Behacked
Would it work if a roguelike(ish) game was happening on top of a match three of a kind game board? Well, time to find out!
So Behacked is a match three type score attack game where you also battle against enemies by literally sweeping the floor from beneath them. Every few kills or so your character levels up and you get to pick a new skill to add to your arsenal. Pick skills to achieve some interesting and possibly game breaking combos and see how far you can make it on the online leaderboards.
Made for #7DRL 2022 in a week using:
- Unity 2021.2 for π silicon (yay!)
- JetBrains Rider β€οΈ
- Garageband & Audacity
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Patch 1.3.0Jul 06, 2022
- Patch 1.2.0Jun 23, 2022
- Patch 1.1.2Jun 19, 2022
- Post Jam UpdateJun 14, 2022
Comments
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FYI at some point you get curses when leveling up
That is intended behaviour to ramp up the difficulty more.
hey so I got a score of 174 XXX XXX (I forgot the rest) and my score isnt showing up is this becuse my wifi shut down when I was playing?
Probably yeah, you need internet connection at the point when you lose and it (tries to) submit the score.
Hey so I got to lv 94, 19752782 score and now my game wont load the next blocks or drop them for that matter. is there a way to kill you
No please don't kill me! π But yes, you can hit escape and press quit there to give up and have it submit the score.
dam ok tk
love ur games btw
Ideas:
1: A skill that causes future skills to occasionally appear with brick tiles.
2: Skull tiles that hurt you when matched.
3: An enemy that changes the direction of gravity when attacked.
Solid game. Genuinely fun. Makes you think. I dig it.
really an awesome game
thanks
Lovely game but sometimes enemy's will ignore blocks being broken under there feet or just strait up teleport (also I once got the curse that blurrs a ability description 3 times in a row)
I'm a bit unclear. With so many professions, where does the differentiation lie? What are the differences at the beginning of the game? Is it only a matter of health points? Then, what's the significance of having different professions?
All the different skills "belong" to one base profession and they are way more likely to appear when playing. Quite a lot of the professions are combinations of two base ones for example (if I remember correctly) palading is cleric + fighter.
So, are there skills that won't appear in certain professions? Do professions have their own exclusive skills?
Nope, nothing is exclusive but just more likely to appear.
today's daily: Behacked without being Behacked
Really an awesome game. Congrats.
Still, I got a few bug to report.
1 - During some games, enemies will freeze definitively and then infinite score is potentially achievable
2 - At some point, with many +50% exp from kills + double skill per level, you'll get soooo much skill choosing that you don't even play anymore.
3 - Arrived at level 100 (I got pretty patient in skill picking) the game is totally crashed, what a relief.
Anyhow, your games are just awesome and this one is no exception. What bugger projects do you work on ? These must be incredible.
Thanks
Tchoneck
Thanks! Yeah, well aware of some bugs and issues on this one. I have too many projects to update and keep up with. And I just keep making more too. π What do you mean by "bugger projects"?
there is a bug where if you quickly make matches, you will be able to make two pieces move in a way that is impossible.
example:
R=red tile Y=yellow tile G=green tile P=purple tile O=orange tile
imagine you have this order in a row:
RYRPRGPOPP
if you switch the o and the p to make:
RYRPRGOPPP
as the game is processing the decision, you can then try to switch the r and the y:
YRRPRGOPPP
then, as the game finishes processing the o and p switch:
YRRPRGO
you can quickly attempt to switch the r and the p:
YRRRPGO
and half the time, it will work!:
YPGO
μ λ무 μ¬λ°μ΄μ λ©μΆ μ μμμ΅λλ€.
this fucking game dosent have anything to let matches exist in impossible situations
I just could not win this one
2 stacks of curses ( more curses) back to back for the next one, also 78% less xp gain.
24 minutes later, i am number 31 in the world on accident
I think I had enough for now :)
reaching 6th place in v.1.3.1 feels like an achievement :)
For me paladin is the best for reaching high scores. Guaranteed potions + good starting health + holy waters to remove curses. I try to avoid any and all skills that destroy tiles as those cause game over in late game.
I was about lvl 110 when I started receiving curse options together with skills. Even with 10 gambler rerolls I started getting the same skills over and over again - I guess there is a limit on how many times you can get a certain skill.
It would be cool to be able to "forget" a skill every now and then.
During one of the mass killings of monsters the sound and music completely disappeared. Such sound "clipping" happens from time to time, but it usually is temporary. At around 30-35 monsters it sound didn't come back at all.
There are multiple bugs with the tile movements. You can switch tiles places without matching (not related to skills) and some times there is a pause between input and board action, but those have their charm and can be considered tricks of the game.
I hope to see an update in the future :)
I love this game too much
do you plan to work on this game further?
I donβt have really any immediate plans but this is one of my favourites of my games so maybe at some point.
Would you be interested in collaborating with someone on it?
This is from the daily today:
Cause of death:
I had active teleportation, so during one explosion while teleporting to a new piece, my increased multiplier caused more tiles to be destroyed - including the one I was teleporting to. This one is more of a feature than a bug, but would be a feature which I wouldn't miss :)
My gut reaction was that not really interested but now that I think about it some more I wouldn't be absolutely opposed to opening the repo for some contributions.
how do you unlock classes?
By picking skills associated with those classes.
this game is challenging but fun
Yup still first after 4 months... I got really lucky.
How do starred skills differ from non-starred skills? Does that mean they can be used by you no matter your current class?
All skills can be used by any class. Star just means that it is a skill you have not had ever yet, meaning it will be used towards unlocking some class(es)
There is a bug where the enemies couldn't move , and i had to stack Wraths to end my run. (btw I got top 7 =)
The new curses aren't very clear. Why are they happening? I'm hovering over enemies and I can't seem to find it. Are there enemies cursing me? Is it when I make an incorrect switcheroo? is it when I match pieces on myself? Or make a match that doesn't affect enemies?
Mostly it's also just annoying. I feel I have no power to counter them either.
No they're just appearing on a timer. And you are not really meant to be able to counter them. They were added as a means to actually make the runs end at some point. Just more dangerous enemies weren't enough to keep players from going pretty much infinite.
Ah, they feel like a punishment more than a limitation or challenge to work against.
im not sure if im the only one with this problem but occasionally i end up with a board full of moves i cant make or moves that wont help me like across the board from the slime that's killing me, i understand the board is random but can you add some ability or something to prevent such early losses. ive played about 20 matches and only in one of them ive made it to level three due to matches like this
Yeah dunno, I make it to at least level 5 pretty much every time I play. It might be that you're just wasting possible matches without making kills (ie. not earning exp).
possibly
(Great game btw <3)
Haha, how on earth did it end up like that. That is quite something! I guess the enemy timers had frozen (known bug and fixed on next patch coming soonish)?
It was a combo of enemy timers and the fact that my level was in the hundred-somethings so the game was having a rough time as is (I was gaining so much EXP that I had to click through the upgrade list for like a solid minute every time I killed an enemy). I really love all the new additions, though, the curses and the class system add a lot!
...
I just got 3.9bil on my third try. I had the witch orb thing which doubles your score when you hit a 2x multiplier. I'm HHuHH. Its way to op.
Haha, right. Yeah I guess it is even though it requires so much luck to get a roll like that. But yeah, it's not really "fair" that you can get so mega lucky and completely blow up your scores like that.
jeez, I didn't know the roll was so rare!
finally, a worthy opponent.
our battle will be legendary!
Ahhh yes script the OLD first place
i didn't even get to use the witch orb in my run
i'll try my best to regain the position... when i feel like it lmao
lol
Some
Somehow managed to walk out of the board and actually stayed there for a moment. I think what happened was few consecutive purple matches
Was it the martial arts skill?
Yes it was.
there are these yellow tinted upgrades that only appear on daily games (I like to call them blessings)
i assume there's no way to get them in a normal run?
Yup, daily modifiers only. I call them boons π
Thanks for adding classes. It makes the game more fun but when I come back today, it's reset. All that progress gone :( Oh well, time to unlock them again.
I have a question: Have you considered porting this to iOs and Android? This would be fun on the go.
Dang, that sucks. Saving stuff on web versions is bit problematic. I tried to save those to browser local storage now. Usually I've used Unity's PlayerPrefs which saves to indexed db on the browser instead but that remains only for some specific url path and that changes when updating the game. So that's not great either. No idea why your local storage would have been wiped though... π€π€·ββοΈ
So the downloadable versions are the best bet of course for having a proper save.
Yea I have given it some thought but not sure if it'd be worth it as the game is pretty niche. The browser version already should be kinda playable on mobile too even though there are some issues that'd need to be solved like all the tooltips. And iOS browsers and Unity web exports right now have some weird issue where UI keeps sometimes flickering. But that's out of my hands and will hopefully fix itself on next iOS update just like it suddenly appeared on 15 I think.
i mean... i think the leaderboard proves why-
i got to the point where the game gave me curses instead of upgrades, hilarious.
also. even when i had the prototeleport upgrade thing, it didn't teleport me to a brick tile in the end, does the ¨teleport to [color] tile instead of dodging¨ overwrite that? (started as tourist btw)
Nicely done on breaking the game (again)! π
Why is it OP really? Because you can hang in a spot surrounded/protected by rats?
Yeah Blink does override Proto Blink and I guess you had no unoccupied tiles of that color left. Indeed when you've exhausted the skill pool you are offered curses instead.
using chaos orb to get some pretty damn high xp boost upgrades and a upgrade that can attack everything makes it op.
you'll be able to hit pretty much everything at once, and rats always have 1 hp.
a kill also raises your multiplier if i recall
then the fact that you can have all your upgrades relate to black tiles.
also
i found out that the way tiles generate is usually in a way that ONE match is always possible, but getting black tiles to spawn naturally via the ¨twice as likely to spawn¨ upgrade, this seems to break.
Right right, so it does need "a bit" more of setup besides just being OP on its own. And the tile generation is absolutely random. Reaper just adds a 10% chance of getting a black tile too (so still lower than the normal colors). Unless of course if you stack it with black Trump card in which case it is bumped to 30%.
huh, odd. usually when i have only 1 match on the board, if i do that match, it always generates atleast 1 new possible move, thought that was intended!
Found a bug where all the enemies just stop acting entirely. Their turn bars just aren't filling up...
Dang, still some corner case causing that. Were you by chance playing on the downloaded standalone and that was the previous time you had the game running? If so could you provide me the logs?
Windows:
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Antti Haavikko\Behacked\
Mac:
~/Library/Logs/Antti Haavikko/Behacked/
Linux:
~/.config/unity3d/AnttiHaavikko/Behacked/
I'm pretty sure I rebooted the game right after but that might've been the only time (meaning it should be the prev.log, right?) but its hard to be sure, I've been playing a whole lot...
Player.log https://pastebin.com/PsDZTJ4d
Player-prev.log https://pastebin.com/XKgXkP3S
Yeah thanks, there was indeed a null ref error in the prev log which is most likely the cause for the freeze. Will be fixed on the next patch. π
Great! glad I had the right log file!
Been a pretty long term fan and I'm loving the newest update!
The curses definitely make sure runs dont get as out of hand even if I managed a 9mil on my first game of the update-
The memory one is definitely a killer- Because of how skills shape a run and how some can kill runs- Though the highlighting of duplicates help a lot in that aspect so I didn't have to completely rely on my bad memory- It did start getting dicey when my skills started to get off the screen-
A scrollable menu during the pause could help with overbearing numbers of skills though-
And I am absolutely in love with Stackable Upgrades, Entropy, and Chaos Orb. It feels I'm able to get a more balanced set of skills than just- Teleport every where and terraform matches to kill.
There's so many unique skills and I love looking for the newer ones- though you'll always get some stronger than others for different parts of the game
I can only see ESP being useful Early gameThey all seem really balanced, even if you get some skills that are deceptively OPI'm looking at you Patience for massive scores and Patterns that let me kill a dragon with just matchesI've even started to think about trying to compile a list of all the skills and curses, and perhaps even enemies- Especially with one of the curses relying on the skill icons.
Which I definitely did not try starting pre-1.2 and took a break from due to the manual effort of typing everything and multiple resets because I wanted to see the skills on the avatar and just that single skillI see lots of good things and ideas being put into this game and I'm truly wanting to stick around to see it!Good to hear! β€οΈ
Yeah 9 mil is no joke but I'd still say it within the bounds of not getting out of hand. I guess it did manage to get the best of you in the end or did you manually quit?
The skill list getting off screen is definitely an oversight on my part. I never really intended the game to go on so long that the list would go off screen. And then after adding the max hp cap and other nerfs, I though it'd be enough. But alas, guess not. I'll add a scroll or something to it on the next patch. π
Hello there ! I tried the last version of the game a few times and I like it a lot, the curses make it more challenging and impossible to become immortal.
A few issues though :
- It would be nice to pause the game when applying a curse, so that players have the time to read its description and understand what is happening
- The early game still relies heavily on luck, because if you get enemies you can't kill before any useful skill you are doomed to die very quickly no matter how well you play (especially with rats that are very aggressive and reduce you max hp on top of that) . Unless you provide some kind of skill like "Inner Demon" by default to damage unreachable enemies it is bound to be very frustrating, and most players won't take the time to try 10 times or so just to get a good start.
- The "flood" curse is too powerful, especially since it is cumulative. On an unlucky game my first 2 curses were purple flood and red flood, and with some locked tiles on top of that I was completely stuck immediately (no possible match), and could just wait for my death... Even with only 1 flood curse you can quickly get completely stuck (no possible match) if you don't have any tile-shuffling skill yet.
-> A challenging game is fun, but an unfair one isn't.
- With the upgraded chaos skill, I got some useless skills too : for example you can have a reflect that deals 0 damage to the enemy that attacked you
- At some point I could get an upgraded stun trap (same color) does the enemy gets stunned for a longer period of time or is it useless too ?
Glad you like it! I also feel like it's finally getting to a point "end game" wise where I wanted it. You can't get carried by some overly powerful combo anymore (I think) and the late enemies feel like big threats as they were intended.
It actually does pause the enemy timers for few seconds when curse is added. Of course it's not enough to read the description but you can always manually pause the game with esc to read the skill/curse tooltips and enemies too. I feel like halting the game and maybe requiring user interaction before continuing on curses might get annoying once you're familiar with them. It might be good to do so when encountering a new curse for the first time but not on repeats.
I don't think it's that luck based to get through the early game. Obviously the slimes are a joke and you have plenty of time to look for a way to dispose of them while they're on route to you. Kobolds are quick and a bit trickier but they can also easily be pacified by not allowing them to be on the diagonals with you. The bats aren't really threats at all, they're just there to be multiplier breakers. The rats are indeed super deadly and fast but also very weak as they don't dodge. And when they come from black squares, the source tile often becomes a brick which quite regularly might be a quick way to deal with them instantly. Well I guess the black slimes only spawn around the mid game where cockatrices are probably a bigger threat already. And pretty soon after that all the enemies introduced to the list are big threats.
Yeah flood is easily the most painful curse. I'm making it less likely than all the others. Doesn't fully fix the issue but makes it more manageable. Fixed the Stun trap repeating too, I guess I accidentally made it repeatable instead of making it repeatable with Entropy.
The Chaos orb skill is supposed to work like that. It's like a coin flip really, double or nothing. For the normally non 1 number skills it's a bigger range of course but still a coin flip, it's either going to result in better or worse version of the skill.
Thanks a lot for the (continuous) feedback! π
No worries, you made a great job on the game so it is a pleasure to help you polish it and balance it. ;-)
From a player's perspective, just pausing the timer instead of completely displaying the curse's effect is a bit of a pain in the ass though : I mean the game is already paused when picking skills, so I wouldn't really mind If there was a pause as well for curses (it would feel more consistent too). If the players already know its effect they can just close the popup immediately, which is less bothersome than having to check the skill list every time when they don't. Furthermore, it's especially troublesome with curses that depend on a color and make you check anyway (For example the flood curse already causes a big disadvantage, and having to check which color just make it more frustrating.) Also if at some point someone manage to survive for a very long time, they could theoretically have a very long skill list that goes off-screen and couldn't even check the curse's effect.
Well I do know very well how to deal with the different enemies (I wasn't a top player just thanks to overpowered combos, I still had to survive the early game to have the possibility to build the right synergies :-p), but I often find myself stuck in the early game in its current state :
- Sometimes there is no possible match on the whole board : not often "by default" but it still happened a few times and all it took was a few locked tiles that blocked the few possible matches I could have, and as soon as there is even a single flood curse it happens very easily (and if at some point you get 2 like me it's over almost immediately if it happens early...)
- Sometimes there is just no possible match between the enemy and my character, so I can just wait (or make "useless" matches) and prepare to die as they get closer, which is no fun either.
-> Out of 10 to 20 games I would say (I lost count because of the very short runs but it could be more), I could only pass the early game once or twice because I was very lucky on my skill choices, but on every other run I got stuck as explained before and lost very quickly even with careful skill picks because I had poor possibilities (either on the board, on the skill selection, or both).
There are 2 types of skills that are way too "vital", and necessary to survive and really enjoy the game :
- The most important ones are tile-shuffling skills and match-facilitating skills (such as wildcard), because they're the ones that can prevent you from getting stuck with no possibilities at all.
- After that, teleporting skills are very important too because they can prevent a single monster (that you sometimes don't have the possibility to kill) to hit you an infinite amount of time on the spot, also effectively ending the run.
=> In that sense I can assure you that the early game is more lucked-based and unbalanced than you think : if in the first few minutes you don't have the possibility to pick those you will die very quickly no matter how well you play, unless you are extremely lucky with the board.
Yeah, I guess you're right about the curse pause thing. I think I've even been surprised by some color flood. Don't think it will hurt to see it fully and get to read it in peace while also getting a bit of a free breather from the action too.
Might be that our definition of "early game" is different. I've always considered the cockatrice spawn (possible) point mark the end of the beginning and I can get there almost 100% of the tries. You definition of early and end game is probably something completely different as you've easily proven to be better at the game than me. π I've only seen those crazy board positions where all spawn spots are in use at the same time etc in screenshots and videos.
But of course it is still heavily RNG dependant. And yeah those skills are quite mandatory for you to make it far. That's why I like the daily mode where the RNG is exactly the same for everyone so the playing field is level. Hopefully the flood chance nerf will make it even a bit better.
Yes the curse pause thing would be really nice :-) in the same way, it would be cool to have a "skill reveal" screen when picking a skill affected by the memory loss curse. (there is no need to penalize the player twice for that either)
I guess the "early game" definition is indeed subjective. I usually die soon after the cockatrice spawn in my recent attempts. (The definition of "soon" is quite subjective too though :-p)
The flood chance nerf did make it slightly better :-)
The game already became much more difficult because of the locked tiles, run-killer enemies, curses, etc... but I figured the main "issue" is that since you added even more skills such as the bows, ESP, etc... that are interesting on the long run but not nearly as necessary the probability to get vital skills was lowered a lot and the RNG part became much more apparent and frustrating. In short, I feel like it is important to balance that back to make the game more fair and appealing again. I honestly don't know what the best solution would be, but I have a few ideas that could help :
- Have more choices when picking skills
- Increase the probability to get vital skills
- Being able to reroll skills once every level by default (just like the gambler's skill)
- Having some other skill by default (a teleport skill or inner demon for example)
- Leveling up faster in the beginning
- introduce the locked tiles with a curse instead of by default (will help a little with the board RNG instead of the skill RNG)
- introduce one of the colors with a curse (same principle, improve the match chance in the beginning to make early game more forgiving)
...
Have a nice day :-D
Heal + Wildcard is weird. (Heal 1 for 3 matched pink and pink and yellow match) I did 2 damage to myself matching 1 pink and 2 yellow.
Huh, weird! So the healing was the source of your death even though it says it was the bandit? And the game is still showing 1 HP for you. I'll investigate... π€
So I guess the healing doesn't take wildcard into account and since the healing amount is calculated as (match count - 2), you ended up damaging yourself.
I did die from the bandit, other times however I have encountered this and had 0HP but wasn't dead.
Having a hard time finding matches and dodging. there should be a patch where if you can't find a match in 10 second, the board resets.
Hmm, that seems like a bit much. It's kinda by design so that you can't just go on forever and might back yourself to a corner/edge with an enemy where you can't immediately match. And that's where the different skills come in too. There is a skill with pretty much exactly the functionality you mentioned except for it triggers when getting hit and not with an interval. Of course I guess it is possible (though astronomically unlikely) that you'll end up in a spot where you can't make any matches at all.
Yeah, I get into a position where I can't make any matches at all. Most likely because I panic and can't find any and I end up dying XD
Haha yea, thatβs how my runs usually end. Total panic trying to find some matches to shuffle the tiles around enough to challenge enemies near me. That or just straight up killing myself.
I don't want to seem like reporting constant bugs, but... this was in the daily challenge, it might be possible during a normal game, but as far as I know, all the ways to reach 0HP have death messages. This was the Jun 21 2022 challenge.
Edit: Heal has a problem of its own, If you have heal for matched color A and wildcard Colors A and B, you take damage from heal if less than 3 is of color A. It's not just the challenge.
Oh I don't mind it at all! I like it that I'm getting bugs reported in. So today's daily had that "healing deals damage instead" modifier and I think that might be the culprit. π€
Oh and by the way, I was investigating that flurry+blink issue you mentioned and it actually seems like blink had an undocumented behaviour of only teleporting to blue tiles (not even affected by chaos). But you still should get a different death message of "Teleported to the void..." when nothing to teleport to.
I died due to flurry of blows but I had blink, and empty spaces available.
Edit, also died to "could not find a footing" when there was an empty tile to my left
Hmm, that really shouldn't happen. Even if you'd fail to blink away, you'd end up with a different death message. Are you sure you had blink and not some other teleporting teleporting skill by mistake instead?
And the missed dodge death, that seems more likely but obviously still not normal. Hard to guess what could have been the cause without specifics but I'll take a look at the dodging code for the next patch.
For the first, yes I'm sure it was blink that activated. I had multiple, but blink activated and that was the death reason I was told.
For the second, Titan's will on the column I was on, I still don't have an answer on how that happened
Yeah looks like there is indeed a bug with Titan's Will (and probably the horizontal version too). Thanks for helping me find it!
Got to a point where all the enemies froze and I couldn't do anything.
Thanks, yet another missing null check. I'll patch that too in for the next version that is already on works π
Hello ! :-)
I completely broke the game again ^^'
Just like with the jam version, I had to lose on purpose because if I played seriously it was 100% impossible for me to die...
Also when the score exceeds the limit it gets negative (cf screenshot below) then if it exceeds the negative limit it gets positive again, and so on... It is around 2000000000 points so my guess is that the limit is 231 = 2147483648.
To end the game I had to kill myself, but the score wasn't saved to the leaderboard because it was negative at the time :'-)
At some point the game couldn't keep up and the enemies were frozen completely, and even when the combo should have stopped it kept increasing if I made a new valid match instead of resetting. (If i tried to make and invalid match it went back to 1 though).
Now my thoughts about the new skills and enemies : a lot of great ideas and a more difficult start, but with some patience and a bit of luck in the beginning it is still quite easy to become godlike and completely invincible.
- The skill that doubles the score on a 20+ combo is nice, but at the moment still way too easy to obtain (I got a 200+ combo pretty easily with terraforming + trump card + other skills that randomize tiles and can create almost infinite combos, and even the grey tiles couldn't stop it.)
- The ability to reroll skills is interesting but breaks the balance even more especially since it is cumulative : I could reroll skills up to 8 times and just like with the jam version I just had to avoid crappy skills that could kill me to stay immortal. Even without clicking anymore, if an enemy attacks me I get teleported and randomize tiles, start a combo that will heal me and kill most enemies (often clear the board almost completely)
-> The game is challenging and interesting in the beginning, but after that rough start you loose any sense of purpose because the only real threat is yourself. I don't think that players should ever have to penalize themselves on purpose to kill themselves and bring the run to an end.
Thanks a lot for the lengthy feedback! β€οΈ
Yeah the score limit is indeed that, I'll change it to unsigned one so it can hold at least the double value instead. I didn't really predict the scores could go that high so didn't really take the limit into account. I usually like to balance score games so that the high scores would end up between millions to hundreds of millions range. Somehow that just seems like the most visually pleasing score amount. High but still not that high that everything past the first digits loses the meaning. π€·ββοΈ
Yeah I definitely didn't want to have the game go infinite or force the player to manually end it by killing themselves as nothing else is capable of doing that anymore. That just seems like a bummer. What do you see as the biggest factor in letting you go infinite like that? Some specific skill combo or what? One small adjustment that came to mind that I will most likely do is reset the multiplier when you get hit. That would solve the "auto play" mode you mentioned and also help in making it more work to make the multiplier go up (or not making it drop).
Other thing that could fix the issue of going infinite and losing all sense of difficulty could be limiting the maximum level of player. Don't really like that route though and it would make the RNG of the skills you do get even more impacting.
I think I will also add new new more dangerous enemies to the end of the list. I guess even the dragons don't pose enough of a threat right now.
The enemies being completely frozen seems like a bug. I guess the game somehow got to a state that the enemies think that you're comboing off or skill picking and they can't move. Did this happen before the score hit negatives too, of course the negative score might have some weird impacts as well as that isn't supposed to happen at all.
I think the main issue with the game in its current state is that it has an inverted difficulty curve : at first it is very difficult and you rely mostly on luck, if you are able to deal with enemies it is great, but you are often stuck with enemies that you can't kill because there is no available match nearby. Rats are especially deadly in early games because they are really fast and decrease your max HP, so even if you get a healing skill such as "tap the source" it becomes useless. However, when you survive the early game and manage to have a nice build you become unstoppable.
Hum any skill that shuffles tiles (terraforming, survival instinct, fallout, etc...) will create new combinations, especially when paired with skills that increase the match probability (trump color, wildcard, fertility, etc...) and that will easily lead to almost infinite combos. Terraforming is especially insane with the skill that teleport you when matching a specific color, because you will teleport and shuffle tiles again and again.What will be a pain to balance now is that shuffling tiles became a necessity to survive because of the grey tiles, but in the end even with the miner skill once I started a combo I would clear the board.
Maybe putting a limit on the max HP could also help ? (As you can see in the screenshot, half my screen was filled with hearts, even if I picked offensive skills most of the time) I also had so much vampire touch that killing any enemy would instantly heal me completely. (not that it mattered at that point because I would clear the board almost every time) so maybe put a limit on the healing skills too.
Skills that deal damages, like poison trap and bows don't have a limit either, so after a while most enemies would die as soon as they moved xD
The second best skill in the game is "Good learner", because twice as many skills means that you get to completely overpowered combinations twice as fast, (careful study is pretty powerful for the same reason) and when you can reroll the skills a few times for each because of a few "gambler" it is really easy to break the game. However, the most game-breaking one is by far "Chaos", because it randomizes the color of skills : with this, any tile can one-shot enemies with a lot of poison, you can fully heal when stepping on any color, etc... It is one of my favorites because it makes most of the other skills more interesting, but it also completely breaks the game's balance at the moment.
As for the score issue, the "patience" skill plays a big part in it, because I could just double my score again and again hundreds of times and it grews exponentially, so maybe replacing it with a fixed amount of points would be a bit better to prevent extreme scores.
Yea, good points.
I know that "Chaos" is the source of all completely busted build but I don't want to change it, it's too much fun and hence the name, chaotic. The poison tiles (like all the step on effects) also do not affect flying enemies so even if you stack that up, there is also a good amount of enemies still posing a threat (and now even more deadly ones as all the additions were flying). Of course the other ranged damage dealers still work though.
I don't really mind the "Patience" increasing the score exponentially. It's more of an issue if you can continuously trigger it again and again.
I guess adding some max hp and skill stacking limits might be a good idea worth investigating. Also "Good learner" and "Gambler" might need to be toned down a bit too, they are indeed quite powerful in the long run.
Hmm, now it comes to my mind that I could add in a negative effect (like the ones on dailies) every 10 or 5 levels for example which also would make staying alive more and more difficult and also help on it not getting boring and stagnant. I might wanna play around with such for the next patch... π€
I agree with you, chaos is really fun ^^ Don't you think that the game would be even more interesting if it was activated by default ? That way each run would feel more unique.
Adding negative effects regularly seems like an excellent idea to keep the game challenging and interesting ! (Maybe after an active duration instead of levels to avoid penalizing people with the "careful study" skill and encourage players to be more aggressive ?)
One thing that I would really enjoy too is a clearer presentation for cumulative skills : for example instead of having "vampire touch" every time, have "vampire touch 2" when you pick it a second time, etc... that way it would be easier to track down if a skill is relevant or not on long runs. Also, it could also be easier to see on the left column if you present skills in a similar way instead of a never-ending list that continues off-screen. Of course the ideal way would be to get a new icon for each color when there is chaos, but you could have a line for poison skills for example, with a list : green poison 3, blue poison 1, orange poison 2, etc...
When leveling up, having this kind of presentation and screen cards that don't overlap the column on the left could bring a more tactical feel, because you could clearly see what you already have and pick new skills accordingly (it is especially useful on very long runs where you kind of lose track of what you got)
Putting a limit to offensive skills so that they can't appear again when they can already one shot every enemy could be cool too, because there is no need to have green poison 20 if no enemy has more than 10 HP for example. Same thing for healing skills and health upgrades if you put a limit on the max HP players can have.
Just uploaded a new patch with some new run killer enemies and the reset of multiplier when you get hit. Hopefully these changes will at least make it less likely to go infinite. Also, that negative 1 bil score did upload but just won't show up because the leaderboards only display the highest score per player. π