itch.io

Genuinely great twist on snake! I love how it flips the script and challenges you to touch your own tail. Controls are strange but I enjoyed the process of learning and getting better at them. My best score was 112.

Criticisms/Suggestions

• I really want some indicator as to when the drops will disappear. A blinking or shrinking effect would do wonders. Going for a drop only for it to disappear happened too often to me.
• Difficulty scaling would be nice. If it existed, I couldn't tell. Arguably the hardest part of the game is the beginning since you start at your shortest length and I don't think you'll ever be that short again.
• It would be cool if there was a reason to try and maintain your length without touching your tail. I know that's the point, but it would add a cool risk reward element to scoring outside of just going the distance. Maybe collecting drops past the necessary length to touch grants more points that scale with total length? Anything to add a little more depth to the scoring would be awesome.
• I've never seen the death screen because I clicked through it instantly every time. Switching to X to restart would fix that (assuming there isn't another option tied to X)

With some of these issues addressed, I could see this being an awesome standalone arcade game. Would love to see it expanded!

nice win! Good points on rewind, I mostly agree. Theres always going to be balance problems with spells that generate resources and don’t exhaust. Rewind is obviously powerful for this reason, but so is meditate and even longstrider. Meditate is arguably the biggest problem of the three, but it’s such a glue spell that i hesitate to touch it. Exhaust would be effective but I don’t want to put exhaust on too many spells.

I have always had too quick of a trigger finger to nerfing powerful but fun content in “card or card-adjacent” games so I’m going to refrain from touching any balance atm.

From looking at your build, honestly what might be the real problem is 2x whirlwind being too efficient. Things like rewind are only as good as your ability to clear the board of enemies, so maybe whirlwind is a bit too efficient specifically when you have two of them. Earthquake is 2x whirlwind in one spell, but with an extra 1 MP and 2 AP for its efficiency, and it’s also really good. Maybe whirlwind should cost 1 more mp or ap. I could also make it more rare, theres an entirely invisible rarity system and i think whirlwind is relatively common (earthquake is relatively rare).

Re 1. It's worth mentioning that this is actually the second attempt at making this game. My first attempt was 9 Till Void, which is available on my itch or steam and has similar mechanics but with some tweaks and some things missing (there's no XP or Gems in that one). This game came about from finding the original prototype of that game, which looks a lot closer to Ennead, and realizing "Wow I think I like this prototype more than the thing I actually released? Maybe I should try this again..." And in those older versions there are more enemy types, including an enemy that blocks the spell in its row from being used. I definitely am open to adding more enemies, but in past experiences it's really hard to get players to mouse over enemies to understand what they do, and also players generally dislike really disruptive enemies. The demons in Ennead work well because its so easy to understand them. I'll think more on it though!

Re 2. Yes I can definitely improve this. To clarify how it works, Void gets created at the end of your turn if Turns is at 0, and Void deals 1 damage to any entity at the end of its turn. The damage is dealt before void gets created, so if you move to a cell which will become void at the end of your turn, it wont hurt you. So just be mindful of ending your turn in void that exists right now, and also consider how enemies might end their turns in void too. I can definitely improve the visual on this. I could also maybe simplify it to make everything happen at the end of your turn to remove some ambiguity, it would just change the balance in some subtle but impactful ways since damage would be applied to enemies before they move instead of after.

Re 3. Streaking actually might be a good way to introduce more enemy types. Restrict more disruptive and complex enemies to streak difficulty modifiers. That would work well I think. I'll have to think more though because I honestly don't like the streaking aspect of brough games, usually. I personally prefer when a run can exist in isolation. I do want to provide some new challenge after players win though that isn't just "get a higher score" so I'll see if I can come up with a non streak solution first, but I'll keep streaking in the back of my mind.

Thanks again for the comments! I'm not sure how soon I'll get to updating the game, but I'll make some devlog posts if I do, so be on the lookout!

Oh! I also meant to ask, did you read my "Some Tips" section in the game description?

This is the kind of comment any game developer loves to receive. Congrats on the win!

I'd love to know how that process of learning went for you: What was confusing, what's still confusing, and what was immediately intuitive. This is one of those games that isn't really "fun" (subjective, I know) until you have a good understanding of the rules and how that might influence strategy. Getting people from "This is hard and confusing" to your comment here is exactly what I want for everyone, but currently that requires a level of curiosity and trust that most people won't have. Not expecting you to solve these problems for me, just curious to hear more about your experience + feedback!

Oh thank you so much! I really appreciate the comment. Yeah I'd love to hear any thoughts or suggestions you might have, there's obviously a lot of room for improvement with this one haha

I'm not sure. I made this game almost a decade ago now and haven't thought much about it sense, so I don't feel confident I'd know what's best for a solo mode. I would probably recommend researching what approaching people have tried taking for other TCG style games, like MTG, Netrunner, Pokemon, etc. Sorry for not being much help!

Solo play wasn't something I considered when I originally designed the game, and frankly I'm not sure there could be a good solo game. However, you could probably try to come up with some kind of "artificial" player that follows a simple algorithm to create interesting scenarios for the human player. You might just have to experiment with it. Sorry for the sort of non-answer!

yes it does. stand on the white floppy discs to save. there is no auto save.

I'm encountering the same issue.

I've seen, thanks!

Love the new tile marking UI! New music is great, although the downtime between tracks feels like it last way too long.

Not sure how I feel about the difficulty increase. On the one hand, I feel like I had pretty much solved the previous version, so more difficulty is good. On the other hand, the game feels a tad more inscrutable now, like there are fewer paths to victory. The tighter HP and fewer initially revealed tiles makes the early to mid game feel a lot more cramped in general. I need to play more to process my thoughts.

Yeah I guess that's fine, I appreciate you for asking. You have permission to re-distribute this game on PortMaster only. 

Very very fun! Managed to get (what I assume is) a perfect score after a few attempts. Would really love if there was a setting that switched the heart/xp UI to just numbers. I found myself having to count up my missing xp and remaining hearts a lot as a result of not having that. better tools for marking spaces would also be nice. a sudoku esque sideboard of buttons would have been useful to avoid all the clicking.

this is really good! love how you can try to go for speed or completion, it's a very smart design. i want more

Ok so I did some testing and wasn't able to replicate this issue. Made a new save file for myself and both my first and second scores saved to the leaderboard. Restarted the game and played two more, and both of those scores saved as well.

That all being said, I *think* when playing I got a 127k score which I don't see on my scoreboard. However, I'm not 100% sure because I wasn't keeping super close track of what my scores were until after this happened, and I do see 4 unique scores on my scoreboard, which is the number of games I played. So it's possible that the issue isn't that scores aren't being saved, but that they are being saved incorrectly in some cases. If your 150k score isn't on your score board, it may have saved as a lower score. I'll give this a closer look soon to see if something is going awry.

I did also notice a few other bugs: one being hands are sorted in reverse now, whoops. Second being the second game you play after the tutorial will be a multiplayer game even if you don't have two players.

I'm going to wait a bit before making a patch to fix these to see if more bugs come in. 

Ah, sorry about that. I don't think it used to do that. I'll have a look tomorrow

Before your comment, progress was 0%. Now it is 100%*. You legally have to download the game now and tell everyone you know to do so as well.

Please read the button mapping table in the page description before playing. Keyboard inputs are not displayed in any way in the game.

this is one of my favorites of yours that i like to revisit it whenever i remember to. it never fails to make me laugh. happy to see it on itch!

Great game, would love to see it expanded! If you do plan to expand it, I'd like to see more work to make it feel like an actual operating system, because right now the UI feels somewhat superfluous. I would also like to see more work done for notetaking. Being able to right click folders to use as breadcrumbs is not as helpful as I want it to be. This would be a cool case to implement the ability to rename folders imo, then the player can come up with their own naming scheme. 

No, this is a very basic platforming shell.

I'm so glad you enjoyed it, thank you for commenting!

Might be good to add a turn timer to unfreeze, it'd be an easy way to prevent this from happening. I'd rather be killed for my blunder than be put in an infinite zugzwang like this.

I seem to have permanently froze the enemies in front of me, and the rest of my board is all spores. Seems impossible to clear them out, and I also cannot die.

am stuck on level 2. feel like im missing something

Interesting game! I'm not sure that this concept is currently working as well as LBAL does, but I'm sure you already know that. I think the main thing that feels lacking is how it doesn't feel like you can really build towards anything. I pulled a very rare plant, and it got delivered after just a few turns, which felt kind of bad. I feel like if you could find a way to redesign this so you kept your plants, instead of delivering them, that would be a more satisfying experience.

thanks!! will hopefully have more to share soon!

it's actually very relevant, because there's a card playing aspect here too! and yeah, that's how i have it setup for card playing right now. although there aren't very many animations that occur when you play cards yet, so it's not super noticeable.

This is really good.

Super fun! Every level introduces something new, whether that be a recurring mechanic or a one-off gimmick. Astra has a pretty varied skillset: you have a slide if you want to go fast, and an aerial float if you wanna take it slow. There's collectibles if you're a completionist, and individual level / full game timers if you're a speedrunner. 

There's a lot of fun ideas here. Highly recommend if you're a fan of platformers!

Lovely tribute! I just barely couldn't get past the third screen, so I decided to return to the title page to input the infinite jump code and see what I missed. Through doing this, I learned something about the game that let me beat the third screen without infinite jumps. I think that's amazing and wanted to share it.

oh that makes a lot more sense. i understood how energy works, i just thought there was also a cooldown mechanic happening. 

seems like it would be better to just have that radial energy restoration display over your energy tracker, rather than on each individual card. as it exists now, it's a very confusing ui

Fun! Your next attacks shoots bombs + regenerate your energy to full + shoot 4 bullets x times is a bit too powerful. The cards that don't cost energy are just very strong in general because you redraw immediately. 

I don't love the cooldown system. Having to wait to play cards feels bad. I'm not sure that cooldowns are even necessary when you already have to wait to restore your energy. Feels like you could remove energy or remove cooldowns and the game would be more fun.

Love all the visual improvements!

Potentially unintended behavior? When I dismiss a held unit, it triggers the essentia item that gives extra essence. This makes that item into a +2 essence per round with no downside, which is weird. Taking a unit off hold should probably not trigger on-sell effects.

Some feedback:

I like the changes you made from the build I played last year. That said, the gameplay has a pacing issue. The pool of units and indulgences is very small and they're all designed to be equally balanced, so there's functionally no power curve. Every turn feels exactly the same. 

Some games solve this through a rarity system, others solve it through a tier system where you can level up the shop to find higher tier stuff. More content would also help. Since the pool is so small, I find myself picking the exact same indulgence or units every round since it's so reliable to get extra copies and they all scale well. Diluting the pool would help force more variety into the game.

One last note, with damage no longer persisting between rounds, the game is now very easy. The AI might need more work or some more gameplay advantages. It could also be fun to give the AI access to units you don't have access to. Playing against different stuff might be more interesting than it always being a mirror match.

Thank you!

with great challenge

The feature that pauses the game when an ability procs is an amazing teaching tool. Made learning the game a cinch. 

I really respect the decision to design an auto battler where death, damage, and even summons persists from combat, however, I am concerned about this design. There's a reason why no other games have done this, and it's because it makes the game into a real feast or famine situation. 

Right now, it feels like the only way to win is to abuse the 5th cell to make one unkillable unit, and scale from there. When I did that, the game felt pretty trivial. When I wasn't doing that, I was having to rebuild my comp nearly from scratch every round. Playing the game "fairly" just felt like re-doing round 1 over and over again because I couldn't get any of my units to stick between rounds.

Another consequence is many of the relics feel useless. Why would I ever spend money to give an on death effect to a unit if it can only ever happen 1 time? The only time I'd consider buying this is if my board is full, at which point I probably was already winning anyway. The relic that gives a unit taunt is useful, but getting the pair feels actively bad because you'd only ever want to put it on the unit which you're scaling in the center cell. But that's also bad because that's the unit you want to draw damage away from, so it's kind of a cursed problem.

Game is very cool and promising, but it really needs some more systems to complement allies not reviving between rounds.

I love the world and art, especially the creative use of large characters as platforms. I just wish there was a bit more oomph to the platforming. I found myself frequently falling into pits because I assumed my jump was better than it was. I think I would have enjoyed it more if the jump height was a bit higher, or the movement speed was a bit faster, but I understand if the player being weak is part of the narrative.

this is fun! although i think it's missing some stakes near the end. when i died after calling riichi, i was expecting that to be a game over, but it just lets me try again until i succeed or get bored. it would also be cool if there was a way to win without calling riichi

Felt like the possibility space for tactics is stifled somewhat by how weak normal movement is. You get such efficient ranged damage options that making 1 tile movements often felt actively detrimental. Killer game otherwise though. Loved the sound and art design especially.