Inspired by Slots & Daggers

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Hi!

I’m making a game inspired by Slots & Daggers. We spin the slots, play match-3 games, pass skill checks, and level up our stats.
I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks.

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You shouldn’t make the pointer change speeds or reverse direction in the skill check. It’s very unpredictable and will drive players nuts. Also, despite having all my slots full, I saw lots of empty slots on the reel. I also felt the game was very luck-based (naturally), but the portions with player agency felt very out of my control too. Example: choosing a new symbol on the machine: either I get lucky and get a good symbol, or the symbols add more clutter (I skip and get annihilated by the next boss). Another example: I unlock several new symbols to start with, but I don’t get to choose which ones I put when I start the run. Another example: I get a skill check opportunity, but the skill meter speeds up right as I click and misses.

The game has some good points in sound design, but I suggest changing the music. It doesn’t fit the game.

Also, I see the description says no AI was used, but is that really true? I see three fingers on one hand of the frog and four on the other.

I just now noticed that the different symbols have different skills. To make that more obvious, you could color-code the backgrounds instead of making them all beige.

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Thank you so much for your feedback—it’s really valuable to me. I’ve already been told that the direction of the pointer changes in an unrealistic way, but when I made it more predictable, it seemed to me that it made the puzzle too easy.

I took a look at the sketch of the frog, and it does have four fingers there. It’s really hard to see in the final image—I didn’t notice it right away myself.

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An important point is that it’s unclear which skills correspond to which player attributes; I’ll take that into account.

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Very cool game! I like these kinds of semi-random mechanics, and the presentation is good. I played through the first island and stopped there, which took two runs. I’m already looking forward to going further in a later build :slight_smile:

I take notes as I play, so here they are:

  • Cool artwork! I like the enemies, and the reel icons are nice and distinct from each other.
  • It feels a little odd that the shop currency is also the in-game currency. Mechanically it works well enough, essentially rewarding the player for winning with fewer artefact uses, but it does make using artefacts feel like a bit of a disappointment each time. It also places more emphasis on the click-within-the-strip mechanic, which often awards as much money as an artefact costs to activate.
    It also creates a positive feedback loop, where a player that’s doing well will have better options, and do more well. Since it’s so central, it can lead to runs getting either boringly easy (in games in general), or slowly dwindling toward failure if the player can’t clear the “hump” of the money curve.
  • The click-within-the-strip mechanic is very tricky, and unpredictable. A bit of unpredictability might be good, but it tends towards frustrating at the moment, especially since it’s so important - it also affects level progression directly, making it essential to succeed at. I think any activation of skills should award xp, scaled with how good of a match, with a good but not essential bonus for getting the “skill shot”.
  • The soundtrack is very loud, repetitive, and I don’t feel it matches the vibe or pace of the game.
  • When choosing reel, two slots in the center line light up when only the second or third is filled.
  • Why are enemy skills togglable? It doesn’t seem to have an effect.
  • It would be nice to show costs on shop item icons, rather than having to mouse over to check
  • It would also be nice to show the attribute of a skill without having to mouse over. Maybe an icon / color / frame / … this is mainly if skill attributes will have more effect on the game in the future.
  • Also be nice to see skill upgrade effects before buying it
  • Upgrades don’t seem to do anything - level 3 Vampirism appears identical to level 1
  • Can’t drag skills from “new skills” to upgrade slot
  • Damage numbers could be bigger and clearer
  • The symbol swap artefact should say “two adjacent symbols”, rather than just “two symbols”
  • Health potion artefact suggests it can be used once per turn, but is in fact spent on use
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Oh, thank you so much. You’re a very, very thoughtful player.

All your comments are spot on—there are definitely issues with the coin shortage and the difficulty of the mini-game.

It’s true that upgrading skills doesn’t do anything right now; I haven’t implemented that system yet.

You can click on enemies’ skills because I forgot to disable click filtering.

Thank you so much for such a detailed review.

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Happy to be of use :slight_smile:

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