I gave it a little try and it’s really neat. I myself am particularly useless at pattern building games (as I’ve learnt by playing 3 of the 6 board games shown here: Pattern Building | Board Game Mechanic | BoardGameGeek) but I did find the game fun.
Bugs
I did find a couple of bugs that I’m sure you’d rather brought to your attention that left unsaid, and have some suggestions if you’d like them as well.
Small visual bug. The opponent’s weapon information tooltip is partially obscured by their cards.
Another visual thing, I noticed some of the transitions and animations were quite choppy. For example when the one armed bandit pops up it (or something else, it’s hard to tell) apears as a tiny image in the middle of the screen and then a second later completes what looks like the last quarter of a scale up transition.
More importantly, placing the card highlighted here caused a hard lock and I could no longer proceed the game. It would not let me place a second card or pass at this point.
I’m not sure what the placement rule is (this is something you probably want to make clearer) but I think it is (per card):
- If it completes a socring hand in either its row, its column, or the long diagonal then it can be placed.
- If it is the 1st card of the turn and can be paired with a card from your hand to fill the last remaining empty slot in its row, its column, or the long diagonal then it can be placed.
- Otherwise it cannot be placed.
This means you can place you first card as long as it satisfies condition 1, but if it did not also satisfy condition 2 then a second card cannot be placed unless it satisfies condition 1 on another axis.
For comparison, the below screenshot indicates 2 cards I placed in a (I beleive) legal placement that does not satisfy condition 2 at all:
General Feedback
At first glance the combat seems like it’ll be very much down to chance, but on realising that passing gets a whole new hand and that sometimes you can set up or save for combos hitting multiple lines I can see a lot of potential for risk-reward style play. Will some of the upgrades build on this further? A very nice concept for a Rogelite.
I was worried on the first spin that I wouldn’t get enough agency in deciding my upgrade path for the run, but on the second spin I won a weapon and had to decide which to keep. In this case it was an easy decision as my current weapon gave no bonuses, but I’m assuming if I had gotten further (before running into the bug I mentioned) then I would find more meaningful choices in the same vein?
I like the art style and vibe of the game a lot. Bugs aside, it already feels quite polished. I can definitely see myself chilling out on an evening after a long day just mulling over where to place my cards, or if I should redraw.
Suggestions
Hopefully these suggestions are useful to you.
- Adding an option to use a 4 colour deck would be useful to people (like me) who struggle to parse shape based patterns. Four-color deck - Wikipedia
- An undo button would be useful in case of accidents, or just if the player changes their mind. It would also prevent hard locks like the one I encountered in the bugs section.
- Consider giving the player more agency when choosing upgrades. You could still embrace the one armed bandit idea (which is cool), it could simply randomly determine which choice you get to make rather than just what you get. You may already have this covered, but in my short run I was worried about it.
I apologize if you’ve already covered some of this in the dev log, I’m afraid I only played the game (though I might read it later) and hope it helps.
