Feedback On Steam Next Fest Demo

[faint locust]

I have some feedback on the game from the Steam Next Fest demo.

1. The target range of cards should be shown on the card itself as a picture, since the card just tells you what it does when played, but not the area you can target with it unless you have it in your hand. This doesn't help when you view the cards in the deck, since the game won't tell me what the range of said card is when viewing it in the library or graveyard.

2. When viewing cards in the library or graveyard, I'm unable to use the mouse to hover over keywords on the card itself to see what it does. In this picture, when I hover over this card in the library tab, the game shows me the details of it, but after I take the mouse off the screen to view the card details at the bottom, it just disappears, preventing me from ever seeing what the keywords mean when the card isn't in my hand.

In addition, you can't ever see what the range of the card is in grids when you'll viewing it in the library or the graveyard, and assuming the deck builder menu for the game doesn't show the grid coverage, I don't want to add a card to the deck when I'm not told while building the deck what the range of the card, only to be forced to play it in a dungeon just to find out what the range is.

3. For this bomb bettle, there's no details that tell me that it does 1 damage to all units in the 8 surrounding grids when it dies on the top of the screen that shows it intect for the turn. In addition, the grids that it damages when it dies isn't show on its movement/attack preview, and this preview makes me think he will damage all of these spaces when he attacks. Max movement range and max attack range should be 2 different colors on this preview since it looks like he will attack 10+ squares next turn.

4. The demo never saves the settings I set the game to in options when I quit in the middle of the run.

5. "Stun" tooltip say that if the player character becomes "Stun" by something, I'm forced to discard all library cards, which would be the entire draw pile in this game since it's called the library. This won't be fair to me if I have a 30-card draw pile at the start of combat and an enemy stuns me, all 30 cards in the draw pile are just sent to the graveyard from 1 attack. Is "library" suppose to say "discard all hand cards" instead here, since it isn't clear either if you discard all hands cards too, but I don't need to lose all draw pile and hand cards just from becoming stunned?

6. For this preview, the game should me what the aftermeth of playing this Flame Ring is since it would have killed all of these bomb bettles which would inflict 3 damage to me and kill the Shaman due to having only 3 life. I don't ever see how much damage I would have taken upon playing this card.

7. The movement preview for this pulse dragon shows that he can move through these flying bomb obstacle, when he can't.

8. When I hover on this map, if I'm hovering over a room that I already cleared, I should be able to fast-travel to it by just clicking on the room. I was getting tired of having to go back through 10+ rooms by walking manually just to get back to a room that had a health fruit which told 5 minutes do, when just clicking on the room to teleport to it would take 5 seconds instead. Can't the heroess have a teleport book or something that lets them "teleport to a room you previously visited on this floor?"

8. Follow-up on point 2 with a card from the graveyard. I'm hovering over it in the first picture, but upon trying to look at the details of a card from the graveyard, the card just disappears on the preview screen, previewing me from seeing what it does.

10. For cards like Quake, the game doesn't make it cleary which enemies are grounded units and which are flying ones, since flying enemies don't have an icon on them that tells me "this is a flying enemy." Assuming that a Shaman was in this battle, I would have no idea how much damage Quake would do to it since there's no hint provided by the game telling me which enemies are grounded and which are flying. This should be made clear so that you know what enemies annoy obstacles when moving. Also, the range of Quake should be visible on the card itself in case I'm looking at it in the draw pile.

11. The AI moved this slime in a wired way in this battle. Where it is now, there was a box at that dead-end, and the AI used its turn to destroy the box and move to that space, when it can't reach me from there due to a tree in the way. I also had situations where the AI moves an enemy one space and moves it back to the original space the monster started its turn in. The AI behavior in this game should be looked at a bit so that it doesn't do non-smart plays like this.

12. For things like gust wind, the game should tell me how many turns the trap stays on the map, since ever cards that apply traps like ice floor doesn't tell me that they stay in place for one turn only.

[stark herald]

I think of red tiles more as of "danger tiles", where you might get in trouble if you stay there

Sometimes red can also mean debuff without damage

[stark herald]

Yeah, this is confusing wording.
"library card" is a card you have drawn from the library, but you can also create "phantom cards" that only exist in your hand

[stark herald]

Imo, that would be too much info

player have to put some thoughts in too

[faint locust]

@steady mortar Just tagging you to read this when you get time, and that you don't forget about it.

[faint locust]

Thanks for your thoughts on the matter, too.

[stark herald]

it have "self destruct" think, so I think player can guess

or just kill it once and see how it goes

it's an enemy in the beginners area and only deals 1 damage to you without any additional debuffs

so even if you fall for it once, it's not a big deal

But when you see enemies in later areas with "self destruct" skill, you would know what to expect

[faint locust]

I hope that add that in the game on full release for the bomb bettle, then. I hate to see what the other enemies do in the other 4-5 dungeons and the final game on full release, which I think would be worse then these bomb bettles, like "when I die, apply 3 burn stacks to yourself."

[stark herald]

Well, general rule of thumb is "red = bad" and "don't get near self destruct enemies"

Learning what some enemies do is also valuable

[steady mortar]

I was on a break yesterday, as soon as I go to my computer I will read this feedback, just going to do some coffee first ahahaha

[steady mortar]

1. This is going to be shown in the deckbuilder most certainly. But in a case that we can't add the feature, it will be available on the game-wiki that we will try to launch with the game.

2. You can actually hold TAB on the demo to see the keywords. But this is something we are fixing while we are reworking the old interface. You will be able to click on cards from Lib/Grave to see what they do.
   Also I think the range question was answered in sort of a way, it might not be intuitive as in the demo you get a deck from the start, but the deckbuilder part is essential for the game and you will be able to see the ranges from there.

3. We are already working on this. All enemies with counters or death throes will have that info on their nameplates.

4. It's going to be on the full version.

5. Library cards in hand. There are two types of cards, Library cards (the ones that circle your Library, Hand and Grave) and Phantom cards (cards that are temporary). We will fix this text to be more clear that we are talking about hand lib cards.

6. We already talked a lot about this between ourselves and the play-testers. This is impossible to be done on how the game's code was made, we would need to scratch everything away. So we treat this as a feature throughout the whole game, you won't see the consequences for you actions, only your initial move. So the player always needs to calculate what to do and test the waters with enemies that indicate death throes and counters.

7. He could as if he is blocked he can attack entities to move to that position, we try showing all possible tiles it can move. As you can see that the only tiles that are "left out" the the walls and indestructible props in the room.

8. Slady, we will not implement this feature. We've discussed it a lot and it would be not cost-effective for the development process and situations it's useful in the full game. But there is always the speed-up options.

9. I think you skipped 9.

10. I will send a screenshot that will me you happy, just give me a sec.

11. We are always bettering the AI as the game is very complex. Thanks for this feedback, we will fix this issue.

12. There is a rule of thumb for all those traps, the full-game will have this information, sorry. But just so you know it already (and I think in the demo there are some traps that might not follow this still, but we are fixing those): All traps will always disappear on the next Begin of Turn of the entity the spawned it.

the screenshot I was talking about

[steady mortar]

yes, exactly

[steady mortar]

👆

[steady mortar]

also, just to add another thing we are working on

wait noticed something lol

censored ||secret character||

[faint locust]

Is the secret character suppose to be the penguin, or what's crossed out in red that you unlock by beating the game once with each character?

[faint locust]

Sorry for skipping point 9. I only noticed now I didn't post a 9 and went from 8 to 10 forgetting all about the 9.

[faint locust]

@steady mortar I forgot to ask in my feedback if it was be possible to save the game while in a dungeon where in case you can't finishing a X-floor dungeon in one sitting, you can save in the middle of it and come back to it later. I wanted to ask that because the demo dungeon took me about 1 hour to defeat it, and assuming I took 1 hour per floor, I can't see myself sitting on my computer for 3 hours finishing a dungeon in 1 sitting if I can't save in the middle of it (like a quick save where you temporary save the game while in the dungeon, and upon booting up the save file, the data is deleted)?

[steady mortar]

yes, there is going to be a save feature in each floor, but I can't give more details as we're still working on the feature itself

[wise dragon]

I would strongly suggest reconsidering 8. I don't know how hard to implement a click to enter a previously visited room is, but that's a really useful feature in games like this.

[faint locust]

Good point, considering pressing and holding keys on a keyboard to get to a room that's on the other side of the map takes 10 minutes and waiting through "change of room" animations adds to that time, which a click of the mouse has you in the room in 3 seconds.

@steady mortar Would what pryovoice said be a good point for fast travel on full release? It's not like you guys are being press for time to finish the game in like 3 months or so (unless you had an agreement with a publisher beforehand that you have to finish in X months), and I have heard of games delay games for a month or too to add quality of life features sometimes to it at the last minute (or after full release of the game).

[steady mortar]

although it seems simple, this feature is not compatible with how we coded the game

it would need a full revision of all the game's rooms

which there are thousands

we might think of a solution later down the line

but at this moment, we are focusing on small changes only

and the release

[faint locust]

What if you added a portal to each room in the game that pops up when you defeat a combat encounter that can teleport you to any other room in the floor and/or a card that let's you teleport to any room that is always in your hand outside combat? Could that work? (Still can't see how a mouse click to go to a room is hard to code it at this point in the game since you physically won't change a rooms layout that much with it.)

[steady mortar]

Unfortunately, the issue is not about selecting a room to go. The issue is how the game calculates position, it wouldn't let this work, and it would need a ton of back-end fiddling to make the feature work in the only way we can do it. Even if we could get it to work, we would need to revise every room in the game to fit a prop for teleportation, and there are almost 10,000 rooms that would need revision. So, while it's a cool idea, it's not something we can implement at this time.

[stark herald]

do
    tile = random tile in room
while(tile is occupied)
teleport to: tile

I will try to mod that in once game is released (assuming no il2cpp)

[faint locust]

What's this for?

[faint locust]

@stark herald Thought I follow up and ask what the mod you posted above is for, since you mention mod the game with the above code, but didn't let me know what the coding is for and what the mod would be about.

[stark herald]

pseudocode on how I will try to implement room teleportation