Steam, pls make this cross-platform. I will wishlist and buy it as soon as available, on Mac. And pls, build it for M-arch. 32bit is being deprecated everywhere, nowadays.
you mean something like this? 27 (6,8)
LOVE THIS GAME. first time I've ever replayed a game this much and didn't feel tired after like 5 replays =D
Just pure Peak, absolutely love the atmosphere and game feel, endless mode is a no-brainer, only complaint is that i wish there was a way to speed up combat. Im very exited for everything thats currently in development
Both Lightkeeper (far left) and the sanctuary (far right) duplicate and the seeker (middle left) attacks twice.
For Zitta: I love how this has improved since the prototype which I honestly thought was all we were going to get. I like how the resource management has changed with the side areas and shop limitations as well as bosses being optional except the dragon of course.
Looking forward to seeing what else you do with this game, you clearly know what you want from it.
This was a fun one.
Great game would love to see more and a Endless mode!!!
I'd love an endless mode.
if you every wonder what 100+ attack looks like
Here is how it happened
quadrupling of stats is bonkers. imagine fractured prospector with that support ability.
visual bug:
i had 4 dancers, 1 with swarming, 3 with charging in that order. on the first attack, all 4 will light up with animation to show ability trigger. afterwards the animation of the next 2 dancers will skip the last dancer.
That's really weird, and other than the visuals, did all those dancers function as expected?
yes. “charging dancer” will pass two attacks to the next available unit. stacking “dancers” works too.
just to add on, chaser is meant to drain 2 attack on all newly recruited followers. i see it does that to followers with less than 2 attack. and brings their attack to 0. i do not see that working on support followers. chaser can drain gladiator for 2 dmg but gladiator passive will fill it back to full hp. unintended synergy. adaptive chaser drains 2 from new recruits but gains 4.
Yes! These are all intended behavior for chaser!
Pretty amazing! I basically became immortal after the 30-ish depth. Didn't really upgrade for anything after the thirties. The familiar is unstoppable with a team focused on buffs.
8 follower capacity 5/5 Core Health
Non-combat traits:
- N/A Hound
- Vanguard Supplicant
- N/A Winemaker
- Growing Winemaker Stranger
- N/A Medic
- Leading Prospector
- Mirroring Familiar
- Vampiric Templar
Love it! Got lucky with the following combo on first attempt and became unstoppable once it happened. 2 * 2x stat gains on the axeman and 2x attack on the mechanical dragon. (Forgot their actual names, cards are not clickable on winning screen)
and my best run after 2+ hrs on this! Familiar does trigger on permanent gain, absolutely OP.
and I have no idea why the "cloned" hound has 50 attack. I'd think 28 + 2 + 2 (double gains) = 32.
Can't wait to see some page listing all cards so that we can come up with more OP/fun combos.
The base stats of hound are 1/2, I think the game gives it that and the aspect, then "gains" the remaining stats.
pretty fun! a suggestion would be for there to be a "number of followers you currently have" thing under the "number of troops you can potentially have"
really fun but I did not have a big enough screen so after beating the dark knight or whatever I could not start the battle buuut realy fun would recommend
awww... sorry to hear it. The windows build should always run with native resolution, so maybe that'll work if you are using windows!
Fun game with good replayability. It also looks and feels really polished, congratulations on making a great game.
Thoughts/suggestions/opinions after playing a solid 20+ runs:
-Re-roll feature at recruitment camps
-Ability to scroll back through combat log
-Damage meter
-Events could have a 3rd choice where you pay faith for something better. e.g (gain 1 attack, Gain 2 health, or pay 3 faith to gain both)
-Sometimes you can fall into a "lose more" spiral where if you lose poorly once then you don't get enough faith and you continue to get weaker and weaker relatively speaking. Maybe if you lose you should get to replay the same depth instead of moving past it so you don't miss out on faith.
-It would be fun to be able to buy more than 1 thing per turn though maybe breaks the balance/core gameplay
-Having an Obelisk either side of a follower doesn't trigger their ability a 3rd time. Not sure if intended but it's not clear from the description
-If its a draw (e.g against fireworks boss) it feels like you should still lose core health
-An aspect or support follower that boosts combat traits would be cool. (e.g "double the power of combat traits")
-"Give random follower X" as a powerup rarely feels like a good choice as you often have disposable followers. Being able to choose might be nice.
-The "revive all followers with 1 health" support seems to end the opponents turn even if they all haven't finished attacking. Makes it even more OP than intended haha.
-After beating a boss the faith option seems underwhelming compared to extra capacity.
-Chaser seems to drain all attack from new recruits, even after hotfix.
-Familiar doesn't trigger off Duelist. Not sure if intended but could be fun if they interacted.
-Familiar doesn't trigger off Reaper. (maybe because permanent gain?)
-Stacking Sculptors, +2/+2 for summons with the fractured aspect seems to be the most OP combo I found. Pretty easy to get 15+ 8/10 statues.
-Familiar can also be pretty OP. On my first try I got him to 74/52 against the dragon.
-Some of the phrasing on the aspects isn't clear, specifically the "gain double the amount of stats" vs "double base stats" distinction isn't obvious at first.
+1
i think familiar only gains in combat stats
I've always loved this game. This feels very different than the former version. Smart of you to lower the Initiate Faith gain from 2 to 1 and kept the Supplicant the same.
Some critiques because I LOVE this game and want to see you make a ton of money on Steam. I really don't like the 'support' followers that aren't even a wall like in the old game.
Big idea: REGAINING CONTROL AS THE PLAYER
1. Allow players to choose between recruiting attributes/upgrades or followers...
1.5 Or at least add the ability to reroll followers given a Faith cost (similar LOL's TFT or Dota 2's Underworld). You could also have similar followers combine.
2. Limit the amount of Faith like in the first game. Now the more Faith, the better the options even if you have 20 Faith in the first 4 rounds.
3. Showing followers out of your Faith range... that was the case in the first version but now you are limited to what you can buy which PREVENTS long term planning using the lock mechanism. (Maybe limit to 1 out of range per showing).
4. Be able to speed up the game (skip the first battle as well).
Big idea: ARCHITYPES
I miss the architypes of the original game. Generally, you would get some low level followers and hope to get the higher ups that made the architype. The architypes in order of power were:
a. "Upon Death" - Stacking Conscripts, Supplicants, Ghost, Flagbearer and others, would combo into the the "Upon Death" Hellhound for easy wins. Put the Incarnator in front of the Hellhound for some stupid stats. Combine with Speaker to spread the love. (SEE BELOW)
b. "PUMP UP / Cleric Stacking" - The +1/+1 from the Cleric was so much stronger in the old version as it was for EVERY NEW FOLLOWER (but only once each turn, not that that mattered). Whole teams were made of 4 Clerics giving followers a +4/+4 boost. Worked really well with Conscripts. Mix with Alchemist for potions to dump on Conscripts. Or use Sanctuary. (SEE BELOW)
c. "Double Attack" - Pump your Turret with Archivist/Alchemist and then put it behind a Incarnator. (SEE BELOW)
d. "Faith Based" - Nerfed correctly (but not in this upgraded version) by working only if all followers were unique. Since Faith is buying power, it needs to be nerfed in order to create balance. Still, it was a very hard architype to pull off as you needed the follower that gains faith per attack (Seeker) and the follower that attacks again each time faith is gained. (Never got Crusader to be good enough)
e. "Defense" - Try to make the Templar, Herald, etc (+1 attack damage per attack) to work by having high levels of defense. Not easy in the slightest since the final boss attacked 3 times. This is much easier in this version of the game.
You have added some new architypes that I really enjoy. I'd love to make a broken "random" damage team. But it seems so random what followers I receive and I really don't have any control over it. And I love that you have made "Medic" actually viable. Medic was terrible before. It allows for a weanie win team comp like seem below.
Old winning sets examples (0 losses):
Current winning sets (0 losses):
I'd be a game tester for this game any day.
Thanks for the feedback! Glad you love the game and like, these are all really valid feedback and I really appreciate it! I want to follow up on several points you raised: not to say a certain piece of feedback is good or bad (they're all good!), just to provide some context as to how we made some of the decisions for the new version.
A lot of your feedback is somewhat tied to the faith/core health rework, which is probably the most impactful change we made. In the old game, faith is intended as a checklist mechanic: the player will have different faith caps at different points of the run, and are expected to more or less cap their faith; although they can achieve that through different means, and maybe increase their faith demands with certain cards like apprentice, but the game is designed around the player having a specific amount of faith income each round.
But this created a lot of problems when we tried to expand the game and add more cards. If we balance the game around a faith cap, then it means that the player should always have ways to reach their current faith cap, which will force us to design the faith generation cards and non-faith cards separately, and always keep them at a consistent ratio (which is exactly how we designed the cards in the old version). While it's easy to design a bunch of unique non-faith cards (with mechanics like random damage or summon), the design space is very limited for faith generation cards. I suppose we COULD have gone the route of having temporary/permanent faith, having followers interact with faith cap, or using other means to make faith more complicated, eventually, the decision is to make faith, or at least those generated by followers, to have the same weighting as other mechanics.
So the idea of the new faith system is that recruiting faith generation followers should be a strategic choice rather than a necessity and that the player should be able to beat the game without any faith generation from followers. We tried to achieve this with enemy faith drop being more substantial and random event options. Ideally, there should be builds where the player will buy high-value cheap cards with enemy faith drop and afford expansive core cards through skipping and faith injection from random events; or, to recruit tons of faith generation followers, BARELY winning every fight due to recruiting another supplicant instead of a templar, and get to big tech cards while still in early game (we'll still need to analyze the playtest data from the past few days to see how viable these playstyles are). We want to get to a place where we can design faith generation cards just like any other type of card, and don't need to worry too much about having an imbalanced number of faith and non-faith cards.
Only showing affordable cards is a byproduct of the rework. If I remember correctly, in the old version the game would occasionally show one card that costs more than current faith but less than faith cap. The assumption in the old version is that the player will be able to afford that card next round if they try. At some point, this feature existed in the new version as well, but I removed it because it constantly made me feel pressured to have a positive faith income, which is not the goal. But this 100% makes locking and planning build worse. I'll probably need to try a lot more things before I can decide how to solve all this. Maybe like occasionally having a recruit event that only shows high-cost cards or something.
Refresh is another thing we struggled with. Having refresh as a basic mechanic works best if the player knows what exactly is in the pool. But we really don't want to pressure the player to memorize every card, or even to constantly check a menu listing all the cards. This is one of the design goals for this project: to create a card game that is more fast-paced and free-form than, say, a deckbuilder. The current plan for refresh is to make it like Hades 1, where you can use tokens to refresh. For example, maybe a follower with "When recruited, gain +3 refresh tokens", so it's less of a basic mechanic and more of a situational/preference thing.
Tbh permanent buff and support follower is more or less the same as faith rework, where we are trying to make something not a necessity. Permanent buff followers definitely still need a lot of tuning -- it seems like they are still somewhat necessary for perfect runs. For support followers, the idea is that we want the player to keep getting more capacity throughout the run, but also want to make follower count part of the build, so that aoe effects like flagbearer can have variable value in different builds. We end up with summons and support followers, which is essentially trading 1 capacity for passive effects. This idea will definitely be further explored when we get to factions, where we plan to create archetypes with maybe just one or two active followers.
Art style, gameplay and design well done.
Very promising.
good damage from vengeful frontline being casted across my adaptive backline. found that vengeful’s +3/+3 buff can be wasted on “dead” units.
mods
oops! Will fix vengeful targeting next patch!
40 statues center guy got copy 1/1 xD
that is nutty. try building a 40+ hp stinger and watch him go daka daka at enemies.
you can get 3 damage from the gatling support for each shot
Love the style, 10/10.
Insanely fun. Here are some of my runs:
Generated around 15 faith per round by itself lol. Fourth card from the left (forgot its name) had the duplication effect. Somehow managed to kill the dragon without losing any core healths by having the three cards on the right all have double stats.
Funny moment when the firework master killed my last follower upon his death
Very op run where the 4/6 had aspiring so it would gain the attack of the 20/20. Then the 13/15, which had double attack, would kill the buffed 4/6 and gain all its stats. Dragon was absolutely shredded.
Gladiator my beloved...
this is a really cool upgrade to the first version of the game, can't wait to see how it progresses! (also, have you considered making a discord for the game?
Glad you enjoy it! We decided against having a community discord because managing that will likely be a lot of extra stress :( Maybe when the game is in a more complete state!
So, uhm, I beat the dragon the very first time I played this. I don't think that was meant to happen. I did over 350 damage. Uhm.
Yeah.
This is an amazing. I've played the previous version extensively and can say this improves on all the aspects of the original. Can't wait to see the new updates you have planned. I'll make another post with some feedback soon. Great job!
An endless mode with the HP and damage of the enemies doubling just on repeat and a hard mode without any lives would be nice.
a great game, there is a glitch worth noting though: when taking a totem and assigning it to someone who already has it, the game will take your faith and let you do it like it was valid, but it doesn't stack
If you are talking about aspect, then yes: they won't stack but the new aspect will replace the older one! We received a lot of complaints on this so will definitely add a more explicit/noticeable warning on a later update!
I realized that after posting, but I think you should probably be prevented from adding another of the same totem onto someone
Why? Archivists are weak enough as-is, they don't need another nerf.
prevent it *unless you have an archivist*, then. as a new player I made the mistake of taking a totem one of my hunters already had and putting on them, thinking it would stack, and lost a good chunk of faith without realizing I'd made a mistake until the next fight.
Valid suggestion! If a big warning sign is implemented and it still can't sufficiently inform players aspect can't stack, then maybe we should just disable applying duplicated aspect. But doing that will certainly make the game less intuitive and make some effects weird (like archivists, or "the next aspect will have double the effect" -- this one not in the game yet). But hopefully a big warning sign can solve everything!
yeah, that'd probably do it
really nice game, good balance. the fact u can fight the boss again after losing once is a really nice touch. managed to try different builds. the art colour schema that hints to the unit’s effects is great.
medic + prospector + goblin + brawler can really make a stable chain of health and damage gain. managed to keep 5/5 core and defeat the dragon.
Gorgeous rework, well done!! Love the way bosses make you think. I wish certain modifiers (attack 2x, +1/1 per round) weren't *so* strong they warped the game around themselves, but that's what you get at the top of the curve, I guess? Looking forward to seeing what new challenges you come up with :)
The support that gives summons +2/+2 (in description) only gives +1/+1
A surrender option would be useful in certain scenarios. I got into a weird setup with the witch where I kept on getting hp but I couldn't do any damage to her so it was locked in a near stalemate.
Amazing. Loved the original version and will play the heck out of this one.
Might be worth making the warning a bit more explicit when you try to replace a trait? I lost my first run because I accidentally overwrote a trait with a new one. It's a learning experience, I guess.
Omg I'm so happy but I just accidentally ended a run at depth 45 cause I didn't know escape would immediately close the game :'( please add a confirm screen before quitting with escape key
Love the new look and the longer gameplay / mechanics! The modifiers seem super OP they're very fun. I'm sure I'll be playing this a lot in the near future, thanks for the continued effort!