Really great game though! Been addicted to it the past couple of days. Took a time or two to really understand the basics but then got hooked on trying to find the best strategy (such as only a few dice, like above).
Shocked that some people are complaining about balance and such. This is a game jam game, no? Wouldn't pay them any attention. The chance events can be rough but anyone that have played games like FTL understand that the randomness is what keeps it from having one set strategy.
Anyone got any good strategies? Mostly I just take what I get and not focus on any specific thing, though I've noticed I've never made it to 20 or above that way.
I find that the best way to survive the early game increasing possible damage per turn ASAP. I try to upgrade either an attack or boost die and discard a boost die within the first few turns. (The other starter dice increase in value with upgrades at a better rate than normal boost dice do.)
If I get the "skip 1-3 floors" event within the first ~6 floors, I'll usually start a new game. It's really hard to make up for the upgrades you don't get if you skip the floors, and there are much better events that will actually help you starting out.
I try to get a set of 7-10 upgraded dice with at least one heavy attack die, because nothing stings quite as much as getting a healing-moth or shield-beetle down to a reasonable amount of HP, and then not getting any damage dice for two turns in a row ;-;
late game spoiler-y hint: gur yriry gjragl-svir obff hfrf vgf bja qvpr ba lbhe cynl nern, naq cynprf vgf qvpr orsber lbhef. guvf zrnaf gung gur obff'f qvpr pna hfr nal zbqvsvref nccyvrq ol lbhe obbfg naq greenva qvpr. (rot13 encoded)
* Remove as much dice as possible, 8 is almost too much. Dice that you are currently not using prevent you to draw your other dice which match better the situation. The advantage of keeping your dice pool small is that you are almost sure to get your good dice. My personnal recommendation:
1. one normal or hollow attack, one heavy attack
2.one normal or hollow defence, one heavy defence
3. one normal or hollow terrain (or hollow mirror if you have no terrain), one hollow booster
4. one normal or hollow or heavy healing
* More than one healing dice is too much. an healing dice well combined can heal you from 1 HP to full life
* The dice that you get by "get new die" could be much better than any upgrading starting dice: they could be heavy, hollow, or have better stats. So check this option, you can skip if nothing is interesting. Remove your older die.
* The terrain dice is an obsolute must. if you manage to make it hollow through encounter, it is even better. Do not hesitate to stack the terrain die with its previous terrain bonus, you can reach unlimited bonus this way (went to +18 with therrain die)
* One booster die is enough, try to get an hollow one.
* Try to get one heavy die for defence and also for attack, but keep also another normal one, to be able to put in on the terrain dice when needed.
* About 30 HP in late game is good, it will allow you to survive the one or two turn of the encounters, it order to build a defence or take down one guy.
* There are mostly 2 kind of encounters: damage dealer like berserk guy or healer/defender. In both case, if you can on turn 1, try to set a strong defence that cannot be breached in one turn. If not try to take down one baddy, or damage the weakest enemy. Then stack defence up to the point it is unbreachable, and combine your dice to make thedamage slaughter. When only guy is remaining, combine your big bonuses to heal yourself.
* Don't skip floors.
* Don't be afraid to take big risk for your deck creation before level 10, like transforming all your dice with the encounters. If you are unlucky, restart your run.
Hope this can help. Enjoy.
My recommendation for balancing to the dev: IMHO, the terrain die may need nerfing: make it not stackable with other terrain die bonus, but stackable with booster instead.
it's apparently possible to beat!!! I feel like it was pure luck that I was able to beat the pink shield/moth healer/spear bug combo. It feels a bit like a slot machine at times. @_@
I love this game. I've spent several hours on it. The only suggestion I have is to add the ability to target specific enemies. It can be quite frustrating to have to wait until you go through two tanky enemies to take out a support monster.
Super fun! i keep coming back to play this :D one complaint is that the moth type enemy that heals, heals itself way too fast, making combat cumbersome bc the damage i do barely does anything. Otherwise great fun!
The screenshotted early encounter below is not fun — on most turns the enemy heals faster than I can damage it and its health pool is so large that I have to get lucky with my damage output multiple turns in a row to beat it. Perhaps you could introduce some additional health scaling on enemies or a lower tier of this enemy so that early fights against it aren't quite so tedious.
The same dynamic is also true of multi-enemy fights on later floors where shielding/healing can turn them into huge grinds or just make them feel unfair — two heavy hitting shield enemies and a move-copier for instance, if you aren't able to take the move-copier out on your first turn.
Have been playing for a month, love the concept and the gameplay. Only have one suggestion. Maybe add an overkill feature where excess damage does something(don't really care what, no this wasn't taken from inscryption. Yeah it totally is)
Might want to fix the 2 shield bearers and copier encounter after bee boss. I had a balanced build with plenty of gold attack die, but just happened to not get enough together to out damage the encounter and died, while trying to keep myself alive aswell
It really feels pretty balanced to me (up until the final five floors but to be totally fair it took me half of the queen bee fight to figure out her mechanic even though you can literally hover over stuff to figure out what it does because I'm stupid and forgot to)
I nearly played whole sunday. I can tell you round 4 if you will see bee queen or not. This is very much depending on the bonus offered between the rounds. Furthermore you need luck with the enemy waves. Some combos are very hard to beat. Too much randomness in my opinion. I like the game anyway.
Really great game!! Love the music and sound effects, love the art, love the mechanics (although it took me a little while to figure out). Fantastic work!
does anyone have any tips for the bee queen? the farthest I've gotten her since the update is like 70 health... what do the "marked by the queen bee" squares do? I've just avoided them or filled them with honey
If you put a dice in the marked squares, you can use the honey dice the queen adds to your hand to multiply its value, which can let you do 20-30 damage in a turn if you plan it properly — and I assume understanding this mechanic is required to beat the boss. It's only for those two squares though, in other squares honey will cause the value to halve.
The jester's randomize event turned all of my dice to blocks except one attack die, which let me tank the wasp queen (yay!) only for the next battle to be against two shield-bearers and a move copier.. turns out that fight is impossible to win or lose when you can do max 6 damage per turn and shield indefinitely, while they constantly shield each other more than you can deplete them :(
Wow! I can't believe you are updating so much so often!
I remember playing the first version of this game without a boss or anything, and I admire how far it's come. You could even sell this on steam if u wanted to, this is like one of those addicting mobile games but if they were actually good!
Geez, this game just keeps getting more stuff. Apparently there's even more stuff beyond the Queen Bee...but I died on the 21st floor, confident that I didn't need to bother healing all that damage I'd taken, so I don't know what it is.
I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the skip floors event. Since you aren't getting the random upgrades/remove/add dice for the floors you skip, there's no benefit. Plus you're taking damage to do so as well.
Please consider reevaluating this one as there's absolutely no reason for the player to accept the offer.
The Jester has the chance to randomize all dice. Essentially it's a "lose the game" button. If you're far enough along and have anything good, you can't recover. I'd lessen the amount of dice or give some sort of indication. It annoyed me that I'd spent 15 minutes on a really nice run and everything was now garbage.
yes yes yes. Great game. I don't like too much games like this (dice or cards game) but this is "easy to use" and with a lot of different ways to play and to win (or lose). Hours of fun, thank you!
this game is difficult. on the first five floors, I'm experiencing elite flies accompanied by two other flies, and even if I'm lucky enough to get to the boss, it just seems so overpowered as if i was able to become god in the other 19 floors (which only happens if you're extremely lucky.) This game just pounds you into the dust with overpowered enemies and terrible rolls at the beginning, and even if you get god tier dice, the setups are going to one turn you in an instant. however, the charm of the game, the power you feel when you beat a difficult setup, the events, and just the entire idea of the game itself is great. I don't think that anybody is gonna like me posting this, nor are they going to like the negativity I have shown, but i feel that this needs to be put out there, and despite all I've said, I really like this game. (also I'm not trying to do this to be mean, these are just some opinions i have on the game and maybe you could just add difficulty settings.)
Yeah, I feel like the health/damage/heal dynamics are poorly balanced in general. It's particularly evident in the boss fights, where their huge health pool and damage output often makes them impossible to counter for an average build. Or, more precisely, my hunch is that the game doesn't allow enough room for player skill to counter bad luck.
And the same issue is spread across sequences of fights as well: the loss of health becomes a compounding problem that travels with you from fight to fight and results in bad gameplay experiences like keeping an enemy alive in order to get the best boosted heal roll possible.
i actually have some ideas for the enemies, and also some suggestions for events. The moth shouldn't have 12 hp and be able to heal it instantly, it should be easily killable with about 5-7 hp, but if you don't get that, it should be able to heal about 2-3 hp at maximum. the fly is decent, but it's hp should be a bit weaker when it's in a group, maybe a 1-2 max health decrease, so it doesn't seem like it's bombarding you when you get three at the third floor. the shield guy should keep his health amount, but should also have a attack that is much like the fly's, ranging from 1-3. it's added shield ability seems decent enough, but it should most of the time just be +1, and only get +3 if it's lucky. the new accurate kill character is perfect the way they are, with 2 attack for the ability to basically be immortal unless you accurately kill it. the elite fly needs to chill with it's attack, it should be able to hit you for about 4-5, and it's health should be about 8 or 7. the elite moth should have about 10-12 hp (or the moth hp we have now). if it hits you, it might be 3 or 4, but it's healing should be about 5-6. the elite ranger should get about 2-5 per hit because of it's double attack, and the second attack should only be 3. the original ranger should have an attack of 1-2 hp per hit, because it can hit twice. (the health can stay the same for the both of them though). the elite shield guy should have 4-6 attack, and the triple attack should only be 1-2 per hit. it's health should stay the same, but the shield should be about 4 for a single, and 1-3 per shield for the triple. the axe guy needs to have an attack of about 3-4 when you weaken it, and five if you didn't. the spear guy should only have an attack of 2-3 (because no spear is strong enough to do 4-5 damage). the boss should only have half health (60) and the attack should range from 10 to 11. the attack after it becomes red should just be a guaranteed 11, and the dice adding should only be one instead of 3. the vents need some work as well. the jester could just be a random status (heavy, hollow or glass) instead of a completely random die. the massive bug should keep the damage, but instead, before a battle, allows you to choose the three options you would have gotten going through the floors normally. the roly-poly should only show up past floor 10 (and not on floor two where you still need all your die). there was also another thing i noticed; if you skip an event, the enemies you encounter fight you in groups or are more powerful (or that's just how the game works.) i just realized this is quite lengthy, so i'll stop it here.
Absolutely great to see you still update. I'm gonna throw some cash your way every time you release an update! :D
Tiny gripe: I'm not sure if the music is final at this stage, but you're probably aware that it gets a bit repetitive after a while. When I turn off the music, all the sound effects are also disabled. They don't need to be, I think.
Anyway, great game, I'm gonna recommend it to all my friends!
If I may take this opportunity for some more feedback: I adore the events. Really spices things up. However, I'd like at least the option to go into them blindly. Right now, some events show the result of the options you can choose, and some of them don't. To truly judge the event by the context clues (which are, might I add greatly animated for just some lines of text, love that) instead of just picking the result I like most, I feel like the results should be obscured from me.
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Oof, this was a grind!
I thought level 20 was the end boss!
Really great game though! Been addicted to it the past couple of days. Took a time or two to really understand the basics but then got hooked on trying to find the best strategy (such as only a few dice, like above).
Shocked that some people are complaining about balance and such. This is a game jam game, no? Wouldn't pay them any attention. The chance events can be rough but anyone that have played games like FTL understand that the randomness is what keeps it from having one set strategy.
Love it!
I like it
I love the smile of the little frog! <3
this game is fun as all hell
will there ever be a steam release?
wow this game is soooo great. Im totally addicted. Finally beat the first boss and then died the next round
Anyone got any good strategies? Mostly I just take what I get and not focus on any specific thing, though I've noticed I've never made it to 20 or above that way.
game like gamer
also hollow dice are always great
Yeah, dont get too many dice. focus on upgrading a small amount. I only had 7 die that were all gold, so that was all I rolled.
My personal recommendation (as of 1.4.1)
* Remove as much dice as possible, 8 is almost too much. Dice that you are currently not using prevent you to draw your other dice which match better the situation. The advantage of keeping your dice pool small is that you are almost sure to get your good dice. My personnal recommendation:
1. one normal or hollow attack, one heavy attack
2.one normal or hollow defence, one heavy defence
3. one normal or hollow terrain (or hollow mirror if you have no terrain), one hollow booster
4. one normal or hollow or heavy healing
* More than one healing dice is too much. an healing dice well combined can heal you from 1 HP to full life
* The dice that you get by "get new die" could be much better than any upgrading starting dice: they could be heavy, hollow, or have better stats. So check this option, you can skip if nothing is interesting. Remove your older die.
* The terrain dice is an obsolute must. if you manage to make it hollow through encounter, it is even better. Do not hesitate to stack the terrain die with its previous terrain bonus, you can reach unlimited bonus this way (went to +18 with therrain die)
* One booster die is enough, try to get an hollow one.
* Try to get one heavy die for defence and also for attack, but keep also another normal one, to be able to put in on the terrain dice when needed.
* About 30 HP in late game is good, it will allow you to survive the one or two turn of the encounters, it order to build a defence or take down one guy.
* There are mostly 2 kind of encounters: damage dealer like berserk guy or healer/defender. In both case, if you can on turn 1, try to set a strong defence that cannot be breached in one turn. If not try to take down one baddy, or damage the weakest enemy. Then stack defence up to the point it is unbreachable, and combine your dice to make thedamage slaughter. When only guy is remaining, combine your big bonuses to heal yourself.
* Don't skip floors.
* Don't be afraid to take big risk for your deck creation before level 10, like transforming all your dice with the encounters. If you are unlucky, restart your run.
Hope this can help. Enjoy.
My recommendation for balancing to the dev: IMHO, the terrain die may need nerfing: make it not stackable with other terrain die bonus, but stackable with booster instead.
it's apparently possible to beat!!! I feel like it was pure luck that I was able to beat the pink shield/moth healer/spear bug combo. It feels a bit like a slot machine at times. @_@
I love this game. I've spent several hours on it. The only suggestion I have is to add the ability to target specific enemies. It can be quite frustrating to have to wait until you go through two tanky enemies to take out a support monster.
you can target enemies by clicking on their health die
Or on the enemy itself
Finally!
Super fun! i keep coming back to play this :D one complaint is that the moth type enemy that heals, heals itself way too fast, making combat cumbersome bc the damage i do barely does anything. Otherwise great fun!
The screenshotted early encounter below is not fun — on most turns the enemy heals faster than I can damage it and its health pool is so large that I have to get lucky with my damage output multiple turns in a row to beat it. Perhaps you could introduce some additional health scaling on enemies or a lower tier of this enemy so that early fights against it aren't quite so tedious.
The same dynamic is also true of multi-enemy fights on later floors where shielding/healing can turn them into huge grinds or just make them feel unfair — two heavy hitting shield enemies and a move-copier for instance, if you aren't able to take the move-copier out on your first turn.
Have been playing for a month, love the concept and the gameplay. Only have one suggestion. Maybe add an overkill feature where excess damage does something(don't really care what, no this wasn't taken from inscryption. Yeah it totally is)
Obviously this wouldn't apply to the have-to-deal-exact-dmg-to-kill enemy(forgot the term)
too many dice
result of the run
Might want to fix the 2 shield bearers and copier encounter after bee boss. I had a balanced build with plenty of gold attack die, but just happened to not get enough together to out damage the encounter and died, while trying to keep myself alive aswell
Loved the game! Did pretty well for my first try I would think haha. Keep up the great work!!! Left a follow!
Good proof of concept but very poor balancing! Very frustrating. Unfair! unfair! unfair! :-(
It really feels pretty balanced to me (up until the final five floors but to be totally fair it took me half of the queen bee fight to figure out her mechanic even though you can literally hover over stuff to figure out what it does because I'm stupid and forgot to)
I nearly played whole sunday. I can tell you round 4 if you will see bee queen or not. This is very much depending on the bonus offered between the rounds. Furthermore you need luck with the enemy waves. Some combos are very hard to beat. Too much randomness in my opinion. I like the game anyway.
Really great game!! Love the music and sound effects, love the art, love the mechanics (although it took me a little while to figure out).
Fantastic work!
does anyone have any tips for the bee queen? the farthest I've gotten her since the update is like 70 health... what do the "marked by the queen bee" squares do? I've just avoided them or filled them with honey
If you put a dice in the marked squares, you can use the honey dice the queen adds to your hand to multiply its value, which can let you do 20-30 damage in a turn if you plan it properly — and I assume understanding this mechanic is required to beat the boss. It's only for those two squares though, in other squares honey will cause the value to halve.
oooooh thanks so much! this really helps!
Hey! did some of you guys can tell me how can i download this game?
This is awesome
The jester's randomize event turned all of my dice to blocks except one attack die, which let me tank the wasp queen (yay!) only for the next battle to be against two shield-bearers and a move copier.. turns out that fight is impossible to win or lose when you can do max 6 damage per turn and shield indefinitely, while they constantly shield each other more than you can deplete them :(
Wow! I can't believe you are updating so much so often!
I remember playing the first version of this game without a boss or anything, and I admire how far it's come. You could even sell this on steam if u wanted to, this is like one of those addicting mobile games but if they were actually good!
now do the exact opposite add a die at every opportunity and never remove a dice
Geez, this game just keeps getting more stuff. Apparently there's even more stuff beyond the Queen Bee...but I died on the 21st floor, confident that I didn't need to bother healing all that damage I'd taken, so I don't know what it is.
Awesome concept and I love how you had enemies that modified the dice placing area.
I'm not sure I understand the purpose of the skip floors event. Since you aren't getting the random upgrades/remove/add dice for the floors you skip, there's no benefit. Plus you're taking damage to do so as well.
Please consider reevaluating this one as there's absolutely no reason for the player to accept the offer.
Yes, this really doesnt make sense...
ye i agree when i saw skip floors i was about to click on the lose 10 hp but i needed more upgrades for my dice so i passed
I think its meant for speedrunners
That makes so much sense, although, I don't think someone would speedrun this game.
I'm in the discord and there are definitely people who speedrun this game :P
Cool game and awesome art !! I really liked to play cuz it's fast development no wasting time on some animation
The Jester has the chance to randomize all dice. Essentially it's a "lose the game" button. If you're far enough along and have anything good, you can't recover. I'd lessen the amount of dice or give some sort of indication. It annoyed me that I'd spent 15 minutes on a really nice run and everything was now garbage.
OK, the second boss - whats up with that? I had the best dice collection and you kill me just because? :/
Cool game! Keep it up
Update is awesome!!! Keep adding stuff!
Inscryption has a nice approach with mods, where you can chose what stuff you want to add to the game.
yes yes yes. Great game. I don't like too much games like this (dice or cards game) but this is "easy to use" and with a lot of different ways to play and to win (or lose). Hours of fun, thank you!
this game is difficult. on the first five floors, I'm experiencing elite flies accompanied by two other flies, and even if I'm lucky enough to get to the boss, it just seems so overpowered as if i was able to become god in the other 19 floors (which only happens if you're extremely lucky.) This game just pounds you into the dust with overpowered enemies and terrible rolls at the beginning, and even if you get god tier dice, the setups are going to one turn you in an instant. however, the charm of the game, the power you feel when you beat a difficult setup, the events, and just the entire idea of the game itself is great. I don't think that anybody is gonna like me posting this, nor are they going to like the negativity I have shown, but i feel that this needs to be put out there, and despite all I've said, I really like this game. (also I'm not trying to do this to be mean, these are just some opinions i have on the game and maybe you could just add difficulty settings.)
Yeah, I feel like the health/damage/heal dynamics are poorly balanced in general. It's particularly evident in the boss fights, where their huge health pool and damage output often makes them impossible to counter for an average build. Or, more precisely, my hunch is that the game doesn't allow enough room for player skill to counter bad luck.
And the same issue is spread across sequences of fights as well: the loss of health becomes a compounding problem that travels with you from fight to fight and results in bad gameplay experiences like keeping an enemy alive in order to get the best boosted heal roll possible.
i actually have some ideas for the enemies, and also some suggestions for events. The moth shouldn't have 12 hp and be able to heal it instantly, it should be easily killable with about 5-7 hp, but if you don't get that, it should be able to heal about 2-3 hp at maximum. the fly is decent, but it's hp should be a bit weaker when it's in a group, maybe a 1-2 max health decrease, so it doesn't seem like it's bombarding you when you get three at the third floor. the shield guy should keep his health amount, but should also have a attack that is much like the fly's, ranging from 1-3. it's added shield ability seems decent enough, but it should most of the time just be +1, and only get +3 if it's lucky. the new accurate kill character is perfect the way they are, with 2 attack for the ability to basically be immortal unless you accurately kill it. the elite fly needs to chill with it's attack, it should be able to hit you for about 4-5, and it's health should be about 8 or 7. the elite moth should have about 10-12 hp (or the moth hp we have now). if it hits you, it might be 3 or 4, but it's healing should be about 5-6. the elite ranger should get about 2-5 per hit because of it's double attack, and the second attack should only be 3. the original ranger should have an attack of 1-2 hp per hit, because it can hit twice. (the health can stay the same for the both of them though). the elite shield guy should have 4-6 attack, and the triple attack should only be 1-2 per hit. it's health should stay the same, but the shield should be about 4 for a single, and 1-3 per shield for the triple. the axe guy needs to have an attack of about 3-4 when you weaken it, and five if you didn't. the spear guy should only have an attack of 2-3 (because no spear is strong enough to do 4-5 damage). the boss should only have half health (60) and the attack should range from 10 to 11. the attack after it becomes red should just be a guaranteed 11, and the dice adding should only be one instead of 3. the vents need some work as well. the jester could just be a random status (heavy, hollow or glass) instead of a completely random die. the massive bug should keep the damage, but instead, before a battle, allows you to choose the three options you would have gotten going through the floors normally. the roly-poly should only show up past floor 10 (and not on floor two where you still need all your die). there was also another thing i noticed; if you skip an event, the enemies you encounter fight you in groups or are more powerful (or that's just how the game works.) i just realized this is quite lengthy, so i'll stop it here.
what is miracle
great game btw. If i had money id pay for this game but thanks for making it free
Absolutely great to see you still update. I'm gonna throw some cash your way every time you release an update! :D
Tiny gripe: I'm not sure if the music is final at this stage, but you're probably aware that it gets a bit repetitive after a while. When I turn off the music, all the sound effects are also disabled. They don't need to be, I think.
Anyway, great game, I'm gonna recommend it to all my friends!
Thanks for the kind words!
Regarding the music... keep an eye out for the next mini-update ;)
Don't tease me like that man!
If I may take this opportunity for some more feedback: I adore the events. Really spices things up. However, I'd like at least the option to go into them blindly. Right now, some events show the result of the options you can choose, and some of them don't. To truly judge the event by the context clues (which are, might I add greatly animated for just some lines of text, love that) instead of just picking the result I like most, I feel like the results should be obscured from me.