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Luck/Strategy game. Extra Move>Shield>Splash. Kill spawning units at wall for 2 instead of 4. beat the first level, and maybe a couple more, without getting hurt or start over.
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If you move to where the stairs would be on the victory screen it drops you back into the last level, which I suspect wasn't an intended mechanic.
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Like any good rogue-like, took a couple of tries to win against the final boss. Also love the tactics options. 5/5
The one thing I would add is a check for "no valid moves" on the first draw. I don't mind being penalized for drawing 3 pawns and not being able to use them, but I should be able to forfeit one action to re-draw 2 cards in that situation. Or something like that so it isn't an instant death sentence. It would probably be unbalanced if you could forfeit an action to redraw 2 cards at any time.
Also saw 1 glitch: one time when the crystal was being placed on the shop floor, its sprite teleported back to the top. I was still able to grab it on the tile it would have been on (one above bottom left corner).
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Love the game. Using chess as a base makes it very intuitive. The more original effects can be a little harder to work out. I think it would help more if rather than just having text explanations if you had simple animations. Like for nimble have the pawnbarian move into it vertically and have the goblin move away from it, then similarly for diagonal movement. Then show the vertical/diagonal attacks when it's against a wall. Also, some kind of indicator on the goblins which show on the board how many dodges they have left would be nice. Would love to see where you take this game next.
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Excellent game, but as already mentioned by top comments, upgrades are not very balanced. Cantrips are the most important, shields are next. You want to have as many of both as possible. Since Pawn upgrades are the cheapest and you always go through entire deck before reshuffling there's no point in choosing expensive upgrade over cheap one as you are not getting more mileage out of it. If you can get enough cantrips to chain them reliably, you can easily double your moves in turn, using fewer turns, getting more gold and less blight on level. IMO splashes should have their price halved and should be combined together to compete with cantrip and shield.
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Nice concept, needs some effort to be playable. When multiple enemies threaten squares it quickly becomes unplayable.
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Nice game but the rules are a bit too uncertain. For example I destroy one of those foes who spawn enemies with a diagonal aoe: the enemies get spawned diagonally but none get killed. Or I use the same aoe to move near a goblin who dodges but is also immune. Then I move towards a goblin and he dies without dodging but I don't know why
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Blight just building and building and never going away or having any means to deal with it is unmanageable, especially a Blighted Nimble enemy that's just going to cover the whole map.
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interesting how Endovior plays the game with a completely different strategy from me: I go for energy first but splash (especially orthogonal on pawns, sometimes you don't want their diagonal splash) lets you kill a lot of enemies fast especially if its on a pawn with energy. only near the end do I go for shields too. It makes the last level quite doable. I kinda like the game balance as it is, though I think that rooks and bishops get relatively little out of splash upgrades given the cost it has for them
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Cantrips are far and away the best upgrade. The ability to make extra moves (and not deplete your rewards) is great at snowballing both the individual fight and an entire run. Paired with shields you can make especially greedy plays and take minimal punishment. Personally, I exclusively buy cantrips for the first few levels, then prioritize giving abilities to blank cards (favoring shields, but splash can do a lot of work if well-placed). I just finished a run where this strategy resulted in only ever taking 1 heart damage, and only on the final fight (despite not spending all my funds in the final shop. I would recommend adding a floor count on shop screens, by the way)
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And last one because I'm rage quitting, you need a way to mitigate the disaster that is being cornered with three pawns but no enemies on the diagonal. One hand of three pawns has been a death sentence more than once because you can't take damage so you need to back up quite a bit.
Hey, sorry it made you ragequit but mitigating that disaster is on you! ;) If there are 3+ pawns left in the deck, you can and should play around the possibility of drawing them all. Predict how enemies will move and position so that you won't get locked even in the worst case. Also remember that you're guaranteed to get one pawn promoted to a queen if you end your turn in the topmost row.
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OK, managed to get through it. To those who say don't bother with splash damage when something moves in the direction of the damage, run those cards into the middle of an area and watch it go boom (and then run out because blight)
Sorry about that, I believe this sometimes happens when using a touchpad but I haven't been able to nail down the exact cause. Shouldn't ever happen with a mouse, at least from what I know so far, please tell me if you were using one. I'm working on it!
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Very interesting game. My main issue is, getting dealt 3 pawns and one enemy standing before you and non diagonal is sudden death...
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Great concept! I don't agree with Endovior (saying splash is lower priority). I ended up the game easily having bunch of splash, among others a pawn with splash on all 8 direction. Some are strategically less useful, like diagonal splash on bishop, but energy and splash can do the job quite fast and let you get out of range.
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yes i do love my RNG just to restart games repeatedly because i know ive already lost without even taking a damage just having bad cards for 10 turn in a row
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This really hits the spot! Definitely a great game. I could perhaps see a "edit" mode where you can create levels from scratch and they get added to the pool of a "sandbox" mode where you can play with these custom levels and/or change the length of a dungeon. To prevent extremely hard or easy levels from being selected in this mode (i.e. champions on floor 1, or two lone goblin on floor 7), custom levels could be listed in "tiers" depending on the enemies in them: for example, if we value capybears 1 point and blighted capybears 2 points, since the vanilla floor 1 has two of the former and one of the latter every custom floor with a total of 3 points of enemies could be selected as a "sandbox floor 1". Higher floors would have more and/or tougher enemies, and harder enemies would be worth more points.
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Just beat the game. The energy upgrades are obviously the best, but they're expensive. Get them anyways, on pawns if nothing else. Contrary to some opinions, shield upgrades are very good; since the factor that determines your gold is time taken, having shields lets you do quick-and-dirty strategies that would otherwise get you killed, which lets you finish rounds earlier and get more gold (which lets you afford those expensive energy upgrades). If energy isn't available, get shields. Splash is lowest priority; it can help, and is sometimes awesome, but it's pretty circumstantial.
You absolutely need shields on the last floor, since the final boss can hurt you no matter where you are, and there's going to be a ton of blight covering everything. I was blocking two or three damage a turn for most of the fight, and barely survived with one HP.
Good game, interested in seeing what else the author will do with this concept!
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I think that the upgrades are unbalanced. The energy and the splash one are very op (tho the energy one is good alone while the splash one is only op in combination with energy). The defense one is very bad because taking shield damages still reduces the coins you get. On the last floor it is good again tho (but still worse than the rest).
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nice game. The price of the upgrades makes it that it seems almost only viable to upgrade pawns though to beat the final round
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While you're at PC, a suggestion for easy keyboard input:
a) 123 or ASD selects the piece to be played.
b) 123-456-789 or QWE-ASD-ZXC selects the direction.
Maybe pressing twice for confirmation.
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Pretty fun. The random aspects frustrated me a couple of times but those are kind of necessary if you're aiming for a rogue-like experience. I look forward to seeing how you develop this further.
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Holy hell that final floor is tough -- practically the whole floor was covered in red bracketed tiles after the first move, so it was just a matter of choosing how I wanted to die :( Overall the game was pretty fun. The enemies that can't be killed unless you push them off the edge pissed me off, but maybe that just means I gotta git gud.
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Has a great deal of potential. Keep working with the gameplay to make it something players want to come back to. Very enjoyable, forced death kind of ruins it. Maybe make it a navigable dungeon with levels or areas we can replay to unlock new pieces/cards for our deck and skillpoints for abilities for said cards?
Hey, thanks for the feedback! The full game will have new challenges and characters that you'll unlock, but ultimately I subscribe to the old school roguelike mindset where death means death, with no carryover progression that would improve your chances, other than what you learned ;)
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a little show case of the game by you showing some of the features and boss fights if any would probably inspire me to play the game longer than till the first death that comes pretty early on. also roguelikes are about building up a character and i havent seen any character building just the turnbased element which doesn't really earn this the roguelike name...
Hey! This demo is designed to be quite challenging but it's ultimately pretty short - you fight through 7 floors ending with a bossfight. You build your character by buying various additional effects for the moves you play, which you can do after each level. If you decide to give it another go, let me know how it went!