Week Five: Alpha Testing

We're in Alpha!!

Accomplished a lot this week just bringing the game into a state of completion; play testing also revealed a decent number of bugs which are now fixed.

The first alpha tester also played the game this week!

Progress

• Finish the lifecycle steps (main quest, death, defeat, victory)
• Make the Act 1 Boss
• Do a lot of testing until the game feels fun. Probably entails:
  • Add more enemy types
  • Give enemies passive effects
    • Added Guard, GenerateMana
  • Balance/replace unpickable cards & tune damage numbers
    • Tuned starter cards, Added secondary effects to some cards, Guard-countering cards are relevant now
  • Ensure there are interesting cross-character synergies (unfinished)
• Town Events
  • Added a simplistic version of town events: Pay gold to heal party, Simple gear shop

Alpha Testing

Alpha testing got underway with our first alpha tester! Watching someone else play the game is such a special moment.

Overall I think it went really well:

• The complexity level felt right for a first time player. Some things needed explaining, but they made sense then. It feels like the level of learning curve a tutorial would handle.
• Positive feedback on visuals. "Cuteeee!"
• A couple of UX issues: understanding quests was a bit hard, and misplaying Combo cards that wouldn't trigger. Heath bars need a real number next to them.

Run Lifecycle

The character selection screen is way better now, and the opening event is simplified.

There's also a way to resolve player death. You can revive them for a cost, or carry on without them. Later there will be events to recruit new players mid run, so you can always build your party back up.

TPK is still a little buggy, but technically works.

Enemy Design

Adding in Guard really made the fights more fun. I think I still need some more distinction between offensive and defensive enemies though, as well as adding some more complex enemy turns.

I think adding unique sprites for all the enemies will also help here; right now every enemy just uses the rat sprite, so a lot of fights feel the same even when the move sets are really different.

Cross-Character Synergies

More work to be done here, but there are some interesting synergies now:

• Fighter's attack-front cards synergize well with Wind Dancer's movement
• Mana gen, draw synergizes well between characters

I still want to add:

• Some hand-size synergies so summons interact more
• More mana gen cards for Necromewncer
• More cross-character buff effects

Town Events

I added a simplified version of town events so I could get resting & shopping into the game. I think this adds a lot to the overall run feel, since there's more to strategize around. It also gives a reason to navigate around the map in a specific way.

Card Balance

Adding in Guard made a lot of cards more viable than they were before.

I've also adjusted the starter attacks to be stat/2 instead of stat, so cards from rewards are a lot stronger relatively. Before, you'd have your starter attack Claw: Attack str, and then be offered (eg) Tail Swipe: Attack str. Draw sol (aka Draw 0), which is effectively the same. Having the starter cards be weaker really improves the scaling of taking cards from rewards.

I also worked to make fewer dead draw cards. Ex: Bash: Move an enemy back 1 is now Shield Bash: Shield 2 self. Move an enemy back 1. This way the card is still usable in fights without any guarded enemies, just not quite as useful.

There's still a lot of cards that are intended to be strong late game, which I don't expect to ever be balanced in Act 1. (Ex: Necrotosis: Gain 1 mana per curse in hand.) It's hard to test those for now, since there's not enough time to build into it.

Up Next

After playing act 1, I think I have a better sense of what the game needs next. (It's a lot lol)

To make Act 1 better:

• Add shops
• Add card removal at towns and events
• Add wandering merchants (can be encountered on the road)
• Add multi-effect items: One item that does two things, or an item that has both a positive and negative effect. These are really interesting because it gives the opportunity to turn the negative into a positive.
  • Ex: Cursed Amulet: +1 str, +1 pre, adds a curse to your deck
  • Ex: Scale Mail: -1 sol, turn action (1): shield [2*str] self
• Add more quest events
• Add ocean enemies & events, more specific regional enemies.
• Art for enemies
• Art for location backgrounds

• Boss reward items (special, extra powerful items that you only get from the boss)
• Quest reward items (special, extra powerful items that you only get from completing a quest)
• Add character quests
• Add more characters: Artificer, Shade Tail
• Add Act 2 fights & boss
  • Also includes adding the ability to have events that only show up in specific acts. Maybe like event.requires_state = ["Act2", "wolf_loss"] or such.
• Add special narrative events
• "Consume" cards: cards that remove themselves from your deck after being played.

This Week

I think it makes sense to focus on making sure act 1 is solid before moving on. It's also hard to build out more content when the balance might change a lot once card removal and shops are introduced.

• Shops
• Card removal
• Enemy sprite art

Stretch goals:

• More quest events, and character quests
• Multi-effect items

There's also an ongoing effort to finish all the card art & event flavor text. I tend to work on that when I've run out of focus for larger tasks.

Card Library (106)

(24 w/o art, 19 less than last week!)