I think some ideas that would make this game more fun are:
- Remove freeze, all cards should require energy - Interesting power ups offered every level - Choose not to switch cards
The current state of the game makes the scaling unsatisfying. You quickly go from 0 to infinite (or die before you get there) because most of the cards are not very good. After you get freezes, you can do whatever you want, but freezing also slows down the game and makes it boring.
It's highly unsatisfying being forced to make your deck worse.
Altogether, a combination of changes that make the player weaker (removing freeze, all cards require energy) and changes that make the player stronger (more and more frequent power-ups, choose not to switch cards) should make the gameplay more fun.
I also think longer levels was a bad idea. Levels should become more difficult, not more grindy. After freeze is removed, level 1 vs level 10 should take the same amount of time, but you obviously must fight more spawns and more difficult spawns.
it's a nice fun little game ^_^ its a bummer there's no better difficulty scaling as the game progresses, since past a certain level with a decent deck there's nothing stopping you from playing indefinitely (i got to lv54 and stopped since it got tiring). something as simple as enemies speeding up could have possibly made it a little more amusing. other nitpick i have is "enamored" enemies could have a different color to differentiate them better and make scanning the map easier
This is great fun! The only complaint I have is that as things are, the "Shoot X Times" cards feel a little anemic since you kinda gotta count on having lots of targets in a line for them to be any good, and one piercing bullet does an infinite number of shots' job in a single line.
Maybe have it so the shots are fired where the mouse is so you could fast-swap to other targets or hold on the same trajectory?
hey, i remember playing this game a few months back and liking it–i'm sorry about all the stuff you're having to deal with now. once you release dire decks on steam i will buy it from you only! please keep up the good work and don't be discouraged, we're all rooting for you :)
The early game is fun but the late game is less interesting if you have a broken deck, because there's no end. I stopped with modifiers to make piercing bullets bounce, regen hearts, and make everything cost 1, and my combo was "next attack is piercing", "next attack is love", "refill energy", "shoot 9", and 1 other non-attack card. the shoot 9 with all these modifications just clears the whole board every time. And the other 3 slots in my deck were just dedicated to reducing the chance of accidentally getting rid of one of my combo cards.
Yeah, it needs an end or better late game content or something. I had a different combo-- shoot an everything bullet+all cards shoot an extra bullet-- but it still ends up with just play your cards at a moderately fast pace and hope you aren't forced to lose your combo on level up and that does stop being interesting pretty quick (especially when you have a redundant copy of each combo piece)
Yeah, same experience here. Just hit my first truly broken combo. The energy-refill rare card is incredibly powerful, as are the freeze cards. I'm still crazy about this game, though, the gameplay loop is incredibly satisfying. If the dev wants to expand it there's a ton of potential in this idea. :)
Cool game, but I think you should add some different kinds of enemies such as ones that take multiple hits to kill or are faster instead of simply spawning more basic enemies. i had a build where i could go [next shot bomb] - [freeze] - [freeze] - [freeze] - wait - [4x] which was pretty much undefeatable and boring. The freeze buys me enough time to build up x to 3 or 4 during the wait, and then 4x + bomb wipes out almost the entire screen. More basic enemies makes no difference to this build as bomb is aoe damage. If the enemies became faster, they could reach me faster than I could bomb them back, and if they were tougher killing them could take multiple rounds of bombing which would make this build defeatable eventually.
Got to level 34 before I got bored of my perpetual strat. The gist of it is that when you play a card from the same spot (like always play the card at spot 1/2/3/4 numbered left ot right) you will always draw cards in the same order with the order being the same as you played. The only way to reorder is to play a different spot since newly drawn ones always come fill spot 4. This changes the size of your "effective deck", if you always play spot 4 its smaller (and the cards unused are always in hand) and if you play spot 1 its at the max size. The other cards can be considered filler cards. I think for safety its best to play 3/4 unless you are reordering since on level up you need to swap a card, and swapping is potentially dangerous when you built a good effective deck so its good to have filler cards to sacrifice if need be. Note that you have to reorder them every time you level up.
Using this you can set up a number of effective decks based on not running out of energy. You need a way to clear the screen and to refill energy. My last run cleared screen with bounce + peirce since there are a lot of ways to set this up and its useful to have early game before you can do all the setup. Other ways could be to use love + peirce, and maybe bombs. For energy refill your best shot is just using an energy refill card and making sure you spend ~5-6 energy cycling through the effective deck, making sure to order the energy refill right as you run out. You can also possibly stall with enough freezes, just playing them at a rate of about 1 every 2 seconds. Ideally you use a mix of both. Other strats that might work would be getting really high power cards and the perk for all cards cast for 1, and maybe something with shuffling costs but those are more risky and harder to do.
All this sorta hinges on the fact that you get cards back in the same order as you play them, once you wrap your head around how to structure an effective deck with that in mind you can generally build an perpetual strat pretty easily. I think as long as you can reach level 10. My last run I cycled the effective deck with 2 freeze (though I only needed one) 2 energy (again only needed the one) 2 quad peirce (I needed both) and piercing shots bounce perk. Before that I got to ~30 with bouncing shots peirce perk, 1 energy, 1 shoot X times, 1 bounce and a couple free cards that I just used to buffer space. For both of these I generally tried to play from spot 3 so I could reorder on the fly, but for my most recent strat I found that playing from spot 4 is just easier to not accidentally misclick. I guess if you play keyboard you don't really need to worry about that.
And got another good combo: freeze, next shot love, bouncing, energy refill, bouncing, and bouncing pierces perk. Always play from 4 after the initial reordering and pause before playing freeze to wait for the screen to fill up to about half. The other cards are for swapping.
Great game, but I feel the energy costs are not really balanced at the moment. High-cost cards are almost never worth it, because just playing two 1-costs is usually stronger (because you just draw on play). And if you get a decent amount of 0-costers, you can just move all your higher cost cards to the left and spam R as fast as you draw cards. Because the amount of cards in the deck is fixed and not much larger than the hand, 3 0-costers + 2 1-costers is already enough. With 3 freezes, 1 0-cost shoot twice and a rotating 1-cost card, I was able to reach an infinite loop that just draws freezes faster than enemies can unfreeze (not gonna say that wasn't really funny though).
Maybe drawing on a timer (instead of on play) could make higher-cost cards more attractive, would probably require some rebalancing though.
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Your games are short and great, but they are missing some music. you can contact me if you need some
Very immersive, simple mechanics, but very fun and addictive.
love this one
Had to stop cause the game was lagging. Great game!
I think some ideas that would make this game more fun are:
- Remove freeze, all cards should require energy
- Interesting power ups offered every level
- Choose not to switch cards
The current state of the game makes the scaling unsatisfying. You quickly go from 0 to infinite (or die before you get there) because most of the cards are not very good. After you get freezes, you can do whatever you want, but freezing also slows down the game and makes it boring.
It's highly unsatisfying being forced to make your deck worse.
Altogether, a combination of changes that make the player weaker (removing freeze, all cards require energy) and changes that make the player stronger (more and more frequent power-ups, choose not to switch cards) should make the gameplay more fun.
I also think longer levels was a bad idea. Levels should become more difficult, not more grindy. After freeze is removed, level 1 vs level 10 should take the same amount of time, but you obviously must fight more spawns and more difficult spawns.
(got bored at level 68)
it's a nice fun little game ^_^ its a bummer there's no better difficulty scaling as the game progresses, since past a certain level with a decent deck there's nothing stopping you from playing indefinitely (i got to lv54 and stopped since it got tiring). something as simple as enemies speeding up could have possibly made it a little more amusing. other nitpick i have is "enamored" enemies could have a different color to differentiate them better and make scanning the map easier
got to level 53, i could have gotten farther but i just got bored
refill energy and freeze is op lol
basically any kind of quick cycle with decent firepower wins the game
and keep the freeze in late game deck as a panic button
This is great fun! The only complaint I have is that as things are, the "Shoot X Times" cards feel a little anemic since you kinda gotta count on having lots of targets in a line for them to be any good, and one piercing bullet does an infinite number of shots' job in a single line.
Maybe have it so the shots are fired where the mouse is so you could fast-swap to other targets or hold on the same trajectory?
In my opinion, the best card is 'refill energy to max' because with it there are so many ways to get unbeatable builds for example:
Cards
-Refill energy
-Next attack is bouncing
-Next attack is love
-Shoot 9 Bullets
Buffs
-Bouncing attacks are also piercing
Optional buffs:
-Attacks shoot 1 more bullet
-Regenerate hearts
-Love lasts 2x longer
Very nice gam
more than 4 freezes can end the game!
Great little game! I reached a basically unbeatable build:
Cards:
- 2 freezes
- next attack is piercing
- next attack is love
- shoot 9 bullets
Upgrades:
- regenerate energy on hit
- regenerate hearts
- piercing bullets also bounce
I got to level 58 and then just stopped because it wasn't getting any harder. Regardless, it was a fun time!
Nice
My best so far is lvl 3, you really should put this on mobile
I think I beat the game huh?
Is there an end?
if anyone asks how to do this, just do piercing mod + bouncy bullets
your next attack shoots love+ shoots twice+ is piercing
This is so cool!
sucks that another indie dev stole your idea like that
which one
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2854060/Wildcard/
the dev admitted it's a clone
Wonderful game! Especially the cards keeping their order allows for some really fun strategy.
fire
Yo fire game bro ! Fuck the thief that stole your idea !
Really nice game!
I like it +1 follower and that guy that stole your idea will be sorry he ever did.
hey, i remember playing this game a few months back and liking it–i'm sorry about all the stuff you're having to deal with now. once you release dire decks on steam i will buy it from you only! please keep up the good work and don't be discouraged, we're all rooting for you :)
? what's happening
This is such a cool idea! I hope the attention brought to you and your games from the whole thing with the thief more than makes up for it.
The early game is fun but the late game is less interesting if you have a broken deck, because there's no end. I stopped with modifiers to make piercing bullets bounce, regen hearts, and make everything cost 1, and my combo was "next attack is piercing", "next attack is love", "refill energy", "shoot 9", and 1 other non-attack card. the shoot 9 with all these modifications just clears the whole board every time. And the other 3 slots in my deck were just dedicated to reducing the chance of accidentally getting rid of one of my combo cards.
Yeah, it needs an end or better late game content or something. I had a different combo-- shoot an everything bullet+all cards shoot an extra bullet-- but it still ends up with just play your cards at a moderately fast pace and hope you aren't forced to lose your combo on level up and that does stop being interesting pretty quick (especially when you have a redundant copy of each combo piece)
Yeah, same experience here. Just hit my first truly broken combo. The energy-refill rare card is incredibly powerful, as are the freeze cards. I'm still crazy about this game, though, the gameplay loop is incredibly satisfying. If the dev wants to expand it there's a ton of potential in this idea. :)
theif? what's going on?
this feels really fun!
very fun game
I'm obsessed with this
Just read the article, stay positive. Happy to donate if you set up a pay what you want.
Thank you SidAlpha for pointing me to this very fun game. I'll have to take a look at your other works.
Super neat idea, and a simple concise gameplay loop. Kudos
Cool game, but I think you should add some different kinds of enemies such as ones that take multiple hits to kill or are faster instead of simply spawning more basic enemies. i had a build where i could go [next shot bomb] - [freeze] - [freeze] - [freeze] - wait - [4x] which was pretty much undefeatable and boring. The freeze buys me enough time to build up x to 3 or 4 during the wait, and then 4x + bomb wipes out almost the entire screen. More basic enemies makes no difference to this build as bomb is aoe damage. If the enemies became faster, they could reach me faster than I could bomb them back, and if they were tougher killing them could take multiple rounds of bombing which would make this build defeatable eventually.
Got to level 34 before I got bored of my perpetual strat. The gist of it is that when you play a card from the same spot (like always play the card at spot 1/2/3/4 numbered left ot right) you will always draw cards in the same order with the order being the same as you played. The only way to reorder is to play a different spot since newly drawn ones always come fill spot 4. This changes the size of your "effective deck", if you always play spot 4 its smaller (and the cards unused are always in hand) and if you play spot 1 its at the max size. The other cards can be considered filler cards. I think for safety its best to play 3/4 unless you are reordering since on level up you need to swap a card, and swapping is potentially dangerous when you built a good effective deck so its good to have filler cards to sacrifice if need be. Note that you have to reorder them every time you level up.
Using this you can set up a number of effective decks based on not running out of energy. You need a way to clear the screen and to refill energy. My last run cleared screen with bounce + peirce since there are a lot of ways to set this up and its useful to have early game before you can do all the setup. Other ways could be to use love + peirce, and maybe bombs. For energy refill your best shot is just using an energy refill card and making sure you spend ~5-6 energy cycling through the effective deck, making sure to order the energy refill right as you run out. You can also possibly stall with enough freezes, just playing them at a rate of about 1 every 2 seconds. Ideally you use a mix of both. Other strats that might work would be getting really high power cards and the perk for all cards cast for 1, and maybe something with shuffling costs but those are more risky and harder to do.
All this sorta hinges on the fact that you get cards back in the same order as you play them, once you wrap your head around how to structure an effective deck with that in mind you can generally build an perpetual strat pretty easily. I think as long as you can reach level 10. My last run I cycled the effective deck with 2 freeze (though I only needed one) 2 energy (again only needed the one) 2 quad peirce (I needed both) and piercing shots bounce perk. Before that I got to ~30 with bouncing shots peirce perk, 1 energy, 1 shoot X times, 1 bounce and a couple free cards that I just used to buffer space. For both of these I generally tried to play from spot 3 so I could reorder on the fly, but for my most recent strat I found that playing from spot 4 is just easier to not accidentally misclick. I guess if you play keyboard you don't really need to worry about that.
And got another good combo: freeze, next shot love, bouncing, energy refill, bouncing, and bouncing pierces perk. Always play from 4 after the initial reordering and pause before playing freeze to wait for the screen to fill up to about half. The other cards are for swapping.
Great game, but I feel the energy costs are not really balanced at the moment. High-cost cards are almost never worth it, because just playing two 1-costs is usually stronger (because you just draw on play). And if you get a decent amount of 0-costers, you can just move all your higher cost cards to the left and spam R as fast as you draw cards. Because the amount of cards in the deck is fixed and not much larger than the hand, 3 0-costers + 2 1-costers is already enough. With 3 freezes, 1 0-cost shoot twice and a rotating 1-cost card, I was able to reach an infinite loop that just draws freezes faster than enemies can unfreeze (not gonna say that wasn't really funny though).
Maybe drawing on a timer (instead of on play) could make higher-cost cards more attractive, would probably require some rebalancing though.
I like it a lot
great game!
Cool game!