*Whew* I finally got all 114 cards at the same time:
I had 113 cards for the last twelve hours, so I *could* have had this much sooner. But "The Dragon's Bed" just would not come up.
A member registered Jan 06, 2024
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I get the feeling you're just getting started with this, but you've done a great job already! Thank you for building this!
I know you're looking for feedback, so here are some ideas:
The inventory space is six items wide, and seven items tall, so there is space for 6 x 7 = 42 inventory slots, but only 40 slots are enabled:
You could raise inventory limit from 40 to *42* and the user interface would still look nice!
Also, I'd move the Enchant button from where it is now, below the item list, to *above* the item list:
...because the item list is constantly changing as you pick up new items. That causes the Enchant button to jump around on the page when you're trying to upgrade. It's hard to click it when it won't stay still.
Also, we could use more armor enchant scrolls! There are six armor items, and only one weapon item, so ideally we'd find six armor enchant scrolls for every one weapon enchant scroll. My experience was closer to this:
Also, it looks like the auto-sell algorithm keeps Hero items in your inventory, and sells everything else. This caused problems for me in the early game, when it sold rare items that I wanted to upgrade in the future. I was very sad when the auto-sell algorithm got rid of them against my wishes.
It also caused issues for me in the late game, when unwanted Hero items completely filled up my inventory. This interferes with the Auto-hunting, because you're forced to teleport back to town, due to a full inventory, before you've had a chance to actually hunt anything.
I wanted THIS auto-sell algorithm:
1. For each item in the inventory, sell the item if there is a corresponding equipped item, and the *base value* of the inventory item is less than or equal to the base value of the equipped item.
2. For the remaining inventory items: keep the best item for each slot and sell everything else.
That way, the auto-sell algorithm would never sell an item with greater potential than your currently-equipped item, and it would clear out the useless Hero items when you're in the late game :) Which is exactly what I wanted!
Also, in the early game, the Auto-hunt algorithm controlled which location I was in: whereas, I wanted this to be user-controlled. I never wanted the Auto-hunt algorithm to teleport to a different location.
Sometimes you want to farm an easier location, so you can get more upgrade scrolls. Sometimes you want to farm a harder location for experience. It should be your choice what you'd like to do!
Anyway, I hope this helps :)
This game is off to a great start. It's fun and playable, even in its early alpha state. I hope it does very well!
Here are a few notes, in hopes that they're helpful?
I was confused by this navigation:
I was expecting the navigation menu to work more like this:
...or this:
...with a single contrasting style to indicate what is selected.
...whereas the navigation menu in the game has a variety of seemingly-random color states, which I found to be endlessly confusing (especially in the beginning).
In reality, the menu is super simple: it's just a row of tabs, with a context-dependent submenu below. But it's difficult or impossible to work this out from the visual presentation *alone*: you really have to play around with it to figure out how it works. I think the structure / behavior could be made obvious at a glance with just a few minor visual changes: little things like an increased amount of whitespace between the menus to separate them, and a clear visual style for the selected tab. That would have helped me a lot!
The second biggest issue, in my opinion, was in the Forge tab, in the Equipment panel: Each item in your inventory appears to have a maximum level, and those maximum levels appear to be different. When an item reaches its maximum level, it would have been helpful for me if the word "MAX" had appeared somewhere near the item level.
(Also, the item level starts at "0". I would have preferred to see the first level displayed as "1", instead of "0": That way, a level "3" item would have had 3x the base stats. I would have found that a lot more intuitive!)
The biggest *gameplay* issue is that the optimal strategy seems to involve very short runs that start and end within sixty seconds, where you almost immediately earn around 10 phoenix feathers. You can quickly purchase all but the most expensive upgrades that way.
To unlock all of the jobs, you need about two longer runs--but that's it. Everything else can be very rapid short runs. It doesn't take *too* long to beat the game that way.
By the time you've unlocked the resource generation, and have begun to forge items, then you are well past the point where you should have leapt into the well: You would have been much better off if you had completely ignored the resources and equipment. The Talent trees are so much more powerful. Furthermore, the Talents persist across runs, whereas the equipment resets, so there's really no point to it. And that is a shame, since the resource generation, resource trading, and equipment forging, were all fun and interesting the first time I encountered them. It's a shame that this part of the game is disincentivized. (This might be different if the resources could be developed more quickly, and if the equipment payoff were greater? Or, from the other point of view, if the shorter runs were made less lucrative somehow?)
There are a few other major balancing issues. You're probably already aware of them, but I'll mention them briefly:
The T1-T2 jobs require some grinding to unlock, but they're not *too* difficult. In contrast, the T3-T4 jobs are excessively difficult to unlock. They only became practical for me after I had purchased nearly the entire Talents tree. (And, at that point, the game was practically over.)
Another minor observation: In the Talent tree, in the Military section, the "Battle-Hardened" talent is *super* powerful, while the similarly-expensive "Precision Strikes" talent has comparatively little effect.
In the Talents tree, there were lots of minor issues: In the Prosperity box, in the "Silver Tongue" talent, the text refers to a "wheat" resource that doesn't exist in the game. In the "Artisant's Touch" talent, there is a typo (it should read "Artisan's Touch") and the completion bonus is "WIP." I won't mention the others like this, since I'm pretty sure you know about them already.
I imagine that you're already planning some big changes to the Talents tree. (Likewise, I imagine you're already planning to replace the placeholder icons in the Equipment section.)
In the Equipment section, here's something that would have been helpful to me: *most* of the equipment items are labeled with the resource that is needed to craft them, but not *all* of the items have this information. (For example, an item might be described as "training" instead of "wooden"). I would have liked to have known which resource was needed to craft the item--so I could boost its level--and this wasn't always apparent from the item. I would have liked a naming convention more like this:
Training Sword Wooden Set
Anyway! I just wanted to say that I really liked your game. When I first started playing it, I thought it was going to be a basic prototype without too much content. But then things kept unlocking! As it turns out, there is a lot more to it than I thought.
It's a lot of fun. I know this is a super-early alpha version, but you've done a great job already.
Thanks for making it.
I understood what was going on pretty quickly--with two exceptions: I never did figure out what upgrading does, and I'm not sure what the Bone and Ectoplasm coins are for?
The main thing I wanted was the ability to auto-summon creatures at a given rate. As it is, I spend most of my time frantically clicking: It would have been nice if the creatures came out on their own (which they technically do, but only very infrequently).
Anyway! I thought it worked pretty well! It was fun to figure out how the towers worked... and then to construct a labyrinthine path to keep the creatures busy.
I took a few screenshots of things that I thought you might like to see:
The text here says "Spirit Lantern Unlock Unlocked."
In this photo, you can see the creatures climbing up without a ladder: You can reproduce this if you summon a huge amount of creatures at once and then move the ladder. (You can also get the creatures to pass through solid towers by placing items on top of them:)
This was also confusing to me:
The text says that there are 6 Furballs, but there are no Furballs anywhere to be seen. The battlefield is completely silent, and has been for a while!
My guess is that when the Furballs do eventually appear, there will be 6 of them. Is that how this works? If so, then this confusion could be eliminated if you added the word "Next: " along with a timer. Ideally, there would also be a tooltip that say you can increase the number of Furballs that autospawn by purchasing the "Upgrade" (assuming that's how it works, of course!)
The one thing that would improve the user interface the most is: Disable the "Necro Tower" button when you don't have enough money to build one (and make the button look different when it's disabled). As it is, you're seemingly able to buy and place the tower--only to have it turn red and disappear at the very end! I think this is the main reason why a lot of people were confused!
