Nails the classic gem-swapping game and feel. The way it ties to resources and skills is kind of perfect. It's a great play on the theme too! As for feedback, I personally would've liked a better sense of whenever the enemy did anything (aside from them using their skills) whether it's with VFX or SFX as it took a couple games for me to figure out if they were waiting on me to react like in turn-based or if it was real-time. It also would've been nice to maybe have a something for the special tiles? I hadn't read the full instructions so didn't know I was suppose to click on them till a few rounds in.
Viewing post in A Fistful of Matches jam comments
Thanks for playing and the great feedback!
Yeah, everything came together pretty late in the dev cycle. We did add some flashing of the characters when they're "hit", but it is pretty subtle. Definitely a bit more we could do here to make things a bit more obvious.
Right now, it's a mix of both turn-based and real-time mechanics, I think we like things about both systems. We had very little time to playtest the game as a whole in the end, so just happy we got something together! But definitely something that I'd want to explore a bit more. The pressure of having to act, I think is important, but the aspect of managing what you're matching to fuel your abilities but not your opponents may just be enough strategy anyway!
We had discussed some alternatives as well, so if we look into moving forward with this in the future, it'd definitely something I'd explore a bit more.