Maybe just luck, but I was able to break the balance by finding a sector where I could handle the debuffs and constantly revisited jump points. Additionally, the Experimental Weapon card quickly became very powerful by upgrading the charge level, even without the grinding.
Some suggestions:
-Maybe don't outright nerf the player's ability to draw, discard, and play 0 cost cards, but have an enemy type (or boss) that punishes the player for these things. Some unbalanced examples:
Enemy Passive
Effect
Suppressive fire
Deal 4 Ion damage for every three cards played in a turn. [Encourages a deck that can do more with less cards played or can counter the chip damage]
Building rage
Every other time this enemy takes hull damage add the following buff(s): precision, anti missile ammo, shield regen, etc. [Encourages a deck that can deal hull damage quickly (plasma) or that can counter enemy buffs]
System jamming
Each time the player's discard pile is reshuffled add 3 unplayable trash cards. [Don't build a small 8 card deck of very powerful cards]
Reactive shields
Every time this enemy takes hull damage, it gains 10 shields and 5 shield reflect. [Makes missiles and ion much more important, I didn't find either to be worth the deck space.]
Damage control
Every time that this enemy takes more than 5 hull damage in a strike, it gains 3 shields, 3 ablative armor (single hit armor plating), 1 missile diffuse, and repairs 3 damage. [Be able to ramp your damage up or just have high damage cards.]
Evasive maneuvers
Completely negate the effects of the player's first offensive card every turn. [Be able to burn the dodge with something weak or use explosive cards.]
(Edit: I noticed that some of these are handled with timeline debuffs.)
-I didn't pick up the prejudiced payload card in my playthrough out of caution. If the ion damage is applied first rather than simultaneously, you could write it as "Deal 7 ion damage, then deal 7 energy damage."
That said, I appreciate you guys putting this out for free. The crafting was novel and fun, especially when the corrupted shard unceremoniously deleted a card. "Huh"
Hey. thanks so much for playing the game! As you could tell, it’s very much still a work in progress.
My intention for the final timeline type was to have every time your deck gets shuffled back into your draw pile, they add some number of hex cards to the draw pile along with it to dilute your deck. This would be to prevent the scenario where your deck is 4 super strong cards that all cost 0 constantly drawing each other.
Experimental weapon might need to get nerfed, the balance is all very much back of the napkin at the moment. Another key balance thing I’m not currently sure about is whether recursive cards should draw first and then shuffle themselves in, or shuffle in and then draw. As it works right now, they shuffle themselves in and then do any draw mechanics, which if you have 0 cards in your deck and make the card cost 0 with “draw 1” means you can infinitely draw it. A pretty specific scenario, but kind of broken.
Anyways, I appreciate the ideas for additional enemy types, as I’m working on adding animations and more enemies/cards every week. So please keep checking back in if you get the chance!
The intent is to eventually put it out on steam, but we’re still a far ways away from that (no audio, pixelated fruit being the enemies, no card art, limited animation, etc)
Also, for any card, the effects happen in the order the text is displayed, but you are definitely right about making that more clear. Thanks again for playing!
That makes sense. As far as balancing goes, I felt like it's in a good spot for starting out. Same for fighting the pixilated fruit lol.
I managed to soft lock myself at a shop on another run by instantly forgetting that I used my last fuel to get there when I saw a shiny artifact. It was a silly misplay on my part, funny though.
I'm sure that you're familiar with slay the spire, but some of the community mods add really neat mechanics, could be good for some inspiration. All art is imitation, yadda yadda..
Best of luck! Looking forward to see where this goes.
As for the soft lock, this is on me for not tutorializing it, but you can spend your ship’s health for fuel if you’re out of scrap! Obviously there are limits to what you can do with that since you might not have enough health to make more fuel, but yeah. Should add that as a popup.
I should also probably add some detection for if you don’t have enough health or scrap to synthesize more fuel and you’re at 0 fuel so users don’t have to figure out what’s happening.
There’s the discord link in game if you want to report any balance/bugs/feedback stuff there too. You’re the first person that’s not a real life acquaintance to play, so you’ll be the first one in there!
← Return to game
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Great game, I've had a lot of fun plating it.
Maybe just luck, but I was able to break the balance by finding a sector where I could handle the debuffs and constantly revisited jump points. Additionally, the Experimental Weapon card quickly became very powerful by upgrading the charge level, even without the grinding.
Some suggestions:
-Maybe don't outright nerf the player's ability to draw, discard, and play 0 cost cards, but have an enemy type (or boss) that punishes the player for these things. Some unbalanced examples:
(Edit: I noticed that some of these are handled with timeline debuffs.)
-I didn't pick up the prejudiced payload card in my playthrough out of caution. If the ion damage is applied first rather than simultaneously, you could write it as "Deal 7 ion damage, then deal 7 energy damage."
That said, I appreciate you guys putting this out for free. The crafting was novel and fun, especially when the corrupted shard unceremoniously deleted a card. "Huh"
Hey. thanks so much for playing the game! As you could tell, it’s very much still a work in progress.
My intention for the final timeline type was to have every time your deck gets shuffled back into your draw pile, they add some number of hex cards to the draw pile along with it to dilute your deck. This would be to prevent the scenario where your deck is 4 super strong cards that all cost 0 constantly drawing each other.
Experimental weapon might need to get nerfed, the balance is all very much back of the napkin at the moment. Another key balance thing I’m not currently sure about is whether recursive cards should draw first and then shuffle themselves in, or shuffle in and then draw. As it works right now, they shuffle themselves in and then do any draw mechanics, which if you have 0 cards in your deck and make the card cost 0 with “draw 1” means you can infinitely draw it. A pretty specific scenario, but kind of broken.
Anyways, I appreciate the ideas for additional enemy types, as I’m working on adding animations and more enemies/cards every week. So please keep checking back in if you get the chance!
The intent is to eventually put it out on steam, but we’re still a far ways away from that (no audio, pixelated fruit being the enemies, no card art, limited animation, etc)
Also, for any card, the effects happen in the order the text is displayed, but you are definitely right about making that more clear. Thanks again for playing!
That makes sense. As far as balancing goes, I felt like it's in a good spot for starting out. Same for fighting the pixilated fruit lol.
I managed to soft lock myself at a shop on another run by instantly forgetting that I used my last fuel to get there when I saw a shiny artifact. It was a silly misplay on my part, funny though.
I'm sure that you're familiar with slay the spire, but some of the community mods add really neat mechanics, could be good for some inspiration. All art is imitation, yadda yadda..
Best of luck! Looking forward to see where this goes.
Thank you!
As for the soft lock, this is on me for not tutorializing it, but you can spend your ship’s health for fuel if you’re out of scrap! Obviously there are limits to what you can do with that since you might not have enough health to make more fuel, but yeah. Should add that as a popup.
I should also probably add some detection for if you don’t have enough health or scrap to synthesize more fuel and you’re at 0 fuel so users don’t have to figure out what’s happening.
There’s the discord link in game if you want to report any balance/bugs/feedback stuff there too. You’re the first person that’s not a real life acquaintance to play, so you’ll be the first one in there!