the second character once, which i find much more intuitive and fun to play

I am glad you liked Mage. Interestingly, while many players agree that Mage is fun to play, some also find him less intuitive, since Warrior is just straightforward “burst damage” character, while Mage requires player to plan across several turns and stall to regain resources right from the start.

If you have a rule for - i want this behaviour and for + i want this behaviour… for me a second word would help…

I understand your point, and indeed “perfectly additive” status like strength is best suited for going negative. However, even for more complicated cases, negative status may be simpler.

Consider the defence status. Currently it is “subtract from incoming damage, if was >0, spend amount equal to damage reduction”. Suppose I split it into “defence” and “vulnerability”, both of which work only if >0. Then the rules must additionally state:

• If both defence and vulnerability are present, smaller one is subtracted from larger one and the difference is actually applied (which is one more thing to calculate mentally).
• Cards which change the sign of statuses, like “Adapt”, must explicitly list all pairs of “opposing” statuses.
• “Defend X” for non-constant X must be re-formulated as “if X > 0, apply X defence, else apply X vulnerable”
• Cards which base their effects on defence, like Bash, need to be re-formulated to “Melee 1*(defence - vulnerability)” etc, (or rebalanced around new defence system).

Overall, the amount of text needed to explain the defence mechanics will grow. The radical solutions is, of course, just to remove “negative” statuses from the game, which many other similar games do. However, I specifically think that added depth of interactions is worth additional complexity here.

map of slay the spire is mostly there to reduce complexity and not to increase it

It is debatable, and StS map is of course a good design, with is why it is copied by most modern games. Still, consider that:

• Right from the get-go, the map offers player to plan the entire route, which is about 4-5 decisions even before the first battle.
• Possible future encounters and their relative probabilities play approximately the same role in StS and my game, but calculating probabilities is much harder in StS, since you have to account for multiple encounters at once
• Opportunities like card upgrade and removal are rarer in StS, but it makes planning for them harder. Basically, you have to decide beforehand whether you want a path allowing to upgrade a card, while in my game upgrade is always available, so the decision is simpler.

All of the above is not a negatives for StS, as it is just another level of strategy, which is simpler in my game. Naturally, beginner StS players can ignore the complications and just click on next stage randomly, but that is also true for my game.

take a look at the coming opponents (it’s good that it’s there in some sense and i only noticed recently)…

That feature is very new, was just added in latest release (see devlog). You may look at the neighbor thread on this forum for a discussion which lead to this feature.

expect the player to … read the description of every possible opponent

Probably the most jarring difference is that my game explicitly exposes the complexity which is hidden in other games. For example, experienced StS players actually do the same, the difference is that they remember all the enemies and their strengths / weaknesses either in their mind or on a separate spreadsheet (see, for example, Jorbs videos for examples of the latter).

Maybe hiding information like the possible enemy list from beginner players may help…

it feels like the process of creating it was “putting a lot of rules and cards in very fast” …

You can read devlogs to gauge development pace. Looking now myself, I see that over the last year, I introduced about 120 cards, so 10 cards per month on average. Not sure how this speed compares to other games.

a game which has more complex card rules … magic the gathering … more similar to your game.

Another keen observation on your part, MtG was indeed second-largest influence after the StS. Multi-color card cost and persistent hand between turns are most obvious MtG similarities.

Regarding your suggestion of slower unlocks: although I long resisted it, it seems like the way to go since many beginner players request it.

compared to the first version I played the warrior plays better now

Perhaps the main difference is that you are now more experienced. When I watch your video, I can see that after trying and learning certain cards and items you have already improved your play (which is the intended player progression).

What I see is the same as the first screenshot, sans the lines on the squares. How do I get to UI on the second screenshot?

This sounds very promising, so I tried you project. However, I does not seem to do anything.

I can create / delete “boards”, whatever they are, but no way to edit actual images / sprites? I tried pressing just about any key and mouse button, nothing helps.

default filter doesn’t take into account the “encounters may appear earlier” ascension.

Will be fixed in next release. Meanwhile, you can manually add 1 to the high value of stage range filter

I could always have my own conducts to have a reason to drop ascensions

If you find some interesting conducts of this nature, I can add them as achievements.

For example, existing ‘Revolutionary’ achievement is somewhat close to the ‘remove starting card’ goal you mentioned.

Released v0.31 with some changes discussed above

I pushed new update with changes to Dreamwalker. I replaced Dispersion with new Somnicide card, which makes some encounters much more comfortable, and is more thematic.

New Psychotic Strike is a bit unreliable, since it can randomly produce guilty dream, but combos well with negative statuses from Otherworldly Tune and is one of the very few cards with multiplicative upgrade scaling. Hopefully this would be enough to make it worth picking.

I did win once on max-ascension, exploiting new quest for Bounce card, which makes good addition to status-managing toolkit, but takes a lot of brainpower due to combinatorial explosion of possible outcomes depending on card order.

I went to laguna and realized I can’t kill the kraken tentacles in time before fatigue kills me

Kraken is a natural enemy of insanity-based builds. I did consider making tentacles flee/die when “main body” dies, but, although thematically good, it makes Kraken too weak against burst damage builds.

idealized, more experienced player would’ve seen that coming.

I have added “View possible enemies” button to next encounter preview, to reduce amount of memoization needed for such decision. I goes with general principle of “give player convenient access to all information not explicitly hidden by game rules”. You still need enough skill to understand which enemies are good / bad for your build, of course.

I avoid using conspiracy … delirium does it’s job

Yeah, when creating Conspiracy, I added potentially much better scaling to compensate, but seemingly that was not enough.

I’d actually appreciate having a reason not to have all ascensions up.

One, admittedly convoluted, reason is achievement hunting. For example, quest-related achievements are much easier without ‘harder quests’ ascension. Of course, that is only relevant if you are into this sort of thing. I personally am not, but I know a few players who enjoy forcing builds and chasing strange achievement goals.

Overall, I think currently late game is too easy in the sense that if you live past ~stage 15, you are probably busted enough to just stomp the rest. I have vague plans to add significant spike in difficulty for the final boss, comparable to Heart in Slay the Spire.

I too suffered from lack of this feature. If your goal is only to create lobbies, you can share links directly to the nested iframe, like this: https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/15886391/index.html

Unfortunately, these links are unstable between game versions, so they are not suitable for long-term publication.

Thanks for putting thoughts and efforts in your reply. This kind of discussion is the main reason I develop the game, since I enjoy exploring unusual and intricate mechanics.

I can see how the current defence (and some other statuses) description is insufficient, and will certainly try to improve it. It is true that “resistance” is more often used in games with negative values. However, resistance is also strongly connected with the notion of multiplicative changes (i.e. “resist 50%”), as opposed to defence, which is frequently additive.

You are quite correct that the decision to allow negative statuses is rare among similar games, but it was quite intentional and currently every status (and even every resource except HP) can be negative, with most of them having real effect depending on the sign.

This creates some interesting and non-trivial interactions which I quite like, as well as actually reducing overall complexity in a roundabout way (since I currently have 27 statuses, which would grow to ~50 if I would replace every negative status with corresponding “inverted meaning” status).

For example, consider Wyvern monster, which does “Repeat 4: (Defend hero -1, Melee 1)”. This sounds quite weak, until you take into account compounding nature of negative defence. If hero has 8 defence, this attack do no damage. However, if initial defence is zero, it does 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 = 14 damage, enough to one-hit weaker heroes.

Another example is negative strength, which obviates requirement for (1) separate “weakness” status (2) additional rules on interaction between strength and weakness.

Your comparison with Slay the Spire is very on point. I intentionally deviated from “simpler is always better” rule of card design which StS embraces. I compensate for complexity a bit by simplifying other parts of the game (such as UI and game map).

i frequently stumble over cards “which talk about status effects” I haven’t even acquired yet

I did consider “trickling down” unlocks in the beginning, so that player gains access to new cards / statuses at a slower pace. Note, however, that actually the Warrior is already “simple and straightforward” character compared to later ones, and his cards are mostly very simple “gain buffs, beat enemy, heal self”. Even Heavy Blow, which is indeed hard to read on first try, is basically just “hit, getting more damage from Weight effect and Critical status”.

Later heroes / cards use indirect damage, hand manipulation, card modification, summoning, etc.

concept of toughness though… (it felt kind of expensive to pay for it…

One other issue I noted watching your playtest is that probably I should reduce probability of rare cards. Note that some cards, including Scaled Skin and Feast on Flesh are rare (with golden titles). Rare cards are more powerful, but also have higher requirements / downsides. So taking a rare card early can be viewed as a risky investment, hoping that necessary ingredients will arrive in future rewards. By default, the game scales up probability of rare cards with each stage, from 0 to 100%.

Problem is, full game contains 20 stages, but stages after 12th have to be unlocked. So the rare card probability grows too fast precisely for novice players, where it can lure them into taking too much unsupported cards. I will certainly think about balancing this.

I played your game a bit. Here are few notes:

• Game UI does not scale with the browser window in non-fullscreen mode
• After the first look, I was really hoping for the game similar to Orb of Creation, but yours is much closer to Cookie Clicker, which is of course ok, but less interesting for me personally
• I suggest to make costs on disabled buttons well-visible, since they are actually the main thing player stares at when he waits until next click
• I suggest some indication of available purchases on the tab buttons (e.g. number in parenthesis)
• Manual clicking income is not reflected in mana/sec making it much harder to judge relative efficiency
• Balance-wise, manual clicking is made obsolete way too fast IMO
• Since the game is Cookie clicker-style, I suggest to copy many useful features from Cookie Clicker UI, such as separate display of income for each unit type, and maybe combining unit purchases and upgrades on single screen
• After quickly reaching ~1000 mana/sec, further progression feels rather bland, since production units do not differ in anything except production speed. I suggest either adding more interesting upgrades, or, if they already exist, making them available much sooner.
• Text in “about” and “privacy” misses spaces after periods.

negative player confusion triggers as if it’s 1

Fixed

Spider Web has no sanity immunities

Fixed, and gave it immunity to ensnared to boot.

spawn of silver getting more guarding is considered the lucky outcome

Fixed, it was a bit funny since I stared at the “obviously correct” line for a few minutes, thinking that I was affected by insanity from my game, until I finally saw the typo:

E.guarding(new RandomInRange(0, 2), { invert: true }), vs E.guarding(new RandomInRange(0, 2, { invert: true })),

dazzling ink improves the multiplier of infectious delirium

Will fix, but this bug also affects some other cases, for example splicing “Melee” effect from Spear into Revenge with Idea. I need to review those carefully.

vitality damage from all sources triggers guilt

Yes, I have already noticed this, and consider this bug serious enough to again publish mostly-fixes release. Unfortunately this change requires some extensive refactoring, so it will take a few days.

Meanwhile, I would like to get some feedback on Dreamwalker. He is certainly very hard, I actually did not yet manage to win on max-ascension. What was your experience with Dreamwalker? I would like to buff him slightly, but without affecting his core “identity”.

So far, my ideas include:

• Give “negative insanity” statuses some benefits, like (bad example) additional melee damage from negative fear. So far, I did not invent interesting enough benefits.
• Tone down guilty damage a bit, but it will make it almost useless when applied to enemies
• Ignore attacker’s guilt when the victim is immune to guilt itself. I like this idea both thematically (no guilt for destroying mindless things) and for balance (since currently the most dangerous enemy in early game is a chest, as it forces player to use Eldritch Light). The main downside is that this change is hard to explain in status description
• Give Dreamwalker a summon (as a way to circumvent guilt). I will certainly add dream-themed summon(s) anyway, but the question is whether to add it to the starting deck.
• Either buff Dispersion or remove it from starting deck, since, although it does save you very rarely, it feels like a burden 90% of the time.
• Maybe you have other opinions?

Thanks a lot.

A few clarifications / notes:

• “defence” works like this: when taking damage, defence is subtracted from the damage, and spent at a rate of 1 per damage prevented, but only if it was >0. So if defence = 3, and incoming damage = 5, then incoming damage becomes 2 and defence becomes 0. If defence = -3 and incoming damage = 5, incoming damage becomes 8, but defence stays at -3. I will try to re-phrase the explanation.

• The “replay” button on tutorial window lets you see the flashing animation again if you miss it. Were you curious what it does? Maybe you thought it does something else?

• It seems that you did not notice “Melee self” effect on Punch card, which acts similar to cost 1 in some ways, but is preventable by block, so you could play Block card before Punch to avoid this self-damage.

• Self-damage is affected by strength, so gaining strength should be managed carefully. You did see the “Brass Knuckles” item which mitigates this (but self-damage was not the problem this run, so your decision not to take it was good).

• The “Spring” card indeed appeared too early (i.e. you did not yet unlock the cards with Clockwork mechanics), I fixed that. I also delayed unlocking of Heavy Blow.

• As usual in deckbuilders, picking even a good card has downside of bloating your deck. In this game, you encountered 3 powerful card/item combinations, each of those could let you win. However, you deck was too large and you drew only 1 of them in your final fight.

• With deck this thick, game should have unlocked the “stashing” mechanics which helps to temporarily remove unneeded cards from deck. But due to a minor bug, unlock was delayed. Fixed that.

• The toughness does reduce card cost, so 6-cost Scales card pays for itself if you play more than 6 total cost of cards afterwards. Playing Scaled Skin + Muscles gives your 2 strength, which you did manage to pull off once. This combo is powerful but very expensive, and default healing in the deck is not quite enough to support it.

• You picked two copies of Feast of Flesh and did not encounter +vampirism card or item, which is unlucky. Feast of Flesh is “win the game with one card” level of power, but only if you have a source of vampirism. After unlocking quests in this game do a lot to increase your chance of finding missing combo pieces.

• You picked Flimsy Shield + Sun Shield + Bash, which is also extremely powerful, but needs card draw and/or more copies of Bash

• You picked Revenge, which you did use well, and correctly noticed that intentionally spending HP may be beneficial.

• The Second Wind card and Blank Paper item could help a lot with card draw.

• The “does-nothing” Boulder card has lots of uses. Simplest is to spend HP for Revenge, especially in combination with vampirism. It did not happen in this game, but with enough vampirism and toughness it may occur that hero is unable to spend HP even if he wants to. Another use is some cards (like Fling or Fair Trade), which do effects proportional to card cost.

• The final battle is perhaps still winnable. The key is NOT to play Feast on Flesh, play only Revenge on the first turn, and maybe play a Secret Technique on the second turn, when your hand contains several attack cards, to buff them all. Salamander Flameraiser can be considered a hidden boon, since it exhausts you cards, getting rid of expensive ones to free the space in hand. If you did not play since then, you can post you “autosave” (press export/import button in “saves” window), and I will try to check if I can beat it.

Thanks again, I gained some valuable insights from your playtest.

This sounds like PotionCraft and other similar potion-brewing games. I do not see anything wrong with this concept, but that is true about almost any other game concept too. The implementation and specific details are what matters most.

Regarding embracing monotony/repetitive actions, I suggest to look at incremental games for inspiration, there are many alchemy-related ones as well.

I played a bit more. Level progression, UI and tutorial are all much better. Separate thanks for volume controls.

I like most of new graphics, except balloons, are now visually hard to parse due to strange white blob, and “mats” where player must place a weapon due to their “noisy” look.

When playing on Windows/Firefox, I experience significant lag every time I pick up the weapon, so severe that music pauses for half-second.

The step-by step nature of tips is very good idea. However, it seems that using tip has no downside. Maybe give 1 less star for level if tip was used?

When playing more complex levels, it is sometimes tedious to watch the process again and again while figuring out next weapon to play. Maybe add “animation speed” setting and / or “quick play” button

Overall, good job on improvements!

In my recently posted devlogs, <meta property="og:image"> tag points to the project cover image, while previously it correctly pointed to the image inside the post. As as result, posting link to external sites such as Discord shows wrong preview.

Example of correct tag: https://alsoknown.itch.io/way-to-crown/devlog/1123383/v028-new-antiquarian-hero-weight-effect

Example of incorrect tag: https://alsoknown.itch.io/way-to-crown/devlog/1144822/v030-insanity-rework-new-dreamwalker-hero