I really like the constant weighing of decisions in the design. Every choice is based on opportunity cost: is it more damage with that extra modifier, or an extra bullet, and is it worth lowering my multiplier by drawing? The hard limit on the number of actions you have per turn is interesting too, you need to get as much value out of each item as you can. The items are cool, I like hot iron item for being cool thematically. Thinning your deck is usually the way to go in these types of games, I think I'd like some reason to keep the pebbles in my deck outside of niche use cases like farming for crits. There's the clear Balatro inspiration, but I like there's a little more being done with the concept. The bounty system is really interesting, picking and choosing when you want to fight what, managing a constant pool of health against certain upgrades.
I wish there was a little more enemy variety, or that they meshed in more interesting ways. The coward enemy getting his box back when killed is a little jarring as he doesn't have one prior to defeat. I also think the final boss could be a bit more intimidating, the cigar use is cool but I don't know if he really jumps at me as much as he could.
Overall, it's a good iteration on some old and new ideas, and I'm a fan of the final output, but I just wish for a bit more variety, which isn't all too bad, I don't want to force scope creep. Great stuff for a little project like this, I look forward to future work.
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Grimshot should insta die if the player does 666 damage to him. :)
Lots of fun! I eventually got to where I beat it 5x in a row. Some bugs:
1. After losing a game and restarting, when starting a fight no cards are drawn and the game is soft locked
2. Pebble to boulder effect is kept after winning a game with it and starting a new one
Thank you for playing!! And congrats on beating Grimshot 5 times in a row, thats impressive!
We appreciate the bug reports, we'll look into them.
Very interesting game. Here are my thoughts:
I really like the constant weighing of decisions in the design. Every choice is based on opportunity cost: is it more damage with that extra modifier, or an extra bullet, and is it worth lowering my multiplier by drawing? The hard limit on the number of actions you have per turn is interesting too, you need to get as much value out of each item as you can. The items are cool, I like hot iron item for being cool thematically. Thinning your deck is usually the way to go in these types of games, I think I'd like some reason to keep the pebbles in my deck outside of niche use cases like farming for crits. There's the clear Balatro inspiration, but I like there's a little more being done with the concept. The bounty system is really interesting, picking and choosing when you want to fight what, managing a constant pool of health against certain upgrades.
I wish there was a little more enemy variety, or that they meshed in more interesting ways. The coward enemy getting his box back when killed is a little jarring as he doesn't have one prior to defeat. I also think the final boss could be a bit more intimidating, the cigar use is cool but I don't know if he really jumps at me as much as he could.
Overall, it's a good iteration on some old and new ideas, and I'm a fan of the final output, but I just wish for a bit more variety, which isn't all too bad, I don't want to force scope creep. Great stuff for a little project like this, I look forward to future work.
This demo was made in about four months with a team of four people so scope was definitely an issue and we can agree more enemies would be nice.
In development we constantly used the philosophy of getting the player to "push their luck" and risking it all so nice job picking up on that.
Thank you for playing and for the comment, We really appreciate it!
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