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)
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.
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).
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!
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.
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?
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... 🤔🤷♀️
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.
reaper is a tiny bit Overpowered in my opinion. 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)
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!
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?
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...
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 game They all seem really balanced, even if you get some skills that are deceptively OP
I'm looking at you Patience for massive scores and Patterns that let me kill a dragon with just matches
I'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 skill
I see lots of good things and ideas being put into this game and I'm truly wanting to stick around to see it!
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. 👍
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.
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. 😅 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)
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... 🤔
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.
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.
Haha yea, that’s 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. 🤔
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.
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.
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.
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. 🤷♀️
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.
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... 🤔
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. 😅
Not really a bug report but sometimes if you get an insane enough set of skills, the combo counter stops going up. Mine stopped at 46.
And also I would like to ask if the quit button would just kill your character instead of just ending the game because it doesn't track your score that way. I got a 97 million that I had to cut off early and it didn't save ;-;
Seeing no errors on that log. Do clue at all why the multiplier would stop increasing, I don't think there is any normal situation where that would happen. Might actually be that the skill triggered matches don't increase the multiplier. Everything that was coming from the top was just bricks at that point and you only kept going due to transforming em. And obviously no mobs there either to kill and increase the multiplier that way.
Damn even the brick tiles aren't enough to stop (almost) infinite combos like that with a good enough set of skills. Well it did come very close few times when almost all of the board was just bricks but you got kinda lucky with that cross transform skill.
Luck was definitely a factor but trump color for blue made it super likely for it to continue and preference for dodging to blue + wormhole making every teleport happen twice , which caused terraformer to activate twice and that spawning blues at an increased rate definitely meant that it would go on for a long time-
Uploaded a new patch with the die/submit on manual quit you suggested. Also added few new run killing enemies and other balancing fixes trying to make the runs not go infinite. Well, yeah just trying as it can still go nuts with the god like skill combinations like you had on that video. 😆
Yeah true. At first of course you can save these situations by matching tiles on the bottom of the board so that either you or the enemy gets repositioned. Of course this becomes an issue when you are on the bottom of the board (which should be avoided, even more so for corners). Teleport, voidwalker and other repositioning skills are a big help for surviving these.
The game freezes and you are unable to do anything and no enemies move if you level up too quickly? I don't know the exact reason but the pop up saying I leveled up happened but then no options popped up.
This happened on the downloaded version on Mac but I'm trying to see if I can get it on the browser too- since my score of about 80,000,000 didn't get saved when I quit either-
Other than that I've been a big fan of all the new skills and the new update and the game as a whole!
Oh damn! Sounds weird and hard to track down. If you do happen to encounter it again, please give me as much info as possible. Screenshot of the frozen state would be helpful too as even the skills might play a role here. I’ve played the game a lot for the past month or so and haven’t seen anything like that so it might even be something that happens as the game gets further along, you seem to be better at it than me. I’ve only broken the 1 mil barrier once.😅 Pretty sure it will happen in all versions though.
Now that I think about it a bit more, I’m pretty sure it is skill (pool) related as you saw the level up text. At that point the enemies do stop and your swapping is locked too. For some reason the game couldn’t come up with a set of skills to present to you and hence it freezes there. Hopefully I can track it down and get it solved. 🤞
Hey and a new idea after playing the daily (actually just paused and came to write this midst of if)! Remember if you encountered any wraiths on that run? They remove one random skill from you on hit and that might somehow be able to mess with the available skills pool. 🤔
Yeah I did have a few and I'm trying to remember if any were near me when the glitched happened, and there might've been which could've been part of the issue?
Did not find any correlation with the wraiths removing skills and getting the skill picks not appearing on next level ups. So it's still pretty much a mystery. Please let me know if you encounter it again and have some more on the scenario where it happens.
I might've gotten it again, Was playing the daily and it froze. And a similar thing happened where I could pause and resume but the problem continued, and quitting didn't save my score. I wasn't paying attention so I don't know if I leveled up multiple times, but I had just chosen a skill and the full exp bar makes me believe I did though. Last time it happened around level 45 if that helps somehow. This time happened with a tile selected too and I couldn't select any other tiles but hovering over skills and enemies still gave me their info.
Oh my, that's a scary looking board state. 🥶 But yeah, I'll keep investigating, seems like it has something to do with being high level (or at least having loads of skills). Yeah I bet it's stuck on the level up menu before somehow without showing the skill picks. Pause/quit and tooltips are working so it's not fully frozen but just waiting for the skill to be picked which you obviously can't do cause they aren't shown.
Oh and if it does happen yet again can you share me the log files from "~/Library/Logs/Antti Haavikko/Behacked " (you were on mac right)? Or if it was the most recent play it should still be there.
On the web version you could just open the console and check the most recent entries there to see if something went wrong...
Yeah, known and fixed issue. An update is coming in a bit over week with fixes and loads more content. Thanks for bug reporting anyway and obviously for playing too!
Love this game, and the few others of yours ive played! ive gotta through the backlog! Are you allowed to upload a separate "Post-7DRL version"? I want to play more of this but I keep running into the bugs that you say you've fixed... Either way, i'll be back when the jam is over!
Glad to hear! I've already done way more than just fix those bugs (balancing, new skills and other content too) so I think it'll have to wait until the jam is over.
Yea sorry about that! The tile movement gets stuck when you queue a swap and one of those tiles gets destroyed before the swap is executed. I've already fixed this bug but can't push an update before the jam rating period is over. Thanks for playing!
I have gotten to the point where it's not possible for me to die, but i can't match anything either due to a glitch that keeps happening where something will stay highlighted but i cannot select anything so i'm just sitting here watching everything die and choosing the same upgrades.
Dang, that sucks. Any hints on what was going on when it crashed so I could try to track the issue down and maybe fix it? I'm guessing a whole bunch of tiles (and enemies) getting destroyed in a big combo?
Yeah the queued swap getting stuck is super annoying bug and I've actually already fixed it but can't update the game until the jam rating period is over. And I will need to do some major balancing (and more content too) to get rid of these cases when the player can't really even fail anymore. Wasn't really planning for players to be that "good" and determined to fully break the game. 😅
i was just playing casually, it was my first time playing and a couple attempts in XD. Usually it is just the queued swap when I level up I think but other than that I don’t really know why it just happens but the concept of this game is really cool and I hope to see it grow
First, let me tell you that this is my new favorite game ! It is simple to understand but very captivating and I absolutely love the music (even when playing for a long time it doesn't get on my nerves at all).
FYI I noticed a few bugs that can completely ruin a run, and also a few broken combo that can just obliterate waves ad waves of enemies (very satisfying but waaaay overpowered)...
Game-Breaking bugs :
- Soft-lock when a tile is destroyed while in queue. You can't match anything and have to let your perks do the work for you
- Sometimes the tiles get stuck in queue for a few seconds before swapping, so the enemies move in the mean time and it can be useless. Also you have to wait for the queue to apply so you are defenseless and can die very easily.
- If you are "too good" with a completely overpowered skill combination the game can't keep up and freezes. (The music still worked though) For context, my combination was so overpowered that the game was playing itself for more than 20 minutes because new tiles were destroyed again and again, and I am pretty sure I had to be "lucky" for a bad enough layout to happen and stop that.
- There is indeed a big issue with orange tiles. For most games the initial layout isn't affected but after that orange tiles don't spawn at all until you pick the "trump color" perk that seem to fix spawn rates. I must admit that it is pretty amusing that the perk fixing orange tiles could be named after Donald Trump though 😂 it's like a random Easter egg made by coincidence.
Overpowered perks and combos :
- "Inner demon" is completely overpowered, because with only a x5 combo you can clear the board, and if you have good perks it is way too easy to do.
- With "Trump color" + "Wildcard" + "Fallout" on the exact same color you can get almost infinite combos where most of the board clears again and again.(until the game crashes of course) Without the "Inner demon" perk that kept resetting the combo I am pretty sure I would have had something like x400 or x500 when it crashed, and I was about to break the current world record by far.
Suggestions :
- Obviously, fix the bugs :-p
- Make the "inner demon" skill deal 1 damage to every enemy on the board instead of killing them instantly, it would still be powerful but not necessarily game breaking.
- Possibly remove the "wildcard" skill and/or the "trump color" skill, because if you combine the two it is way too easy to make long combos
- Add more and more tile colors the longer the game lasts, that way it will become harder to make long combos and break the game. The more colors you have the worst it gets for accessibility and colorblind people, but it probably can't be helped :-/
Keep up the good work ! I can't wait to play the final version of the game ! :-D
Yeah, will surely fix the bugs and do some balancing after the jam is completely over. The queued swap tile getting destroyed softlock seems to be the most annoying and common issue right now but at least it is something that'll be easily fixed too. I guess you still encountered some other missing null check case when those long combos are going on still.
Oh dang, I guess the orange tiles don't spawn after all. When this first was mentioned, I just checked the initial layout but of course that isn't the whole story. It's indeed the new tile spawning where orange is missing. I'm pretty sure it was due to introduction of the trump color skill and refactoring the color picking code at that point. Otherwise I would probably have noticed it during dev testings. Nice catch! 👍
The skill is not named after Trump (I guess you noticed that it turns your character orange and gives you a yellow hair piece) but kinda the other way around. As I was thinking of a name for the skill, the Finnish term for trump (a power suit in many card games), "valtti" came to mind. I couldn't even remember the English word for it so I had to do a bit of searching. Well the results were that of course and I wasn't even sure if I wanted to use that term anymore at all. Didn't come up with anything better so I decided to keep it with the visual representation easter egg.
Yeah something is wrong with the enemy turns sometimes. It somehow gets stuck to "enemy turn" even though none of em is moving and obviously can cause some annoying deaths. This thing was noticed during the dev week too but wasn't a huge priority as it kinda solves itself out after all the enemies have moved again and there were a lot more important stuff to fix near the end of the jam. 😅
Yup, something needs to be done to inner demon. Sadly It's just too fun good. Damage cap instead of fully killing is at least something that must be done but I think even increasing the multi combo point might need a bit of a bump too. I could of course lock some too good skill pairs so that once you got one, other wouldn't be offered anymore but dunno if that would be going too far to playing the fun police. And I'm sure I'll be introducing more broken skills too, I still have a list of about 30 ones I didn't get to implement yet. 😆
Wildcard is too fun in a brain melting and accident inducing way to get rid of. I have some ideas how to make the infinite comboing stop. As one might notice, Tetris Attack (and such) is a big inspiration and it has these stone blocks that player needs to break with a connecting match. I did think of somehow introducing them (even some of those skills I had already todo listed mentioned them) and they'd be the perfect tool for blocking the infinite combos. Incrementally increasing the spawn rate of such instead of a normal tile the longer the combo is going on. This would also make the row/column clearers and other such AoE destroy skills more valuable.
My pleasure ! :-D This game is amazing and has the potential to become a masterpiece if you push it further ! You revisited match-3 games in a very clever way and the rogue-like mechanics work really well.
I know that the skill was named after a trump card and not Donald Trump, but I thought it was funny because the only color with issues is the orange one !
I forgot to mention it, but I am pretty sure every time the queue got stuck there was a bird enemy on the map (that could then run away or kill me if it happened when I am in front of it). Maybe because it moves pretty fast compared to other enemies ?
Inner demon is sooo satisfying, but it also kind of spoils the challenge. However in the current version it became mandatory at some point with so many enemies spawning.
I think locking a skill when you get the other one would probably feel unfair for the player and kind of ruin the fun. That's why I suggested adding more colors, because the more you have the harder it is to make infinite combos even with powerful skill combinations. But the neutral tiles is a good idea too ! They're not incompatible so maybe both then ? I guess with these solutions you will just have to be careful and check that the player cannot get soft-lock with no match possibility at all because that would be very frustrating to clear the board and be punished for it.
30 new skills !? :-D I love this game more and more !
I hate the cocatrix though xD I had around 150 HP at lvl 70, but one spawned on the tile next to mine and one-shot me before I could do anything because I didn't have the possibility to get rid of it immediately. :-p
Do you plan to add new enemies as well ? There are a lot of possibilities with fantasy bestiaries !
Oh yeah true, neutral tiles could easily force player to a state where no matches can be found anymore. I did think of even adding a check for such and resetting the board but at its current state it felt like it would pretty much never happen.
More enemies definitely too but I pretty much exhausted what I had planned already. Of course easy enough to come up with more though. Good thing I managed to capture the scary nature of cockatricke then. 😅 Those things were like the bane of my existence back in the day when I was getting started playing NetHack.
I think the reason for the issue with getting stuck on enemy turn must be some already dead enemy still being on the list when it's doing their movements or something. Of course the bird (which is a bat by the way) could have something to do with it too.
Is Orange not spawning an intended feature? Orange-related upgrades feels pretty useless. Also I recommend highlighting selected tile differently to hovered tile - sometimes my clicks are not registered properly and the UI failed to convey that.
I think a turn-based mode should be implemented in addition to the real-time mode. It helps new player to study enemies and understand game mechanics. For example, I died because I 'angered the gods', but I did not even know what happened.
Orange tiles are spawning, just had to check too. 😆 You even killed yourself with em since "angered the gods" death message is from the match orange and damage everything (including yourself) skill. The death replay was added exactly for this reason as I often was quite unsure how I had died during dev testing.
Yeah agreed on the hilite/select style. And even the queued swap style is too close to my liking really.
I've stated this before and still think that turn based wouldn't really be the same game at all. Especially as just a "mode". Hmm, I can't even think of a single real time action game that has a turn based mode. 🤔 Sure it would ease the learning and could serve as a tutorial but in true roguelike fashion, the "tutorial" is dying and learning from your mistakes.
I played again today. Still no Orange spawned (not at game start but after game started when tiles got destroyed and refilled, in case I was not specific enough).
I also don't think I killed myself with Orange tiles because that was one of the few games I cleared all Orange tiles very early. I have always been meticulous not to choose any power-ups that randomizes tiles, but I think I did have the randomize power-up colours perk.
Yes, I did try to watch the death replay, but it was so small I could not make out what powers I used before I died. I suggest, in addition to a larger replay screen, a textual log of what happened; the skill names above the character overlap and can be rather difficult to read.
But of course the queuing bug is the first priority. May my feedback be helpful at all :).
Very fun! Feels like a super polished product, pretty impressive work for one week. I enjoy the frantic time-pressure, but it does mean that I'm not really being strategic with how I choose my matches or paying attention to using my upgrades: I'm just taking any matches I can get. Also I believe this has been reported, but I did end my run with a bug: I queued a swap while stuff was clearing, and one of the tiles I had queued got cleared, then I was stuck with only one tile "selected" and unable to interact with the tiles anymore.
Thanks! ❤️ Yeah the queued swap tile getting destroy bug is known. I will for sure fix it after the jam rating period is over and we're fully allowed to update the games. I also have a plethora of more skills and enemies still on my todo list that I just didn't have time to add during the week. Will also have to do a bit of balancing now after I've heard from players.
Well yeah, the time pressure thing and just matching anything is surely a way to play but it's leaving the success a bit to luck then. You just gotta remember the skills you have (at least the key ones) and try to focus on playing accordingly. I don't really succeed with all the time either but it's very satisfying when you do it and skip a match just to wait until they move to next tile so you can cleave them for example.
REALLY LOVE IT, doesn't need to be turnbased. Often get stuck matching tiles that have already been destroyed. U get softlocked and have to restart the game.
Yes, if you queue (or even just press a piece that gets destroyed) and either/both of them get destroyed I'm no longer able to match pieces. I wish I could right click to cancel selection/queue.
Oh dang right. I think I added just a null check there (but didn't clear the queued swap) so now it doesn't crash but instead soft locks you. Better than flat out crashing I guess though as you will still be able to submit your score at least. 😅 It'll be an easy fix but I have to think whether or not I can do it or not now that the jam rating period is active. Manual clearing will be an easy addition too but that will at least have to wait until the jam is fully over. Nice feature too, I myself have also encountered some queued swaps that I would have liked to cancel after looking at it more carefully while the combo was going on.
nice game! I loved playing do;MIN(0) and this game definitely captures the same feeling with a nice, easy to learn, and chaotic puzzle game.
tbh a lot of the fun with these games for me is figuring out how to score higher than was probably intended. here's my personal strategy for that. if you get the inner demon upgrade and the blink upgrade then enemies won't build up and if enemies ever get near you it's pretty easy to teleport out of there. at that point you can just focus on clearing as many tiles as you can. pick the upgrades that will make it easier to clear a large amount of tiles (especially the upgrade that makes two colors count as the same color); you don't really need to care about damage upgrades after getting inner demon. if there aren't any upgrades that help clear tiles, then pick upgrades that give you more health, and definitely pick the upgrade that lets you choose two upgrades. if you use this strat then the game is all about reflexes and matching tiles as soon as you see them so you can get x5 combos. eventually I got to the point where I'd have to wait like a minute just for my combo to end. I scored above 150k but then the game crashed (I was using the Window's download). I tried playing the web version to replicate that so I could get on the leaderboard but then that crashed at 6k points lol. fun game tho.
What an awesome game! It's chaotic but very fun and the music makes it even more enjoyable.
I think Inner demon is completely OP after a few levels, it pretty much took care of all enemies so I didn't even have to focus on them.
Also the web version crashed every time I got to ~6000 points, with the message "Table index is out of bounds", so I had to use the Windows build, and now I have two highscores :/
Hmm, I think I got the "table index out of bounds" issue fixed. And yeah, I'm starting to think that the multi reset "nerf" in "inner demon" isn't quite enough and it is indeed quite OP. But OP stuff is fun though... 😅 Just gotta make everything as OP as that.
It is fun, it's great the way it is. I was just missing a lot of the content (the late-game enemies) because I kept getting 5x combos. I didn't mean to complain :)
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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 😁
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... 🤔🤷♀️
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)! 😅
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. 👍
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! ❤️
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. 👍
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! 👍
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. 😅 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... 🤔
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, that’s 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. 🤔
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 😉
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! ❤️
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. 🤷♀️
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... 🤔
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. 😅
Heya, It's me again
Not really a bug report but sometimes if you get an insane enough set of skills, the combo counter stops going up. Mine stopped at 46.
And also I would like to ask if the quit button would just kill your character instead of just ending the game because it doesn't track your score that way. I got a 97 million that I had to cut off early and it didn't save ;-;
Here's the Log of It
And a really bad quality video I threw together that explains some of it and shows it off
Good idea! I'll add that for the next patch. 👍
Seeing no errors on that log. Do clue at all why the multiplier would stop increasing, I don't think there is any normal situation where that would happen. Might actually be that the skill triggered matches don't increase the multiplier. Everything that was coming from the top was just bricks at that point and you only kept going due to transforming em. And obviously no mobs there either to kill and increase the multiplier that way.
Damn even the brick tiles aren't enough to stop (almost) infinite combos like that with a good enough set of skills. Well it did come very close few times when almost all of the board was just bricks but you got kinda lucky with that cross transform skill.
Luck was definitely a factor but trump color for blue made it super likely for it to continue and preference for dodging to blue + wormhole making every teleport happen twice , which caused terraformer to activate twice and that spawning blues at an increased rate definitely meant that it would go on for a long time-
Uploaded a new patch with the die/submit on manual quit you suggested. Also added few new run killing enemies and other balancing fixes trying to make the runs not go infinite. Well, yeah just trying as it can still go nuts with the god like skill combinations like you had on that video. 😆
This game has a serious difficulty curve, sometimes you get stuck with an enemy next to you and you can't match to kill them
Yeah true. At first of course you can save these situations by matching tiles on the bottom of the board so that either you or the enemy gets repositioned. Of course this becomes an issue when you are on the bottom of the board (which should be avoided, even more so for corners). Teleport, voidwalker and other repositioning skills are a big help for surviving these.
A bit of a new bug report for the new update-
The game freezes and you are unable to do anything and no enemies move if you level up too quickly? I don't know the exact reason but the pop up saying I leveled up happened but then no options popped up.
This happened on the downloaded version on Mac but I'm trying to see if I can get it on the browser too- since my score of about 80,000,000 didn't get saved when I quit either-
Other than that I've been a big fan of all the new skills and the new update and the game as a whole!
Oh damn! Sounds weird and hard to track down. If you do happen to encounter it again, please give me as much info as possible. Screenshot of the frozen state would be helpful too as even the skills might play a role here. I’ve played the game a lot for the past month or so and haven’t seen anything like that so it might even be something that happens as the game gets further along, you seem to be better at it than me. I’ve only broken the 1 mil barrier once.😅 Pretty sure it will happen in all versions though.
Now that I think about it a bit more, I’m pretty sure it is skill (pool) related as you saw the level up text. At that point the enemies do stop and your swapping is locked too. For some reason the game couldn’t come up with a set of skills to present to you and hence it freezes there. Hopefully I can track it down and get it solved. 🤞
Hey and a new idea after playing the daily (actually just paused and came to write this midst of if)! Remember if you encountered any wraiths on that run? They remove one random skill from you on hit and that might somehow be able to mess with the available skills pool. 🤔
Yeah I did have a few and I'm trying to remember if any were near me when the glitched happened, and there might've been which could've been part of the issue?
At least that is a straight forward thing I can investigate and try to replicate. And if it is indeed the source, should be an easy(ish) fix too.
Did not find any correlation with the wraiths removing skills and getting the skill picks not appearing on next level ups. So it's still pretty much a mystery. Please let me know if you encounter it again and have some more on the scenario where it happens.
Oh my, that's a scary looking board state. 🥶 But yeah, I'll keep investigating, seems like it has something to do with being high level (or at least having loads of skills). Yeah I bet it's stuck on the level up menu before somehow without showing the skill picks. Pause/quit and tooltips are working so it's not fully frozen but just waiting for the skill to be picked which you obviously can't do cause they aren't shown.
Oh and if it does happen yet again can you share me the log files from "~/Library/Logs/Antti Haavikko/Behacked " (you were on mac right)? Or if it was the most recent play it should still be there.
On the web version you could just open the console and check the most recent entries there to see if something went wrong...
Sometimes, you just lose because of glitches where a match "gets stuck"
In this image, I can't match any tiles, because the yellow tile at G7 is trying to match with a tile that got destroyed during a combo.
Yeah, known and fixed issue. An update is coming in a bit over week with fixes and loads more content. Thanks for bug reporting anyway and obviously for playing too!
Love this game, and the few others of yours ive played! ive gotta through the backlog! Are you allowed to upload a separate "Post-7DRL version"? I want to play more of this but I keep running into the bugs that you say you've fixed... Either way, i'll be back when the jam is over!
Glad to hear! I've already done way more than just fix those bugs (balancing, new skills and other content too) so I think it'll have to wait until the jam is over.
very exciting! super looking forward to seeing what you've got!
I was doing good but at some point the click and drag just stopped working.
Yea sorry about that! The tile movement gets stuck when you queue a swap and one of those tiles gets destroyed before the swap is executed. I've already fixed this bug but can't push an update before the jam rating period is over. Thanks for playing!
I have gotten to the point where it's not possible for me to die, but i can't match anything either due to a glitch that keeps happening where something will stay highlighted but i cannot select anything so i'm just sitting here watching everything die and choosing the same upgrades.
at level 75 577363 score, it crashed
Dang, that sucks. Any hints on what was going on when it crashed so I could try to track the issue down and maybe fix it? I'm guessing a whole bunch of tiles (and enemies) getting destroyed in a big combo?
Yeah the queued swap getting stuck is super annoying bug and I've actually already fixed it but can't update the game until the jam rating period is over. And I will need to do some major balancing (and more content too) to get rid of these cases when the player can't really even fail anymore. Wasn't really planning for players to be that "good" and determined to fully break the game. 😅
i was just playing casually, it was my first time playing and a couple attempts in XD. Usually it is just the queued swap when I level up I think but other than that I don’t really know why it just happens but the concept of this game is really cool and I hope to see it grow
Hello !
First, let me tell you that this is my new favorite game ! It is simple to understand but very captivating and I absolutely love the music (even when playing for a long time it doesn't get on my nerves at all).
FYI I noticed a few bugs that can completely ruin a run, and also a few broken combo that can just obliterate waves ad waves of enemies (very satisfying but waaaay overpowered)...
Game-Breaking bugs :
- Soft-lock when a tile is destroyed while in queue. You can't match anything and have to let your perks do the work for you
- Sometimes the tiles get stuck in queue for a few seconds before swapping, so the enemies move in the mean time and it can be useless. Also you have to wait for the queue to apply so you are defenseless and can die very easily.
- If you are "too good" with a completely overpowered skill combination the game can't keep up and freezes. (The music still worked though) For context, my combination was so overpowered that the game was playing itself for more than 20 minutes because new tiles were destroyed again and again, and I am pretty sure I had to be "lucky" for a bad enough layout to happen and stop that.
- There is indeed a big issue with orange tiles. For most games the initial layout isn't affected but after that orange tiles don't spawn at all until you pick the "trump color" perk that seem to fix spawn rates. I must admit that it is pretty amusing that the perk fixing orange tiles could be named after Donald Trump though 😂 it's like a random Easter egg made by coincidence.
Overpowered perks and combos :
- "Inner demon" is completely overpowered, because with only a x5 combo you can clear the board, and if you have good perks it is way too easy to do.
- With "Trump color" + "Wildcard" + "Fallout" on the exact same color you can get almost infinite combos where most of the board clears again and again.(until the game crashes of course) Without the "Inner demon" perk that kept resetting the combo I am pretty sure I would have had something like x400 or x500 when it crashed, and I was about to break the current world record by far.
Suggestions :
- Obviously, fix the bugs :-p
- Make the "inner demon" skill deal 1 damage to every enemy on the board instead of killing them instantly, it would still be powerful but not necessarily game breaking.
- Possibly remove the "wildcard" skill and/or the "trump color" skill, because if you combine the two it is way too easy to make long combos
- Add more and more tile colors the longer the game lasts, that way it will become harder to make long combos and break the game. The more colors you have the worst it gets for accessibility and colorblind people, but it probably can't be helped :-/
Keep up the good work ! I can't wait to play the final version of the game ! :-D
Nice, thanks for the lengthy feedback! ❤️
Yeah, will surely fix the bugs and do some balancing after the jam is completely over. The queued swap tile getting destroyed softlock seems to be the most annoying and common issue right now but at least it is something that'll be easily fixed too. I guess you still encountered some other missing null check case when those long combos are going on still.
Oh dang, I guess the orange tiles don't spawn after all. When this first was mentioned, I just checked the initial layout but of course that isn't the whole story. It's indeed the new tile spawning where orange is missing. I'm pretty sure it was due to introduction of the trump color skill and refactoring the color picking code at that point. Otherwise I would probably have noticed it during dev testings. Nice catch! 👍
The skill is not named after Trump (I guess you noticed that it turns your character orange and gives you a yellow hair piece) but kinda the other way around. As I was thinking of a name for the skill, the Finnis
h term for trump (a power suit in many card games), "valtti" came to mind. I couldn't even remember the English word for it so I had to do a bit of searching. Well the results were that of course and I wasn't even sure if I wanted to use that term anymore at all. Didn't come up with anything better so I decided to keep it with the visual representation easter egg.Yeah something is wrong with the enemy turns sometimes. It somehow gets stuck to "enemy turn" even though none of em is moving and obviously can cause some annoying deaths. This thing was noticed during the dev week too but wasn't a huge priority as it kinda solves itself out after all the enemies have moved again and there were a lot more important stuff to fix near the end of the jam. 😅
Yup, something needs to be done to inner demon. Sadly It's just too
fungood. Damage cap instead of fully killing is at least something that must be done but I think even increasing the multi combo point might need a bit of a bump too. I could of course lock some too good skill pairs so that once you got one, other wouldn't be offered anymore but dunno if that would be going too far to playing the fun police. And I'm sure I'll be introducing more broken skills too, I still have a list of about 30 ones I didn't get to implement yet. 😆Wildcard is too fun in a brain melting and accident inducing way to get rid of. I have some ideas how to make the infinite comboing stop. As one might notice, Tetris Attack (and such) is a big inspiration and it has these stone blocks that player needs to break with a connecting match. I did think of somehow introducing them (even some of those skills I had already todo listed mentioned them) and they'd be the perfect tool for blocking the infinite combos. Incrementally increasing the spawn rate of such instead of a normal tile the longer the combo is going on. This would also make the row/column clearers and other such AoE destroy skills more valuable.
Thanks again for the feedback! ❤️
My pleasure ! :-D This game is amazing and has the potential to become a masterpiece if you push it further ! You revisited match-3 games in a very clever way and the rogue-like mechanics work really well.
I know that the skill was named after a trump card and not Donald Trump, but I thought it was funny because the only color with issues is the orange one !
I forgot to mention it, but I am pretty sure every time the queue got stuck there was a bird enemy on the map (that could then run away or kill me if it happened when I am in front of it). Maybe because it moves pretty fast compared to other enemies ?
Inner demon is sooo satisfying, but it also kind of spoils the challenge. However in the current version it became mandatory at some point with so many enemies spawning.
I think locking a skill when you get the other one would probably feel unfair for the player and kind of ruin the fun. That's why I suggested adding more colors, because the more you have the harder it is to make infinite combos even with powerful skill combinations. But the neutral tiles is a good idea too ! They're not incompatible so maybe both then ? I guess with these solutions you will just have to be careful and check that the player cannot get soft-lock with no match possibility at all because that would be very frustrating to clear the board and be punished for it.
30 new skills !? :-D I love this game more and more !
I hate the cocatrix though xD I had around 150 HP at lvl 70, but one spawned on the tile next to mine and one-shot me before I could do anything because I didn't have the possibility to get rid of it immediately. :-p
Do you plan to add new enemies as well ? There are a lot of possibilities with fantasy bestiaries !
Have a nice day.
Oh yeah true, neutral tiles could easily force player to a state where no matches can be found anymore. I did think of even adding a check for such and resetting the board but at its current state it felt like it would pretty much never happen.
More enemies definitely too but I pretty much exhausted what I had planned already. Of course easy enough to come up with more though. Good thing I managed to capture the scary nature of cockatricke then. 😅 Those things were like the bane of my existence back in the day when I was getting started playing NetHack.
I think the reason for the issue with getting stuck on enemy turn must be some already dead enemy still being on the list when it's doing their movements or something. Of course the bird (which is a bat by the way) could have something to do with it too.
"The bane of my existence" seems like a fair enough description ! xD I never liked them in any game.
My bad I meant bat but wrote bird !
Anyway, if at some point you need help beta-testing the next versions just let me know and I'll be happy to help you when I have time :-)
Is Orange not spawning an intended feature? Orange-related upgrades feels pretty useless. Also I recommend highlighting selected tile differently to hovered tile - sometimes my clicks are not registered properly and the UI failed to convey that.
I think a turn-based mode should be implemented in addition to the real-time mode. It helps new player to study enemies and understand game mechanics. For example, I died because I 'angered the gods', but I did not even know what happened.
Orange tiles are spawning, just had to check too. 😆 You even killed yourself with em since "angered the gods" death message is from the match orange and damage everything (including yourself) skill. The death replay was added exactly for this reason as I often was quite unsure how I had died during dev testing.
Yeah agreed on the hilite/select style. And even the queued swap style is too close to my liking really.
I've stated this before and still think that turn based wouldn't really be the same game at all. Especially as just a "mode". Hmm, I can't even think of a single real time action game that has a turn based mode. 🤔 Sure it would ease the learning and could serve as a tutorial but in true roguelike fashion, the "tutorial" is dying and learning from your mistakes.
Sorry for the late reply.
I played again today. Still no Orange spawned (not at game start but after game started when tiles got destroyed and refilled, in case I was not specific enough).
I also don't think I killed myself with Orange tiles because that was one of the few games I cleared all Orange tiles very early. I have always been meticulous not to choose any power-ups that randomizes tiles, but I think I did have the randomize power-up colours perk.
Yes, I did try to watch the death replay, but it was so small I could not make out what powers I used before I died. I suggest, in addition to a larger replay screen, a textual log of what happened; the skill names above the character overlap and can be rather difficult to read.
But of course the queuing bug is the first priority. May my feedback be helpful at all :).
how to beat dragon
Same as everything else really. You will either need some damaging or dodge distupting skills or destoy all nine tiles under/around it with one move.
what if someone was able to defeat dragon without match affecting skills?
Bragging rights I guess 😁
Very fun! Feels like a super polished product, pretty impressive work for one week. I enjoy the frantic time-pressure, but it does mean that I'm not really being strategic with how I choose my matches or paying attention to using my upgrades: I'm just taking any matches I can get. Also I believe this has been reported, but I did end my run with a bug: I queued a swap while stuff was clearing, and one of the tiles I had queued got cleared, then I was stuck with only one tile "selected" and unable to interact with the tiles anymore.
Thanks! ❤️ Yeah the queued swap tile getting destroy bug is known. I will for sure fix it after the jam rating period is over and we're fully allowed to update the games. I also have a plethora of more skills and enemies still on my todo list that I just didn't have time to add during the week. Will also have to do a bit of balancing now after I've heard from players.
Well yeah, the time pressure thing and just matching anything is surely a way to play but it's leaving the success a bit to luck then. You just gotta remember the skills you have (at least the key ones) and try to focus on playing accordingly. I don't really succeed with all the time either but it's very satisfying when you do it and skip a match just to wait until they move to next tile so you can cleave them for example.
Fun so far but the green and yellow look to similar
This is a great idea for a game. I like how you’ve added time pressure here, brings some excitement to the matches!
I do find the blur effect on a swap a bit hard on the eyes, though.
REALLY LOVE IT, doesn't need to be turnbased. Often get stuck matching tiles that have already been destroyed. U get softlocked and have to restart the game.
Edit: First place on leaderboard lol
Edit2: Beaten by Hong Kong :'(
Nicely done! 👍 And bit of a gap to others too. Lets see how long it lasts.
You mean when you've queued two tiles to swap and either of them gets destroyed before the actual swap? I'm pretty sure I've fixed that now.
Yes, if you queue (or even just press a piece that gets destroyed) and either/both of them get destroyed I'm no longer able to match pieces. I wish I could right click to cancel selection/queue.
Oh dang right. I think I added just a null check there (but didn't clear the queued swap) so now it doesn't crash but instead soft locks you. Better than flat out crashing I guess though as you will still be able to submit your score at least. 😅 It'll be an easy fix but I have to think whether or not I can do it or not now that the jam rating period is active. Manual clearing will be an easy addition too but that will at least have to wait until the jam is fully over. Nice feature too, I myself have also encountered some queued swaps that I would have liked to cancel after looking at it more carefully while the combo was going on.
Also, out of curiosity. About what level were you on your #1 run and did you have "inner demon" skill?
Haha, yes! I got stuck because of the softlock bug, so inner demon carried me immensely since I no longer could match pieces.
The combo was mostly teleport on hit + recolor ground on move + break all of one color on hit + wildcard + inner demon + blink dodge.
(+ a billion of the "1 damage to enemies moving to these spots"
Aside from the game randomly crashing because of an error, it's not a bad game.
I'd like it more if it was turn-based.
looks very cool! sadly i got an error while playing :(
https://pastebin.com/3PXwEd92 here it is
I think I've managed to fix this issue now.
nice game! I loved playing do;MIN(0) and this game definitely captures the same feeling with a nice, easy to learn, and chaotic puzzle game.
tbh a lot of the fun with these games for me is figuring out how to score higher than was probably intended. here's my personal strategy for that. if you get the inner demon upgrade and the blink upgrade then enemies won't build up and if enemies ever get near you it's pretty easy to teleport out of there. at that point you can just focus on clearing as many tiles as you can. pick the upgrades that will make it easier to clear a large amount of tiles (especially the upgrade that makes two colors count as the same color); you don't really need to care about damage upgrades after getting inner demon. if there aren't any upgrades that help clear tiles, then pick upgrades that give you more health, and definitely pick the upgrade that lets you choose two upgrades. if you use this strat then the game is all about reflexes and matching tiles as soon as you see them so you can get x5 combos. eventually I got to the point where I'd have to wait like a minute just for my combo to end. I scored above 150k but then the game crashed (I was using the Window's download). I tried playing the web version to replicate that so I could get on the leaderboard but then that crashed at 6k points lol. fun game tho.
Yea you pretty much nailed the optimal tactic. Inner demon also has a downfall of capping you max multi to x5 so it’s not _that_ op.
What an awesome game! It's chaotic but very fun and the music makes it even more enjoyable.
I think Inner demon is completely OP after a few levels, it pretty much took care of all enemies so I didn't even have to focus on them.
Also the web version crashed every time I got to ~6000 points, with the message "Table index is out of bounds", so I had to use the Windows build, and now I have two highscores :/
Really good job!
Yea, there seems to be some null checks missing unfortunately.
inner demon also resets your multiplier so it’s not that good for scoring.
Thanks for playing and good job at already surpassing me on the leaderboards. 👍
Hmm, I think I got the "table index out of bounds" issue fixed. And yeah, I'm starting to think that the multi reset "nerf" in "inner demon" isn't quite enough and it is indeed quite OP. But OP stuff is fun though... 😅 Just gotta make everything as OP as that.
It is fun, it's great the way it is. I was just missing a lot of the content (the late-game enemies) because I kept getting 5x combos. I didn't mean to complain :)