I have been playing too much this gem of a game. It is time for me to take a break from it.
Sometimes when you start off a good run it can go for hours before the curses catch up with you, a death of a thousand cuts that can go on forever. I would love to see a menu screen where I could either save my progress and continue later or can give up (submit my score) ... also add some sound controls there too :)
Ignoring scope constraints, instead of simply "give up" maybe there could be some sort of "go to siege" button or something similar that would send you to a super hard, impossible to win level, which offers massive points with every step that you take.
I'm starting my summer vacation from my "real" work today so time to start working on the 1.6 patch. Lets see if that can entice you to return... 😅
I have some new feature ideas and that siege idea sounds pretty neat too. Might play around with it to see if it'd be cool. I don't really like how the runs can actually start taking multiple hours. And of course there are loads of bugs to fix too including the corner case ones reported by you that still remain.
I'd also like to hear your opinion on the green gems. I kinda still avoid them myself when possible as they can kinda trap you. But I'd like to make them more viable and enticing options. Got any ideas?
It won't take much effort to entice me. There are games that I have paid 10-15EUR and I have played them much less than this one. I believe that it has potential.
Regarding the greens here are some thoughts:
- It is ok for not all gems to be desirable from the start. Navigating around the green rarely poses a problem (for an experienced player).
- In later stages, when curse chests start appearing, green can be helpful to complete the stage while avoiding opening such chests (maybe a shopkeeper can offer the service to remove relics, Cavalry is one of those good until it becomes bad, kind of relics).
- Maybe not directly changing green gem, but adding more use cases where green can be useful would add extra depth.
Here are some ideas:
Fragile tiles - tiles that can be used only once, and then they disappear from your deck
Dangerous spots - makes tiles placed on them fragile. Similar to the sacrificial spots, but the placed tile remains in use for that level.
Extra-dangerous spots - Walking on a tile placed on such spot will break the tile. An extra challenge combo-breaker that you need to plan how to finish the level without stepping on it too many times.
"Wild beasts" that walk on empty spots - Similar to brutes, they damage you when you pass by, use your tiles to "pen" them so that you can continue playing undisturbed.
Change scenery - after XX levels, the background changes and some gems have different effects(?)
These are the ideas that come to me when I think: "I have a gem that creates tiles and has map control, when can it be useful?". I am sure that you can think of others as well. I have been amazed by your creativity, and when you ask for my suggestions I feel very honored.
The RNG in the daily is not as deterministic as initially thought.
I was worried that my score was so low in comparison to others, so I tried to find my mistake and load the daily in a new browser. Surprisingly, reloading the game in incognito can give you different starting deck. Examples:
Sorry for bombarding you with bug reports. Let me know if I should stop.
Today I got stuck in a shop. I knew that going there I would be blocked by heretics from going anywhere else. My plan was: 1) enter the shop, 2) buy something, 3) place a tile in one of the inaccessible spots 4) make use of the sin relic for an extra turn 5) place a tile in the last remaining inaccessible spot 6) win the level. What I believe that we are seeing is that reaching the tile with the shop the sin relic was activated before finishing the shop interaction (I guess)
Nah, all good, thanks for reporting these! Fortunately this one too is a very much corner case (though annoying one) but I will try to replicate and fix it for the next patch. Something is indeed going quite wrong there and I guess as you suspected that SIN is not waiting for you to stop shopping and triggers the level ending too. Weird how the HP bar is not displaying at all anymore and how the whole level blinks out when you try to select something (I guess). And the shop isn't showing the exit option either...
neither the points or the shop prices were shown...
One thing that doesn't sit well with the rest is that SIN should only activate after I place a tile that I can't access - step 3) in the above plan, but in this case we see the problem already before step 2)
I have noticed that potions are drinkable at all times. Today I attempted to use the healing potion after getting stuck, while the lighting bolts were raining down on the remaining empty spaces. The idea was that if I time it right, I could heal more than if I used the potion before the end of my turn. While I was able to pull it off, apparently, the game had already decided that my hp at the end of the turn was less than all the damage to be received, so it killed me anyway. May I suggest that the hp>0 check is done at the end of the lighting bolts animation?
I am sure that other Casual Crusade pro gamers would appreciate it :)
I am having too much fun with this game! New build strategy - if you get enough red gems and raise your max hp high enough, it pays off to purposefully block yourself from playing more chests, especially if they are cursed.
A few bugs worth mentioning:
The description of relics that involve gems are messed up. It is something new from today. For example, Smite mentions "Khan legacy", while the text remains red and the effect is on red gems.
I believe I had a case where I was standing next to a red gem, a brute came next to me, they stepped on the gem, died, and then I received 1 damage from them.
Good catch, the "static color" relic descriptions were indeed messed up. This was regression from the relic color seeding issue fix from the last patch. The second one isn't really a bug as they kinda happen at the same time but I think it might make more sense to change it so that smiting would stop the damage from happening too.
Another simultaneous interaction that doesn't behave as expected: Having the relic for healing when stepping on red, when you pass by a brute just before stepping on the red, the healing does not trigger - only the damage from the brute.
Not a bug, but an edge case suggestion - make cavalry relic (open chests with blanks) to work on picking crosses in boss fights. It is a marginal improvement, but can save runs ... like mine from today
Huh, weird. It keeps showing red for me in the menu view but actual run is yellow then. And it seems to do the same consistently every time I refresh it too. Have you noticed skill colors not lining up properly in the past dailies?
Well this was a bit of a weird one. Seems like Chrome and Firefox have a bit different sorting algorithms which caused the initial green/red difference for me and you. I was also generating the list in wrong order (for daily menu view and the actual game that already is basically staring in the background at that point) and the actual game ones affected the "allowed" colors for the menu generation. But now both of these issues are fixed and the daily mods should preview correctly and be consistent on all browsers.
Hey. This is the second time I get stuck on that "alternative dimension" This time I opened a new browser and recorded the same run.
It is not related to my previous ascension because the problem happens with a new account as well. It must be expecting me to place a tile, but the board is already completed
Inexplicable death to the first boss today. Just picked the chest with the cross and died. Judging by the similar score, I suspect that @Rafitko might have had the same issue.
before I reach I usually always try to shuffle the tiles so that I have options available later.
I think this particular time, I had 3 tiles (from Fibonacci) I placed a purple gem tile so it swapped out one of my options. I am guessing that when the boss jumps and all tiles are reshuffled, the people gem activated a second time and it swapped out the other tile as well...
Just a small thing, the cross disappeared for some reason, I needed a moment to find it.
Later the Brutes decided to huddle together until they died after moving.
I have a question regarding the endgame. What am I doing wrong? My runs could go on forever, but I'm usually ending them after several hours because sleeps important 😅 I've collected multiple mouldy keys and grails but nothing happens? In one daily run I managed to go to that different level, but I don't remember what I might have done differently than in normal runs. I'd think that after getting so far I'd finally reach the end.
I don't know what happened with the first altar, there was a quick text effect that I couldn't read fast enough and then I continued playing.
I was carrying a second moldy key and 2 grails for multiple levels, not sure if that was intended.
My only problem from today's run - can dailies count as part of the regular leaderboard as well? I am afraid my 66 G will be lost in the many pages of the dailies chronologies.
Suggestion for a new curse: "the number of the beast" - if your score contains the digits 666 next to each other, you receive damage and another curse.
It is an amazing game, my friend. You could develop something full fledged from this idea.
I think your first one might have been a broken one. It depends on which alt world version you're in and wether you have the grail or not.
I don't plan on merging the leaderboards really as I've intentionally made daily modifiers that can completely change the game and scoring. But I've been thinking of adding like a all time statistics leaderboard or something along those lines so that doing well wouldn't be that much lost forever.
And obviously you do get to keep the hat and the wings! Kinda why I added that today's modifier. Like a "bit" of a nudge for people achieving it. But still not too easy to pull off. I was eagerly waiting for this one to appear. And then I completely botched my own run... 😅
That's a pretty neat curse idea. Fits thematically and not too oppressive yet still having some effect.
You are very correct about the leaderboards. Some daily modifiers are small enough to be negligible, but I am sure that people would prefer to have a separate leaderboard for "clean" runs.
And yes, I will proudly wear my "hat" and wings now
If you are still interested in some edge cases bugs, here are some from today's daily:
1) Died for standing on a trap tile during a boss battle - I guess that the heretic tried to appear and clashed with the player character
2) new trap card out of nowhere - I started the recording because I suddenly got a new trap card during the boss battle. Was this the case for others? Is it supposed to be like that?
3) Chest - Merchant - Deck view interaction - When reaching a merchant and a chest at the same time, the selection windows for each get queued. I opened my deck to review which tile would be the best for me, this caused the chest options to disappear and to switch to the merchant's selection.
Well these 1 and 2 are pretty weird. No idea why a new trapped one would appear. There is only supposed to be two of them (half of starting five rounded down). And I have no idea what killed you there. The heretic would not spawn if the spot was somehow blocked and they only activate once you leave the space anyway. Boss did the stomp so somehow he thinks you're stuck.
The third case is pretty clear but luckily not very common one.
If you use a green tile as your last possible tile in a turn, the game will still detract from the pieces filled with a blank tileas if they were empty.
This seems to only happen if there's at least one unfilled tile remaining at the end of the turn.
So it basically means that it will be placed randomly in the middle of other relics. Even in the today's daily it is placed between the other two modifiers thus disabling them both.
The instant death in that scenario is intended (kinda). If you play a tile and can't walk to it (no matter why really, if it's blocked on otherwise unreachable) the level ending will trigger and in case of boss levels, they'll do the stop and hurt you for each unfilled square.
But the heretic being off the tile is something I have no clue about (and shouldn't happen either). I guess it was on that other tile but somehow decided to move even though the boss destroyed the tile it was going to move to...
Time to take a break from this game. Can be addictive :)
I thought to make a video to report some bugs, ended up recording my record run. It is 69 minutes long and doesn't start from the beginning. Let me know if you want to see it
This is a screencast that doesn't record audio or the mouse position. It is unedited, real time of me pausing and thinking, so it might appear a bit slow.
(The boss battle starting at 7:05 was epic. I actually completely forgot about my Fibonacci blink and almost died)
Ohh right, you had that relic that makes heretics skip turns and that's why he wasn't moving and towards you where that wildcarded fibo tile would have then smited him. I wondered that what was going on there.
Looks like for the whole fight that was you biggest hurdle all the time really always screwing up with the "placed traps" but blink with all those different wildcards really carried hard!
But you actually got a good use out of that skill on the normal levels afterwards. I think I've kinda overlooked the usefulness of it a bit myself. I guess I should indicate that amounts of stun on the enemies themselves somewhere so you'd be more easily able to know whether they'll move or not. Would make the skill more usable and make planning around it easier.
Today's blessing from daily - Crystal Cascade caries over to normal runs. Not sure if the curse as well, because it is harder to check.
I mean, I played the Daily, then started a normal run and the Crystal Cascade effect works even though I don't have this blessing. Starting new run and restarting the game doesn't fix that.
I'm not sure if it happens to all runs, or only these played after doing a Daily.
1) Maybe not all curses should be in the daily pool? (Halted lineage). I guess if I made it far enough, I would have a relic to pass on, so maybe it does have a place there
2) On the third level I got a bottled mana potion that should give 1000 points. Drinking it gave me 3000 points. Maybe include in the description the current multiplier "1000 x3" that changes with the level number, or don't multiply it if that was not intended.
True, you can not leave legacies in dailies anyway. So basically yes it doesn't do anything there. Same thing kinda when you have a daily mod and excommunication which then immediately disables the mod.
Using the multi is intended for it. Almost all score additions are multiplied that way. You can actually even use that pot in the middle of movement to have even bigger multiplier.
I thought that I was being super smart when I placed all my tiles on the boss fight before opening the first chest. Instead got insta-killed by the boss (first boss, 1 hit 5 hp). Not sure what is the rule that defines how much damage you take.
Question: Do everybody have the same rng seed in the daily or is it only the starting relics?
Everyone will get the exact same RNG. So all chests for example will have the same options (unless they've branched off and can no longer get some relic etc) and so on.
Yea that is the "strat" for bosses as far as I know too. So farm points until you run out of options and have to grab the chest or cross. The boss damages you for every unfilled square on the board if you can't place anything anymore. So you should have opened the chest on your last tile. Then the boss would not damage you and would reshuffle all tiles back to your deck.
After using Rejuvenating Toxicant, it seems to be able to draw cards indefinitely by stepping on purple tiles (Penance), even when the deck is exhausted.
When Gemstorm Tonic is used in boss fight, the temporary effect extends to next level. It returns normal 2 levels after the boss. I'm not sure if this is intended effect or not. I only used the portion once on boss, so not sure if it's the same for normal levels.
1. Penance actually puts a card from your hand back to deck before drawing so if you have no deck you will put one card back there and then immediately draw it back to your hand. I can't find any issue with how it works now. Got any more details if you got it to somehow generate endless cards?
2. Yes the gem generation (or actually reverting them back) had some issues (on other levels too). They sometimes indeed were semi-permanent even though they shouldn't. Fixed already for the next patch.
On #1, the game was duplicating a card in my hand. I forgot the details, but it was either:
A card tries to go back to deck, but it stays on the player's hand.
A card goes back to deck, and the player draws 2 of the same cards.
If I stepped on multiple Penance at one move, my hand grew larger. I remember that I had like 3 cards in my hand at one point, but had 7 to 8 cards after a move. I had like 5 Magna Carta at that point. I also had Wildcard on Penance (red <-> purple and orange <-> purple).
Just to make sure, this started happening after using Rejuvenating Toxicant.
Why the heck is my run not logging???? I had 150 P and it does not show up, whyyy??. I pressed Back to menu and is just does not show up?? WHY??
Is the leaderboard just updating slowly or is something very wrong here???
I just realized how wacky this sounds since i have no proof bruh. Is there anyway to for you (Anttihaavikko) to like check played runs or something or is it just lost?? (have no screen shots)
Edit: Ok i have collected my self and this definetly has to be patchted. Tmrw i will make a different account on my phone istead and try replicate it (new device so i can do it with lower score). The only thing i did different from normal is hitting "back to menu" instead of "try again". Will try that tmrw
I only see one score (117) from you yesterday on there. I have no other loggings or anything extra, just the scores that are submitted.
I wonder if it could be actually possible that my backend can't handle so big numbers and failed to save because of that. I'll investigate after work and see if that could be the case. I guess if it is, it's proof enough.
And doesn't matter which button you hit on the end, the score should be saved at that point already.
Doesn't look like that's the case. I have no idea why your score wouldn't have been saved...
Also after playing today's daily I'm starting to see that contrite might actually be a bit too good. It completely prevents you ending up with curses in the late game and gives you loads of points on top of that. Might need to limit it to maybe once per level or something... 🤔
Wait the record was beaten again? That does not show up on my device? Or was it just a test? (i suppose Antti is you)
If you nerf Contrite this way then you should prob also look into nerfing the banker. I just gave him roughly 0.5T after the third boss and then it is just a boring waiting game. 2-3 boss fights later and baam over 9000 T. (which i then 16x with two DD for the 150 P). This makes the game very boring and non-interactive the second you get a good chunk of money into the banker. Also the new relic that kills heretics when you open a chest is waaaayy to op in my opinion
Nah it was me just testing and I deleted it afterwards.
True, might need to do some tweaking to banker too. I wanted to make him a bit of a gamble like "can you still make it far enough to meet him again". And I guess the purple key too. 🤔 But yeah, contrite is the reason you can dodge all curses (or any other unwanted relics) completely and therefore avoid a big chunk of the "endgame" difficulty on actually making runs end.
I see that you are really into the game and like helping out with bugs and what not. Maybe you could start recording your runs ... or even streaming them. It would definitely help with bug reporting if you have a video
Rn in the game there is kinda to types of powerups. The ones which stack (health, pillage, etc) and the ones you only get one of (contrite, smite, blink). Annoyingly home tiles dont fall in either. You can have multiple of them but they dont stack. Niether is having two or more useful in any way. Can this be changed such that you only get one of them like you do with smite and contrite. (same goes for the same type of wildcards).
Not sure if I am just bad at it or is it too much luck based. In the sense that I often have runs that I know are going nowhere, but if I am lucky with the draw I might get an insane score. It is a bit frustrating to fill my deck with tiles with limited directions and not being able to do much about it. There are the destruction potions, but maybe there could be more options to customize the deck?
Some suggestions for quality of life improvement:
Viewable deck — clicking on the pile should show what tiles I already have accumulated. This would help when choosing new rewards and should be available from lvl 1 (not an upgrade). Some deckbuilder games even show the order in which the cards will be drawn, maybe that could be a relic?
Informative tooltips about the colors — this doesn't tell me what yellow and cyan do. The only information that I get is that you call the cyan color "blue" :) If I still need to memorize their functions, there is no need of a tooltip.
Make blank cards placeable (?)— not sure if not a bug, but during a boss fight I had (1) a khan gem place some blank tiles; (2) end without any playable options; (3) all tiles were collected, and a new hand was drawn; (4) I drew some blank tiles that couldn't be placed anywhere. Expected behavior: a) either don't add them to the deck or b) allow the player to place them next to tiles that don't point in that direction. (if there is a tile that points towards a direction, you shouldn't be allowed to place a blank tile there, because it would break the continuity of the line)
Idk about you but after playing the game for a bit one will prob learn what the colors do, after all there are only 5. I do agree that the Wildcard description could be improved. When i first started playing it was confusing and i thought it switched up the powers of the tiles (instead of making both do both). Idk what to write instead but i am sure Anttihaavikko could come up with something.
And yes the game is fairly luckbased but a good overal understandig of macro and microstrategies is still required i feel like. (as someone who tryhards the game i always reset for a good start lol)
I played the initial release and learned the meaning of the colors. Now when I play again I couldn't recall what those colors/keywords mean and the tooltip was not helping.
Viewable deck, yes, it's a good idea. I actually did even think about it for the initial release but hit the 13k size limit fairly quickly and couldn't really squeeze it in in favour of some actual content. But yes, now I can (kinda forgot about it and grew accustomed to playing without it myself) and will add it in for the next patch! And seeing them in a correct order might indeed be nice as a relic (I've done this too on some past deckbuilder games of mine).
True, wildcard description is pretty vague. Will find a way to improve these too.
Blanks are kinda intentionally "bad". To do have a purpose with shouldn't be used all willy nilly because they can block you off or do exactly what happened to you. Allowing to place them would have few problems. For one, they wouldn't follow the same rules as other tiles. All other tiles can block paths but must be placed so that they connect and therefore the character will also find a path and move there. Not adding them to deck could work but again, it would be a special behaviour conflicting with how everything else works.
Regarding the blanks in your hand - my impression is that they are too punishing right now. I already suffered damage from the boss and now my deck has extra "ballast" - I have no options how to overcome this challenge - it is the type of frustration that doesn't make the game more enjoyable.
If you copy the rule "paths can only connect to paths" and it becomes "blank cards can only connect to the blank edge of other cards", it would be more consistent overall. It will allow playing all cards in your hand instead of having some cards that are stuck in your hand forever
Playing some more, I can see how blanks are the tile version of curses. I realize now that the sacrificial spots can be used to clear blanks if needed.
A few other topics:
Potential bug: I had the relic to kill heretics that step on red gems. A heretic spawned directly on a red gem, but did not die. Is it intentional not to count that as a step? I also had the relic for opening chests from a distance - maybe related.
Suggestion: If there are more than one picks to be taken, show that in the UI. With changing relics and multiple chests being open, it can be difficult to keep track of that.
Yeah, blanks can indeed be powerful at filling some nooks on the board but also meant to be dangerous and annoying when they and up in your hand or deck or if used haphazardly.
It is intentional that smite doesn't trigger when heretic spawns on a PB tile. If it did, I think it would be maybe too easy to use and very much on the too good spectrum on power. Now you need to do a bit of planning to actually use that properly.
It actually is already shown on UI. It says "pick your rewards" if you've got multiple and after picking the first, it'll say "pick x more" etc.
Yes "have both effetcs" sounds good. Perhaps "Tiles with P and D" do both their own and the others ability" or something along the lines of that. Might be a bit lengthy tho?
I am mainly concerned that the effects are not written.
The color of the text "Penance" and "Dynasty" matches the color of the gem, so I don't think that the text "____ is the ____ gem on a tile" adds any information to the player.
Well yeah, if you look at the picture I posted above earlier, that's pretty much the same as your suggestion 😉👍
Also, telling that they're specific color gems is I guess necessary too. One player said that they were confused about those earlier on. Cause you can encounter relics that refer to them before actually ever seeing any gems at all.
Here i am and the glitch is still not patched. This time it was a brute and not a heretic. 54 T might be a new highscore but i am sitting with another 2000 TRILLIONS in a bank which i can not acces!!!!! Like "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH"
Ah crap so that thing is indeed still happening somehow. Gotta investigate some more. Yea I made fourth boss and onwards spawn brutes instead of normal heretics.
I guess you've tried continuing to just move past it again? You don't need to end on the spot to grab it, just passing it too should get it. And since the heretics don't always mess it up, worth a try to try again.
Have tried walking back and fourth. There is no fix. 2000 Trillions are gone :(
My what i remember it seems like the glitch happends whenever you pick up the cross at the same time a brute/heretic steps on PB and gets smited. Could be something
More info on how it happens please. Was it the first hit (not counting when opening the chest of course) or can happen at any point? Did you kill the heretic the same turn you move there or earlier? Did you happen to have sounds on, does it play the cross grab sound? How did you kill the heretic (and where on the map was it) Looks like you had blink too, any blinks or potion usage?
Might need to disable boss heretic spawns completely for now unless I find a solution to this.
edit: Also, do you remember if there was a gem on that cross spot tile?
For this case: This was prob around the 5-6 cross so it can happen whenever. The brute did indeed die on a PB at the same time as i picked up the cross. Infact we both had the exact same amount of tiles to walk for our destination (1 tile, i like to set it up this way since it lets you keep the PB tile, my guess is that this is because the boss wont remove the tile since it think there is a heretic on it). No sounds, i play with it of but will turn in on to get information. The heretic died via smite and as far as i can recall no warping through him was taking place. There was prob a gem on the tile since my deck mostly consisted of those. I did not activate any potions.
I think generally most of these things can be said about the bug. it has happend 3-4 times i think. Most of the times PB was involed i think. Generally i have also found some other inconsistencies regarding heretics and brutes. Sometimes they wont move if the board is cleared during the same brickplacement etc. This last paragraph might not be fully accurate since it happend a while ago.
Turning of heretics might indeed be a good idea. It will only affect better players since this only matters after 3rd boss and beyond so the impact is not to huge perhaps. If you need help testing (and if there is a way to organise that) i will gladly help. I love knowing all of the little interesting intricacies of this game.
Side question. After consuming 4-5 Chaos six packs (trying to get another DD potion) they stopped appearing in chests yet vednors still sold them. Is there a cap here as well or just RNG?
Also i would love if you changed is so that the game starts writes say 1.3 T instead of 1300 G. It makes is feel so much nicer hitting that new barrier and seeing that new letter lol (for me this is since i wanna see the Quadrillion symbol as fast as possible lol,)
Edit: If you are going to remove heretic spawns in bosses, please do as fast as possible. Wanna get back to grinding for 1 Quad as fast as possible lol :D
Actually, chaos six pack respects the "only one DD pot per game" rule and so does Pontiff. When I said you could gamble for them, I meant the chaos brew potion which has a completely random potion effect. But of course very risky as it can instantly kill you or fully wipe your score.
I don't like the look of decimal values so that's why I only hop to next suffix after 10. And of course there is the whole point versus comma thing too (I think you guys use comma too right).
I will push an update tomorrow no matter what. If I can't solve this, I'll disable the boss heretic spawns.
I think I may have the solution even though I haven't been able to reproduce this anymore after the first round of fixes. I think it's somehow caused by timing issues and/or ordering of things when heretics move at the same time the cross is grabbed. But the heretics shouldn't even be allowed to move at that point since you move first, grab the cross, boss does it's thing as it's getting hurt and then when it would be the heretic's turn to move, there actually are no more tiles to move to. So I think making them just not even try to take their turn on that scenario would fix this issue.
Will prob finish this run tmrw. 5 T combined with 2 divine dilution? This will be atleast 80 T lol (also have 4 chaos brews for the of chance of another DD potion lol)
I apologize for the terrible quality of the provided footage. (Since Itch.io wouldn't accept files larger than 3 MB I had to edit this down to only include me opening chests. In addition to this, the resolution had to be set to 192x108 accompanied by the low color count of 64)
Anyways.. As you can see I received the same options every time I opened a chest. The same three tiles kept appearing over and over, preventing me from collecting any relics or accessories. This continued for each level/round until I died. Fortunately, this has only happened to me once. I have never been able to replicate this bug. Not sure what could've caused this, but it sure is a weird bug don't you think?
Edit note: Perhaps I should mention that entering and exiting full-screen did change the selection of tiles. LMS, do you remember what my first alternatives were? I want to say they included a four-way indulgence tile, no?
Oopsie, looks like I goofed up a bit on my maths and there was a low chance of ending up with a run where all the chests will end up getting the same seed value for their content generation. Good find, thanks!
When you get new scarfs and hats, does it show if you have them already or not in some way? If not it think i should be added? (And yes it is indeed interesting to find these tiny differeces across devices:))
Another thing is about the potions that ad pathways to tiles on hand and on board. These seem to be temporary by my experiments which in that case should be clarified in the potion description (it is currently not)
On a highscore run rn and the vednors does indeed allow for the purchase of a second doubleing of your score. Unless i am stupid this should be a new highscore with a big margin
Nope, hats/scarfs you already have are not marked in any way and you and get same again. I guess for hats it could be shown if you've already got it but not really possible for scarfs as their lengths for example are random floating point values ie. never going to be the same.
Yea I guess I should point out on the descriptions that those are temporary. The gem addition ones do say if they're permanent or temporary but didn't even think about mentioning for paths as they're all temporary.
I liked this game. But what in the world was this orange pawn that appeared? Was it a enemy? It just appeared suddenly, and I saw it moved once I moved, I'll presume it was going after me something.
Well, when it appeared on my way, when I put another tile, the lighting strike, and I lost. So I have no idea what that circle-eye orange pawn does. Do you know what that thing was? Probably, I lost cause this pawn counted as a obstacle or something, so I couldn't pass through.
Yeah, I call them pawns cause they look like chess pawns.
Yes that would be your first encounter with the enemy, a heretic! They indeed block your path and unless you can reach the tile you place, you'll be punished for every uncovered square left on the map. And they are indeed just lowly pawns but the more valued pieces are also lurking out there.
Uhhh i hate to bring the bad news but this is still a ting unfortuantly. This time i can give some more precise information on what went down. There is a thing were if you pick up a cross at the same time a heretic steps on a PB ad gets smited the PB tile is kept during the "hey am a big bad boi boss so am gonna clear all ur placed tiles" thing. This is precisely what happend here. exept i did not get the cross. Fortunatly it seems you are on the right track since it seems it is connected to heretics.
Side note: I saw youre response regarding the double score potion. I agree that is is balanced to be a one time thing. With brew mastery (i think thats what is what its called) and 5 extra slots you could theoreticly get 4^8= 65536 times your score in like 3 seconds. That would be kinda broken. Spamming chaos brew in late game to get these potions is prob the best strat rn
Hmm, are you sure you played the updated version? I guess it's impossible to say for sure unless you happened to notice the version number on the start menu. Because I for sure fixed one source for this cross get failure happening and can't spot why otherwise it would happen and can't make it happen myself anymore.
Yes it is indeed Smite. It might be about playing on cromebook. The Contrite icon (kinda funny, have never even seen my favorite power up lol) is always missing as well. The other things only show up when claming a lot of hats and scarfs
Question: Can you recive the same scarf and had twice from chest or do they not re appear when you already have them?
Huh, that's weird. I've seen some very slight differences in other people screenshots (and I guess that is due to different machines having different fonts) but weird how it's like completely different and other one is even missing...
And yes, you can get hat and scarf dupes. They're always completely random with random properties such as colors and scarf length etc. Unless of course playing daily where the same item is the same for everyone.
First of all. Contrite icon i a cool guy with glasses. Thats all i need to know.
Second. Yes it might be about fonts. My Indian friend mensioned that the symbols used here belong to a town near where he was born so thats kinda cool.
Edit: Now that i think about is its definetly about different fonts on different devices. My friend Dalex (hes also here somewere in the discussion feed) has mentioned how Smite is different on Pc
Correct! All icons are actually different.. As you know, LMS, contrite's icon is missing on Chromebook devices. Additionally; the icons for a majority of the red relics are much smaller on Android devices. The circles that are a part of the green relics are also way larger on those devices.
But yeah, that's just how the fonts are made. It's quite fun however to discover these differences across different devices! What do you think? :)
Another lil glitch i found (its not very urgent so dont stress it, take ur time :D) is when you interact with a chest and a vendor at the same time. Sometimes (but only someyimes wierdly) you will enter the chest first and then not get to enter the vendor. Its odd to me how it only happends sometimes. Once again this is not to urgent so take ur time if u need a break from all the glitch patching lol. (no screenshot since this would be difficult to capture)
Haha, all good. I enjoy bug hunting and had a day off work today too so had plenty of spare time. But yeah, this is indeed quite weird but at least not hugely game breaking so I’ll leave it for tomorrow.
Yea the vendor is marked as "used" when the menu pops up so makes sense that going for it again will then trigger it properly. Do you have any details on when it happened? Could it have been a reward skip?
Any more clues on what could have happened here? Like any common things when it happened? Does it happen early on or later or just when ever? I found out that skipping a reward pick (with contrite) at leat made the vendor not trigger afterwards.
Ah yes that is probably whats happening. It would explain the inconsistencies and as far as i can remember i think (very loose think) that is had only ever happened when i have had contrite and have skipped a reward. The "Cool guy with glasses" relic is probably the culprit.
This is very annoying and it has happened twice. I have tried getting the cross multiple times but it does not work. This completely kills the run and it was prob gonna be a new highscore :(
Yes precisely. For some more information it is not like is spawned say on a tile where the heretic stands (has happened before but it is not to bad). It just spawned normaly and when i went to pick it up nothing happend.
And as a side note. Going through this run in one sitting i realized that the time spent is more around 2-3 hours for a highscore run. Multiple sittings threw me of lol
Well this was a tricky one. But managed to repro and fix! Basically as the player and heretics are running the same pathfinding etc, the heretics were also running the cross fetching checks and sometimes overriding the fact that player got it. So I think theoretically they could have also activated the cross.
And thanks to trying to find this, found and fixed another unrelated bug with the heretics on boss level. Thanks again! ❤️
Also i have a question regarding the potion that doubles your score. During all my runs i have only ever had it once per round. Is that a thing or am i just stupidly unlucky lol
It does work on mobile (browser) too though it isn't hugely optimized for it (mainly due to the screen aspect ratio). But should be completely playable. Maybe that's the next thing I should tackle and make it make better use of full mobile screen aspect ratio.
Yup! Originally the heretics didn't have that "face". It was added a few patches ago and I think the addition of scarves broke it. Just pushed a patch with these both fixed. Any idea how that losing with 1 life left happened. Did something heal you after going to zero or what?
I was counting the tiles, so I'm sure I was supposed to survive. 5HP and 4 tiles destroyed so I should be left with that 1HP. No idea what triggered that.
Fixed this now (at least I think so). Don't think it was just an issue with the most recent patch but has always been there with the bosses. But of course this scenario not very likely to happen that often. Also made the (boss) levels not allow to overlap with the hand so much.
As a side note, congrats on the number one spot on the leaderboards. 🎉 Awesome score! How long did the run take? As you've probably played it quite a bit, do you have any things you'd like to see added/improved etc?
Thanks! I am not sure of how long the run took as i played it over multiple days but my guess would be probably around 4-5 hours. Of the top of my head i have an idea about the vendors. The vendor who sells mixed tiles is (i feel like) a litte bit uneccessary since wildcards achieve the same effect but way better. It would cool if he sold unique tiles with special powers that can only be aquired from him. Will probably think more about new ideas during the day. Otherwise i think ur doing a great job developing the game and making it more intresting as well as being good at fixing these bugs fast. (playing bigger games you sometimes have to wait weeks for a little patch note). :D
Edit: Have tought a bit more about what special powers these bricks could have. Perhaps they could be stronger versions of the original tiles like a popes blessing healing for more than one or a dynasty 3x your step score (these would still be affected about relics like wildcard or home.
Another idea is a tile that kills of heretics. Whilst we already have this as popes blessing+smite i think this could be nice as a way of making runs less smite (and blink) dependent.
My last idea is kinda wacky but could be cool. Maybe the tile selling vendor could also sell land. This would be something that you could place down to make the map a bit larger. It would be cool and allow for some dynamic gameplay.
As i am not a game developer myself i have no idea how complicated these things would be to implement but they could be cool :)
Second edit (lol): saw your reply. Yes saving runs could be quite nice. When i was on my highscore run i was hella nervous about my battery running out (playing on cromebook). That would make the tabs refresh and the run would be lost
Dang, that's pretty long. Quite a bit longer than I intended for the runs to last. But hey I guess you gotta work for that number one spot. 😜 Wonder if I should add saving if runs can last that long... 🤔
Yea the double gemmed cards of Fibonacci are indeed quite similar and worse than wildcard. But it's still another source of getting them. Having a vendor with completely unique tiles would be cool though. And I do have some ideas about such already brewing.
And yeah, I guess that's a benefit of working completely solo on a game. I can fix stuff quick and just push the changes out to to world straight away without needing some approvals or any red tape.
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I have been playing too much this gem of a game. It is time for me to take a break from it.
Sometimes when you start off a good run it can go for hours before the curses catch up with you, a death of a thousand cuts that can go on forever. I would love to see a menu screen where I could either save my progress and continue later or can give up (submit my score) ... also add some sound controls there too :)
Ignoring scope constraints, instead of simply "give up" maybe there could be some sort of "go to siege" button or something similar that would send you to a super hard, impossible to win level, which offers massive points with every step that you take.
I'm starting my summer vacation from my "real" work today so time to start working on the 1.6 patch. Lets see if that can entice you to return... 😅
I have some new feature ideas and that siege idea sounds pretty neat too. Might play around with it to see if it'd be cool. I don't really like how the runs can actually start taking multiple hours. And of course there are loads of bugs to fix too including the corner case ones reported by you that still remain.
I'd also like to hear your opinion on the green gems. I kinda still avoid them myself when possible as they can kinda trap you. But I'd like to make them more viable and enticing options. Got any ideas?
It won't take much effort to entice me. There are games that I have paid 10-15EUR and I have played them much less than this one. I believe that it has potential.
Regarding the greens here are some thoughts:
- It is ok for not all gems to be desirable from the start. Navigating around the green rarely poses a problem (for an experienced player).
- In later stages, when curse chests start appearing, green can be helpful to complete the stage while avoiding opening such chests (maybe a shopkeeper can offer the service to remove relics, Cavalry is one of those good until it becomes bad, kind of relics).
- Maybe not directly changing green gem, but adding more use cases where green can be useful would add extra depth.
Here are some ideas:
These are the ideas that come to me when I think: "I have a gem that creates tiles and has map control, when can it be useful?". I am sure that you can think of others as well. I have been amazed by your creativity, and when you ask for my suggestions I feel very honored.
The RNG in the daily is not as deterministic as initially thought.
I was worried that my score was so low in comparison to others, so I tried to find my mistake and load the daily in a new browser. Surprisingly, reloading the game in incognito can give you different starting deck. Examples:
Dang. Looks like it yeah. The directions seem to vary while the amount of them and the gem seems to be constant green.
Fixed now. Though it does somewhat bork the daily of today as it changes the 5th card to be a blue one instead.
Sorry for bombarding you with bug reports. Let me know if I should stop.
Today I got stuck in a shop. I knew that going there I would be blocked by heretics from going anywhere else. My plan was: 1) enter the shop, 2) buy something, 3) place a tile in one of the inaccessible spots 4) make use of the sin relic for an extra turn 5) place a tile in the last remaining inaccessible spot 6) win the level. What I believe that we are seeing is that reaching the tile with the shop the sin relic was activated before finishing the shop interaction (I guess)
Nah, all good, thanks for reporting these! Fortunately this one too is a very much corner case (though annoying one) but I will try to replicate and fix it for the next patch. Something is indeed going quite wrong there and I guess as you suspected that SIN is not waiting for you to stop shopping and triggers the level ending too. Weird how the HP bar is not displaying at all anymore and how the whole level blinks out when you try to select something (I guess). And the shop isn't showing the exit option either...
neither the points or the shop prices were shown...
One thing that doesn't sit well with the rest is that SIN should only activate after I place a tile that I can't access - step 3) in the above plan, but in this case we see the problem already before step 2)
I have noticed that potions are drinkable at all times. Today I attempted to use the healing potion after getting stuck, while the lighting bolts were raining down on the remaining empty spaces. The idea was that if I time it right, I could heal more than if I used the potion before the end of my turn. While I was able to pull it off, apparently, the game had already decided that my hp at the end of the turn was less than all the damage to be received, so it killed me anyway. May I suggest that the hp>0 check is done at the end of the lighting bolts animation?
I am sure that other Casual Crusade pro gamers would appreciate it :)
I am having too much fun with this game! New build strategy - if you get enough red gems and raise your max hp high enough, it pays off to purposefully block yourself from playing more chests, especially if they are cursed.
A few bugs worth mentioning:
The description of relics that involve gems are messed up. It is something new from today. For example, Smite mentions "Khan legacy", while the text remains red and the effect is on red gems.
I believe I had a case where I was standing next to a red gem, a brute came next to me, they stepped on the gem, died, and then I received 1 damage from them.
Good catch, the "static color" relic descriptions were indeed messed up. This was regression from the relic color seeding issue fix from the last patch. The second one isn't really a bug as they kinda happen at the same time but I think it might make more sense to change it so that smiting would stop the damage from happening too.
Another simultaneous interaction that doesn't behave as expected: Having the relic for healing when stepping on red, when you pass by a brute just before stepping on the red, the healing does not trigger - only the damage from the brute.
Not a bug, but an edge case suggestion - make cavalry relic (open chests with blanks) to work on picking crosses in boss fights. It is a marginal improvement, but can save runs ... like mine from today
For today's score I got 6000 from drinking a potion of randomness. The 481 I survived long enough thanks to green gem filling the board.
Lucky! Even that 481 was quite a lot for that seed.
Today's daily chroma ban was supposed to be the green one, but during play it was the red one?
Huh, weird. It keeps showing red for me in the menu view but actual run is yellow then. And it seems to do the same consistently every time I refresh it too. Have you noticed skill colors not lining up properly in the past dailies?
Haven't paid attention to that, but will keep an eye out. I opened the daily in incognito and it was the same for me - green in the menu; red in game.
Well this was a bit of a weird one. Seems like Chrome and Firefox have a bit different sorting algorithms which caused the initial green/red difference for me and you. I was also generating the list in wrong order (for daily menu view and the actual game that already is basically staring in the background at that point) and the actual game ones affected the "allowed" colors for the menu generation. But now both of these issues are fixed and the daily mods should preview correctly and be consistent on all browsers.
Hey. This is the second time I get stuck on that "alternative dimension"
This time I opened a new browser and recorded the same run.
It is not related to my previous ascension because the problem happens with a new account as well. It must be expecting me to place a tile, but the board is already completed
Thanks, good find! Praying on broken altars made you indeed become stuck there and didn't trigger level ending even though it was empty. Fixed now.
Inexplicable death to the first boss today. Just picked the chest with the cross and died. Judging by the similar score, I suspect that @Rafitko might have had the same issue.
I messed up early on and didn't get that far. Was there a tile on hand then that could connect to the stood on one after everything else is removed?
before I reach I usually always try to shuffle the tiles so that I have options available later.
I think this particular time, I had 3 tiles (from Fibonacci) I placed a purple gem tile so it swapped out one of my options. I am guessing that when the boss jumps and all tiles are reshuffled, the people gem activated a second time and it swapped out the other tile as well...
Tried again on incognito and didn't die straight away to it but did run myself to a dead end few hits in.
In Behacked there was "holy water" to remove curses. We should have a similar relic/potion here.
Just a small thing, the cross disappeared for some reason, I needed a moment to find it.
Later the Brutes decided to huddle together until they died after moving.
I have a question regarding the endgame. What am I doing wrong? My runs could go on forever, but I'm usually ending them after several hours because sleeps important 😅 I've collected multiple mouldy keys and grails but nothing happens? In one daily run I managed to go to that different level, but I don't remember what I might have done differently than in normal runs. I'd think that after getting so far I'd finally reach the end.
Me again :)
I don't know what happened with the first altar, there was a quick text effect that I couldn't read fast enough and then I continued playing.
I was carrying a second moldy key and 2 grails for multiple levels, not sure if that was intended.
My only problem from today's run - can dailies count as part of the regular leaderboard as well? I am afraid my 66 G will be lost in the many pages of the dailies chronologies.
Suggestion for a new curse: "the number of the beast" - if your score contains the digits 666 next to each other, you receive damage and another curse.
It is an amazing game, my friend. You could develop something full fledged from this idea.
Oh nice you did it! Congrats! 🎉
I think your first one might have been a broken one. It depends on which alt world version you're in and wether you have the grail or not.
I don't plan on merging the leaderboards really as I've intentionally made daily modifiers that can completely change the game and scoring. But I've been thinking of adding like a all time statistics leaderboard or something along those lines so that doing well wouldn't be that much lost forever.
And obviously you do get to keep the hat and the wings! Kinda why I added that today's modifier. Like a "bit" of a nudge for people achieving it. But still not too easy to pull off. I was eagerly waiting for this one to appear. And then I completely botched my own run... 😅
That's a pretty neat curse idea. Fits thematically and not too oppressive yet still having some effect.
You are very correct about the leaderboards. Some daily modifiers are small enough to be negligible, but I am sure that people would prefer to have a separate leaderboard for "clean" runs.
And yes, I will proudly wear my "hat" and wings now
If you are still interested in some edge cases bugs, here are some from today's daily:
1) Died for standing on a trap tile during a boss battle - I guess that the heretic tried to appear and clashed with the player character
2) new trap card out of nowhere - I started the recording because I suddenly got a new trap card during the boss battle. Was this the case for others? Is it supposed to be like that?
3) Chest - Merchant - Deck view interaction - When reaching a merchant and a chest at the same time, the selection windows for each get queued. I opened my deck to review which tile would be the best for me, this caused the chest options to disappear and to switch to the merchant's selection.
Well these 1 and 2 are pretty weird. No idea why a new trapped one would appear. There is only supposed to be two of them (half of starting five rounded down). And I have no idea what killed you there. The heretic would not spawn if the spot was somehow blocked and they only activate once you leave the space anyway. Boss did the stomp so somehow he thinks you're stuck.
The third case is pretty clear but luckily not very common one.
If you use a green tile as your last possible tile in a turn, the game will still detract from the pieces filled with a blank tileas if they were empty.
This seems to only happen if there's at least one unfilled tile remaining at the end of the turn.
Today's daily has a curse "Excommunication - ... - This curse can be placed anywhere"
What does that mean?
Also - me making the most of an unlucky boss fight:
So it basically means that it will be placed randomly in the middle of other relics. Even in the today's daily it is placed between the other two modifiers thus disabling them both.
I've got a heretic placed in empty spot:
Placing a tile (orange) under him resulted in instant death.
The instant death in that scenario is intended (kinda). If you play a tile and can't walk to it (no matter why really, if it's blocked on otherwise unreachable) the level ending will trigger and in case of boss levels, they'll do the stop and hurt you for each unfilled square.
But the heretic being off the tile is something I have no clue about (and shouldn't happen either). I guess it was on that other tile but somehow decided to move even though the boss destroyed the tile it was going to move to...
Time to take a break from this game. Can be addictive :)
I thought to make a video to report some bugs, ended up recording my record run. It is 69 minutes long and doesn't start from the beginning. Let me know if you want to see it
Haha, nice! Yea it'd be cool. Always a good to get some extra insight on how the players are actually playing the game...
This is a screencast that doesn't record audio or the mouse position. It is unedited, real time of me pausing and thinking, so it might appear a bit slow.
(The boss battle starting at 7:05 was epic. I actually completely forgot about my Fibonacci blink and almost died)
Ohh right, you had that relic that makes heretics skip turns and that's why he wasn't moving and towards you where that wildcarded fibo tile would have then smited him. I wondered that what was going on there.
Looks like for the whole fight that was you biggest hurdle all the time really always screwing up with the "placed traps" but blink with all those different wildcards really carried hard!
But you actually got a good use out of that skill on the normal levels afterwards. I think I've kinda overlooked the usefulness of it a bit myself. I guess I should indicate that amounts of stun on the enemies themselves somewhere so you'd be more easily able to know whether they'll move or not. Would make the skill more usable and make planning around it easier.
Today's blessing from daily - Crystal Cascade caries over to normal runs. Not sure if the curse as well, because it is harder to check.
I mean, I played the Daily, then started a normal run and the Crystal Cascade effect works even though I don't have this blessing. Starting new run and restarting the game doesn't fix that.
I'm not sure if it happens to all runs, or only these played after doing a Daily.
Thanks! Fixed now.
Daily run discussion:
1) Maybe not all curses should be in the daily pool? (Halted lineage). I guess if I made it far enough, I would have a relic to pass on, so maybe it does have a place there
2) On the third level I got a bottled mana potion that should give 1000 points. Drinking it gave me 3000 points. Maybe include in the description the current multiplier "1000 x3" that changes with the level number, or don't multiply it if that was not intended.
True, you can not leave legacies in dailies anyway. So basically yes it doesn't do anything there. Same thing kinda when you have a daily mod and excommunication which then immediately disables the mod.
Using the multi is intended for it. Almost all score additions are multiplied that way. You can actually even use that pot in the middle of movement to have even bigger multiplier.
Daily run discussion:
I thought that I was being super smart when I placed all my tiles on the boss fight before opening the first chest. Instead got insta-killed by the boss (first boss, 1 hit 5 hp). Not sure what is the rule that defines how much damage you take.
Question: Do everybody have the same rng seed in the daily or is it only the starting relics?
Everyone will get the exact same RNG. So all chests for example will have the same options (unless they've branched off and can no longer get some relic etc) and so on.
Yea that is the "strat" for bosses as far as I know too. So farm points until you run out of options and have to grab the chest or cross. The boss damages you for every unfilled square on the board if you can't place anything anymore. So you should have opened the chest on your last tile. Then the boss would not damage you and would reshuffle all tiles back to your deck.
2 possible bugs:
1. Penance actually puts a card from your hand back to deck before drawing so if you have no deck you will put one card back there and then immediately draw it back to your hand. I can't find any issue with how it works now. Got any more details if you got it to somehow generate endless cards?
2. Yes the gem generation (or actually reverting them back) had some issues (on other levels too). They sometimes indeed were semi-permanent even though they shouldn't. Fixed already for the next patch.
On #1, the game was duplicating a card in my hand. I forgot the details, but it was either:
If I stepped on multiple Penance at one move, my hand grew larger. I remember that I had like 3 cards in my hand at one point, but had 7 to 8 cards after a move. I had like 5 Magna Carta at that point. I also had Wildcard on Penance (red <-> purple and orange <-> purple).
Just to make sure, this started happening after using Rejuvenating Toxicant.
I'm sorry to report that our new vendor can't count... At first I thought that maybe he has it backwards and counts open chest, but that's not it:
So far I haven't been able to buy anything from him.
EDIT: Wait. Are the unopened chests from previous levels and not the current one?
Yes, exactly.
Why the heck is my run not logging???? I had 150 P and it does not show up, whyyy??. I pressed Back to menu and is just does not show up?? WHY??
Is the leaderboard just updating slowly or is something very wrong here???
I just realized how wacky this sounds since i have no proof bruh. Is there anyway to for you (Anttihaavikko) to like check played runs or something or is it just lost?? (have no screen shots)
Edit: Ok i have collected my self and this definetly has to be patchted. Tmrw i will make a different account on my phone istead and try replicate it (new device so i can do it with lower score). The only thing i did different from normal is hitting "back to menu" instead of "try again". Will try that tmrw
I once experienced similar issue on "Post jam update" version.
I only see one score (117) from you yesterday on there. I have no other loggings or anything extra, just the scores that are submitted.
I wonder if it could be actually possible that my backend can't handle so big numbers and failed to save because of that. I'll investigate after work and see if that could be the case. I guess if it is, it's proof enough.
And doesn't matter which button you hit on the end, the score should be saved at that point already.
Hm ok that could be a thing i guess
Doesn't look like that's the case. I have no idea why your score wouldn't have been saved...
Also after playing today's daily I'm starting to see that contrite might actually be a bit too good. It completely prevents you ending up with curses in the late game and gives you loads of points on top of that. Might need to limit it to maybe once per level or something... 🤔
Wait the record was beaten again? That does not show up on my device? Or was it just a test? (i suppose Antti is you)
If you nerf Contrite this way then you should prob also look into nerfing the banker. I just gave him roughly 0.5T after the third boss and then it is just a boring waiting game. 2-3 boss fights later and baam over 9000 T. (which i then 16x with two DD for the 150 P). This makes the game very boring and non-interactive the second you get a good chunk of money into the banker. Also the new relic that kills heretics when you open a chest is waaaayy to op in my opinion
Nah it was me just testing and I deleted it afterwards.
True, might need to do some tweaking to banker too. I wanted to make him a bit of a gamble like "can you still make it far enough to meet him again". And I guess the purple key too. 🤔 But yeah, contrite is the reason you can dodge all curses (or any other unwanted relics) completely and therefore avoid a big chunk of the "endgame" difficulty on actually making runs end.
I see that you are really into the game and like helping out with bugs and what not. Maybe you could start recording your runs ... or even streaming them. It would definitely help with bug reporting if you have a video
That is true however i play on my school cromebook so streaming and recording will prob get very laggy and difficult.
Finally a worthy opponent, our battle shall be legendary....
Also why are there two pk accounts???
I guess they've used different computer/browser, incognito or something like that.
Prob i guess
Ah, sorry if it's a bad thing to do here. I used incognito mode.
Also, many thanks for the fun game.
Rn in the game there is kinda to types of powerups. The ones which stack (health, pillage, etc) and the ones you only get one of (contrite, smite, blink). Annoyingly home tiles dont fall in either. You can have multiple of them but they dont stack. Niether is having two or more useful in any way. Can this be changed such that you only get one of them like you do with smite and contrite. (same goes for the same type of wildcards).
Yeah I guess I should ignore exact dupes for those as well. Still allowing a dupe with different colors of course though.
Nice
Great game as always!
Not sure if I am just bad at it or is it too much luck based. In the sense that I often have runs that I know are going nowhere, but if I am lucky with the draw I might get an insane score. It is a bit frustrating to fill my deck with tiles with limited directions and not being able to do much about it. There are the destruction potions, but maybe there could be more options to customize the deck?
Some suggestions for quality of life improvement:
Viewable deck — clicking on the pile should show what tiles I already have accumulated. This would help when choosing new rewards and should be available from lvl 1 (not an upgrade). Some deckbuilder games even show the order in which the cards will be drawn, maybe that could be a relic?
Informative tooltips about the colors — this doesn't tell me what yellow and cyan do. The only information that I get is that you call the cyan color "blue" :) If I still need to memorize their functions, there is no need of a tooltip.
Make blank cards placeable (?)— not sure if not a bug, but during a boss fight I had (1) a khan gem place some blank tiles; (2) end without any playable options; (3) all tiles were collected, and a new hand was drawn; (4) I drew some blank tiles that couldn't be placed anywhere. Expected behavior: a) either don't add them to the deck or b) allow the player to place them next to tiles that don't point in that direction. (if there is a tile that points towards a direction, you shouldn't be allowed to place a blank tile there, because it would break the continuity of the line)
Idk about you but after playing the game for a bit one will prob learn what the colors do, after all there are only 5. I do agree that the Wildcard description could be improved. When i first started playing it was confusing and i thought it switched up the powers of the tiles (instead of making both do both). Idk what to write instead but i am sure Anttihaavikko could come up with something.
And yes the game is fairly luckbased but a good overal understandig of macro and microstrategies is still required i feel like. (as someone who tryhards the game i always reset for a good start lol)
I played the initial release and learned the meaning of the colors. Now when I play again I couldn't recall what those colors/keywords mean and the tooltip was not helping.
Viewable deck, yes, it's a good idea. I actually did even think about it for the initial release but hit the 13k size limit fairly quickly and couldn't really squeeze it in in favour of some actual content. But yes, now I can (kinda forgot about it and grew accustomed to playing without it myself) and will add it in for the next patch! And seeing them in a correct order might indeed be nice as a relic (I've done this too on some past deckbuilder games of mine).
True, wildcard description is pretty vague. Will find a way to improve these too.
Blanks are kinda intentionally "bad". To do have a purpose with shouldn't be used all willy nilly because they can block you off or do exactly what happened to you. Allowing to place them would have few problems. For one, they wouldn't follow the same rules as other tiles. All other tiles can block paths but must be placed so that they connect and therefore the character will also find a path and move there. Not adding them to deck could work but again, it would be a special behaviour conflicting with how everything else works.
Regarding the blanks in your hand - my impression is that they are too punishing right now. I already suffered damage from the boss and now my deck has extra "ballast" - I have no options how to overcome this challenge - it is the type of frustration that doesn't make the game more enjoyable.
If you copy the rule "paths can only connect to paths" and it becomes "blank cards can only connect to the blank edge of other cards", it would be more consistent overall. It will allow playing all cards in your hand instead of having some cards that are stuck in your hand forever
Playing some more, I can see how blanks are the tile version of curses. I realize now that the sacrificial spots can be used to clear blanks if needed.
A few other topics:
Potential bug: I had the relic to kill heretics that step on red gems. A heretic spawned directly on a red gem, but did not die. Is it intentional not to count that as a step? I also had the relic for opening chests from a distance - maybe related.
Suggestion: If there are more than one picks to be taken, show that in the UI. With changing relics and multiple chests being open, it can be difficult to keep track of that.
Yeah, blanks can indeed be powerful at filling some nooks on the board but also meant to be dangerous and annoying when they and up in your hand or deck or if used haphazardly.
It is intentional that smite doesn't trigger when heretic spawns on a PB tile. If it did, I think it would be maybe too easy to use and very much on the too good spectrum on power. Now you need to do a bit of planning to actually use that properly.
It actually is already shown on UI. It says "pick your rewards" if you've got multiple and after picking the first, it'll say "pick x more" etc.
Or maybe "have both effects" 🤔
Yes "have both effetcs" sounds good. Perhaps "Tiles with P and D" do both their own and the others ability" or something along the lines of that. Might be a bit lengthy tho?
I am mainly concerned that the effects are not written.
The color of the text "Penance" and "Dynasty" matches the color of the gem, so I don't think that the text "____ is the ____ gem on a tile" adds any information to the player.
Here is a mockup I made in photopea
Well yeah, if you look at the picture I posted above earlier, that's pretty much the same as your suggestion 😉👍
Also, telling that they're specific color gems is I guess necessary too. One player said that they were confused about those earlier on. Cause you can encounter relics that refer to them before actually ever seeing any gems at all.
Hey, I see that you added this for wildcard. Could you also do it for the other relics as well?
It's nothing game braking but I don't think the blank tiles should go there. I think they appeared in the spots destroyed by the Boss.
Thanks! True, they shouldn't. Looks like some similar effects had the same issue. Fixed for the next patch coming out later today.
Here i am and the glitch is still not patched. This time it was a brute and not a heretic. 54 T might be a new highscore but i am sitting with another 2000 TRILLIONS in a bank which i can not acces!!!!! Like "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH"
Ah crap so that thing is indeed still happening somehow. Gotta investigate some more. Yea I made fourth boss and onwards spawn brutes instead of normal heretics.
I guess you've tried continuing to just move past it again? You don't need to end on the spot to grab it, just passing it too should get it. And since the heretics don't always mess it up, worth a try to try again.
Have tried walking back and fourth. There is no fix. 2000 Trillions are gone :(
My what i remember it seems like the glitch happends whenever you pick up the cross at the same time a brute/heretic steps on PB and gets smited. Could be something
Sad, sorry bout that! 😭
More info on how it happens please. Was it the first hit (not counting when opening the chest of course) or can happen at any point? Did you kill the heretic the same turn you move there or earlier? Did you happen to have sounds on, does it play the cross grab sound? How did you kill the heretic (and where on the map was it) Looks like you had blink too, any blinks or potion usage?
Might need to disable boss heretic spawns completely for now unless I find a solution to this.
edit: Also, do you remember if there was a gem on that cross spot tile?
For this case: This was prob around the 5-6 cross so it can happen whenever. The brute did indeed die on a PB at the same time as i picked up the cross. Infact we both had the exact same amount of tiles to walk for our destination (1 tile, i like to set it up this way since it lets you keep the PB tile, my guess is that this is because the boss wont remove the tile since it think there is a heretic on it). No sounds, i play with it of but will turn in on to get information. The heretic died via smite and as far as i can recall no warping through him was taking place. There was prob a gem on the tile since my deck mostly consisted of those. I did not activate any potions.
I think generally most of these things can be said about the bug. it has happend 3-4 times i think. Most of the times PB was involed i think. Generally i have also found some other inconsistencies regarding heretics and brutes. Sometimes they wont move if the board is cleared during the same brickplacement etc. This last paragraph might not be fully accurate since it happend a while ago.
Turning of heretics might indeed be a good idea. It will only affect better players since this only matters after 3rd boss and beyond so the impact is not to huge perhaps. If you need help testing (and if there is a way to organise that) i will gladly help. I love knowing all of the little interesting intricacies of this game.
Side question. After consuming 4-5 Chaos six packs (trying to get another DD potion) they stopped appearing in chests yet vednors still sold them. Is there a cap here as well or just RNG?
Also i would love if you changed is so that the game starts writes say 1.3 T instead of 1300 G. It makes is feel so much nicer hitting that new barrier and seeing that new letter lol (for me this is since i wanna see the Quadrillion symbol as fast as possible lol,)
Edit: If you are going to remove heretic spawns in bosses, please do as fast as possible. Wanna get back to grinding for 1 Quad as fast as possible lol :D
Actually, chaos six pack respects the "only one DD pot per game" rule and so does Pontiff. When I said you could gamble for them, I meant the chaos brew potion which has a completely random potion effect. But of course very risky as it can instantly kill you or fully wipe your score.
I don't like the look of decimal values so that's why I only hop to next suffix after 10. And of course there is the whole point versus comma thing too (I think you guys use comma too right).
I will push an update tomorrow no matter what. If I can't solve this, I'll disable the boss heretic spawns.
I think I may have the solution even though I haven't been able to reproduce this anymore after the first round of fixes. I think it's somehow caused by timing issues and/or ordering of things when heretics move at the same time the cross is grabbed. But the heretics shouldn't even be allowed to move at that point since you move first, grab the cross, boss does it's thing as it's getting hurt and then when it would be the heretic's turn to move, there actually are no more tiles to move to. So I think making them just not even try to take their turn on that scenario would fix this issue.
sounds good to me. By my experience of this glitch i do agree that this sounds like a good fix. Thank you!! Back to grinding for 1 Quad
Will prob finish this run tmrw. 5 T combined with 2 divine dilution? This will be atleast 80 T lol (also have 4 chaos brews for the of chance of another DD potion lol)
Crusade of the day? This is bug of the day! :)
I apologize for the terrible quality of the provided footage. (Since Itch.io wouldn't accept files larger than 3 MB I had to edit this down to only include me opening chests. In addition to this, the resolution had to be set to 192x108 accompanied by the low color count of 64)
Anyways.. As you can see I received the same options every time I opened a chest. The same three tiles kept appearing over and over, preventing me from collecting any relics or accessories. This continued for each level/round until I died. Fortunately, this has only happened to me once. I have never been able to replicate this bug. Not sure what could've caused this, but it sure is a weird bug don't you think?
Edit note: Perhaps I should mention that entering and exiting full-screen did change the selection of tiles. LMS, do you remember what my first alternatives were? I want to say they included a four-way indulgence tile, no?
Oopsie, looks like I goofed up a bit on my maths and there was a low chance of ending up with a run where all the chests will end up getting the same seed value for their content generation. Good find, thanks!
Marvelous! I had played it a while ago, I am fascinated with the updates added 😊
When you get new scarfs and hats, does it show if you have them already or not in some way? If not it think i should be added? (And yes it is indeed interesting to find these tiny differeces across devices:))
Another thing is about the potions that ad pathways to tiles on hand and on board. These seem to be temporary by my experiments which in that case should be clarified in the potion description (it is currently not)
On a highscore run rn and the vednors does indeed allow for the purchase of a second doubleing of your score. Unless i am stupid this should be a new highscore with a big margin
Nope, hats/scarfs you already have are not marked in any way and you and get same again. I guess for hats it could be shown if you've already got it but not really possible for scarfs as their lengths for example are random floating point values ie. never going to be the same.
Yea I guess I should point out on the descriptions that those are temporary. The gem addition ones do say if they're permanent or temporary but didn't even think about mentioning for paths as they're all temporary.
I liked this game. But what in the world was this orange pawn that appeared? Was it a enemy? It just appeared suddenly, and I saw it moved once I moved, I'll presume it was going after me something.
Well, when it appeared on my way, when I put another tile, the lighting strike, and I lost. So I have no idea what that circle-eye orange pawn does. Do you know what that thing was? Probably, I lost cause this pawn counted as a obstacle or something, so I couldn't pass through.
Yeah, I call them pawns cause they look like chess pawns.
Yes that would be your first encounter with the enemy, a heretic! They indeed block your path and unless you can reach the tile you place, you'll be punished for every uncovered square left on the map. And they are indeed just lowly pawns but the more valued pieces are also lurking out there.
Also, I saw that there were players with their pawn having customizations, for example, one with a scarf. How can you use that and where you find it?
You can find them randomly in the chests.
Uhhh i hate to bring the bad news but this is still a ting unfortuantly. This time i can give some more precise information on what went down. There is a thing were if you pick up a cross at the same time a heretic steps on a PB ad gets smited the PB tile is kept during the "hey am a big bad boi boss so am gonna clear all ur placed tiles" thing. This is precisely what happend here. exept i did not get the cross. Fortunatly it seems you are on the right track since it seems it is connected to heretics.
Side note: I saw youre response regarding the double score potion. I agree that is is balanced to be a one time thing. With brew mastery (i think thats what is what its called) and 5 extra slots you could theoreticly get 4^8= 65536 times your score in like 3 seconds. That would be kinda broken. Spamming chaos brew in late game to get these potions is prob the best strat rn
Hmm, are you sure you played the updated version? I guess it's impossible to say for sure unless you happened to notice the version number on the start menu. Because I for sure fixed one source for this cross get failure happening and can't spot why otherwise it would happen and can't make it happen myself anymore.
Ok that could be the case. I might not have refreshed the tab or something like that. Thanks
Also, do you know what this second icon from the start is?
From the other options and the amount of stuff I guess it must be this. Wonder why it's showing up different for you...
And do those empty gaps (or misplaced icons) happen a lot for you? I thought I had already managed to tackle that issue.
Yes it is indeed Smite. It might be about playing on cromebook. The Contrite icon (kinda funny, have never even seen my favorite power up lol) is always missing as well. The other things only show up when claming a lot of hats and scarfs
Question: Can you recive the same scarf and had twice from chest or do they not re appear when you already have them?
Huh, that's weird. I've seen some very slight differences in other people screenshots (and I guess that is due to different machines having different fonts) but weird how it's like completely different and other one is even missing...
And yes, you can get hat and scarf dupes. They're always completely random with random properties such as colors and scarf length etc. Unless of course playing daily where the same item is the same for everyone.
First of all. Contrite icon i a cool guy with glasses. Thats all i need to know.
Second. Yes it might be about fonts. My Indian friend mensioned that the symbols used here belong to a town near where he was born so thats kinda cool.
Edit: Now that i think about is its definetly about different fonts on different devices. My friend Dalex (hes also here somewere in the discussion feed) has mentioned how Smite is different on Pc
Correct! All icons are actually different.. As you know, LMS, contrite's icon is missing on Chromebook devices. Additionally; the icons for a majority of the red relics are much smaller on Android devices. The circles that are a part of the green relics are also way larger on those devices.
But yeah, that's just how the fonts are made. It's quite fun however to discover these differences across different devices! What do you think? :)
Another lil glitch i found (its not very urgent so dont stress it, take ur time :D) is when you interact with a chest and a vendor at the same time. Sometimes (but only someyimes wierdly) you will enter the chest first and then not get to enter the vendor. Its odd to me how it only happends sometimes. Once again this is not to urgent so take ur time if u need a break from all the glitch patching lol. (no screenshot since this would be difficult to capture)
Haha, all good. I enjoy bug hunting and had a day off work today too so had plenty of spare time. But yeah, this is indeed quite weird but at least not hugely game breaking so I’ll leave it for tomorrow.
A similar thing happened to me once, except I got to enter the vendor after placing two more tiles...
Yea the vendor is marked as "used" when the menu pops up so makes sense that going for it again will then trigger it properly. Do you have any details on when it happened? Could it have been a reward skip?
Any more clues on what could have happened here? Like any common things when it happened? Does it happen early on or later or just when ever? I found out that skipping a reward pick (with contrite) at leat made the vendor not trigger afterwards.
Ah yes that is probably whats happening. It would explain the inconsistencies and as far as i can remember i think (very loose think) that is had only ever happened when i have had contrite and have skipped a reward. The "Cool guy with glasses" relic is probably the culprit.
This is very annoying and it has happened twice. I have tried getting the cross multiple times but it does not work. This completely kills the run and it was prob gonna be a new highscore :(
So what's going on here? Is the cross not activating?
Yes precisely. For some more information it is not like is spawned say on a tile where the heretic stands (has happened before but it is not to bad). It just spawned normaly and when i went to pick it up nothing happend.
And as a side note. Going through this run in one sitting i realized that the time spent is more around 2-3 hours for a highscore run. Multiple sittings threw me of lol
Well this was a tricky one. But managed to repro and fix! Basically as the player and heretics are running the same pathfinding etc, the heretics were also running the cross fetching checks and sometimes overriding the fact that player got it. So I think theoretically they could have also activated the cross.
And thanks to trying to find this, found and fixed another unrelated bug with the heretics on boss level. Thanks again! ❤️
You are the one who deserves a thanks. 4 patch notes in half a day is incredible :D
Also i have a question regarding the potion that doubles your score. During all my runs i have only ever had it once per round. Is that a thing or am i just stupidly unlucky lol
this game totally would be great on mobile!
It does work on mobile (browser) too though it isn't hugely optimized for it (mainly due to the screen aspect ratio). But should be completely playable. Maybe that's the next thing I should tackle and make it make better use of full mobile screen aspect ratio.
just want to tell you I really love your little roguelikes/lites (I even made a collection of them on itch) keep up the great work!
Thanks! ❤️ Will do exactly that... 👍
I guess the boss sometimes still makes it impossible
One life left, yet I'm dead. No luck today
Any idea how this happened? 🤔 And looks like the heretic faces are messed up too.
What about the first cross one too? Did the cross go there and boss break that tile or did the cross just straight up go there?
Oh right, so the dot is the heretics face. Well... it's there
for me it was like this from the beggining.
About the cross, the boss destroyed the tile under it.
Yup! Originally the heretics didn't have that "face". It was added a few patches ago and I think the addition of scarves broke it. Just pushed a patch with these both fixed. Any idea how that losing with 1 life left happened. Did something heal you after going to zero or what?
I was counting the tiles, so I'm sure I was supposed to survive. 5HP and 4 tiles destroyed so I should be left with that 1HP. No idea what triggered that.
Fixed this now (at least I think so). Don't think it was just an issue with the most recent patch but has always been there with the bosses. But of course this scenario not very likely to happen that often. Also made the (boss) levels not allow to overlap with the hand so much.
As a side note, congrats on the number one spot on the leaderboards. 🎉 Awesome score! How long did the run take? As you've probably played it quite a bit, do you have any things you'd like to see added/improved etc?
Thanks! I am not sure of how long the run took as i played it over multiple days but my guess would be probably around 4-5 hours. Of the top of my head i have an idea about the vendors. The vendor who sells mixed tiles is (i feel like) a litte bit uneccessary since wildcards achieve the same effect but way better. It would cool if he sold unique tiles with special powers that can only be aquired from him. Will probably think more about new ideas during the day. Otherwise i think ur doing a great job developing the game and making it more intresting as well as being good at fixing these bugs fast. (playing bigger games you sometimes have to wait weeks for a little patch note). :D
Edit: Have tought a bit more about what special powers these bricks could have. Perhaps they could be stronger versions of the original tiles like a popes blessing healing for more than one or a dynasty 3x your step score (these would still be affected about relics like wildcard or home.
Another idea is a tile that kills of heretics. Whilst we already have this as popes blessing+smite i think this could be nice as a way of making runs less smite (and blink) dependent.
My last idea is kinda wacky but could be cool. Maybe the tile selling vendor could also sell land. This would be something that you could place down to make the map a bit larger. It would be cool and allow for some dynamic gameplay.
As i am not a game developer myself i have no idea how complicated these things would be to implement but they could be cool :)
Second edit (lol): saw your reply. Yes saving runs could be quite nice. When i was on my highscore run i was hella nervous about my battery running out (playing on cromebook). That would make the tabs refresh and the run would be lost
Dang, that's pretty long. Quite a bit longer than I intended for the runs to last. But hey I guess you gotta work for that number one spot. 😜 Wonder if I should add saving if runs can last that long... 🤔
Yea the double gemmed cards of Fibonacci are indeed quite similar and worse than wildcard. But it's still another source of getting them. Having a vendor with completely unique tiles would be cool though. And I do have some ideas about such already brewing.
And yeah, I guess that's a benefit of working completely solo on a game. I can fix stuff quick and just push the changes out to to world straight away without needing some approvals or any red tape.