itch.io

This isn't just a boring exercise in systematic permutation, it also has a thin veneer of slop.

Dude, did you even playtest this? 

Do you seriously expect me to sit here manually drawing 100+ pentagrams?

not that I suggest wasting time on this.... but....

you can churn through the bosses by grinding gear - if get the item drop & rarity rate up,  fill up on items with good boosts (learn which boosts are good and which are crap, some start bad and get good later, or vice versa), 

manually set a higher level to grind higher and higher, if the drop rate is tuned you can double your target level in a very short time, and just keep doing it

you need the portal, a few jumps maybe

the base area has the lowest level enemies

That's the place where the bosses hang out.

ugh, found it, tiny, in the base section, next to the top of the relics area

you get there by grinding gear

it's a slog

• make sure you set the level of the battle manually
• attack the highest level you can manage at a decent pac
• pick an location to fight based on the gear you want right now (see bestiary)
• while you are in the bestiary, check the drop chance and rarity, if it's low, you will take forever to get anything,

• you need to get item drop% and rarity% up while also being strong enough to increase the fight level
• eventually you will auto-trash anything except epic gear

• a lot of bonuses are garbage, exactly which ones suck will change as you progress
• you can watch the fight to get an idea of what you need
  • if yo don't see the enemy bar going down with every hit, get accuracy up
  • if you recover health only slowly, get more healing (of some kind, try leeching)
• you can check the stats to see what is working and what isn't
  • get enough health to take a hit or two
  • get enough heal to heal up before you take the next hit
  • get enough damage (depends on multiple factors) to kill faster
  • enough drop% and rarity% to get good gear fast
  • you need to keep up with accuracy, but only enough to hit most of the time 
    

bosses are unlocked at jump 20

it's a slog

Where even are the plants after building the "viridarium"?

The game is feature rich, but poorly balanced, lacking in QoL, and too much of a repetitive slog.

New players be advised: There is nothing worthwhile at the end of the grind.  

Scroll is a treasure hunt. Follow the clues and explore locations in order.

dafk? u troll?

9 is nothing?

nah, fort lvl 13 then explore base camp

It's dumb.

1. You have to get the fort to level 13. 
2. THEEN explore the starting area with the base in it (even if it is already fully searched).  
3. Read the log and follow the breadcrumbs across all locations in the given order.

Forgot to mention, this needs save game export.

Damn, that last battle was seriously sweaty. Those big nasties that grow stronger whenever you do anything almost got me. Then I got lucky with a frogger from the portal, took one of the bastards out, and then managed to grind my way into turning the tide. Won with 1 hp left, and no more cards to draw.
Improvement suggestions:
1. If the text log was less verbose (ie fit on a single line) it would be easier to follow what happens. 2. Totally-not-an-ambull  threw a dude so hard his hit-box broke. Couldn't click him to make him move. Buggy indeed. 3. At times I felt like the arena was too large. But then again, with that final battle being such a nail biter, maybe you have it just right.

Well done dev!

I don't know. Maybe not the best genre cross-over.  You hide QOL behind upgrades, but also, many of the upgrades take away from fun of the jigsaw puzzle.

True, it took some trial and error. 

(to be clear, I'm just a rando with no connection to this game other than trying it and leaving a comment)

cute

cost scaling is pretty awful

lol, classic

build the wood cutter next to trees

Yeah, I suppose I can see what you were going for, and it makes sense. Though I felt mostly frustrated by constantly having to trash what I just built, and the UI being ornery makes that worse. Maybe there can be an easy mode whith a more forgiving map.

That said, I still spent a good while on it and I feel like if it was a bit more polished it would be great.

I feel like it has a lot of potential. But it needs a lot more polish. The UI is not good, and fights you all the time. The progress is not very elegant. The combination of the tight map, how unlocks invalidate previous set-ups, and the UI being against you constantly, it's rather punishing.
Devs should playtest for themselves a few times before publishing.

Doesn't get past the loading screen. Bar fills, music plays. That's all folks.
(Tested Safari, FF, Brave, all on Mac)

Seems about the right length to me. It's a very basic concept, no need to milk it.

Still slow, and the animations look bad in high speed. 
20 rats & 20 spiders, then a zombie that takes forever to gnaw at.

Concept is cool, but you made a watch-paint-dry simulator.

Too slow.

Pretty cool!

Late stage area manages to be a bit overwhelming and a bit of a slog.

Lava is confusing, don't know what is causing it or how best to deal with it.

As is par for the course with vibe coded projects you get a thick layer of features, but minimal substance, and a generous smattering of bizarre issues.

Just to mention two:

How do you get into furniture?

How do you get lvl 4 pickaxe, when you need a level 4 pickaxe to mine the alloy you need to make a level 4 pickaxe.

Writing is not good, instead big meh.

Balance is poor.

UI is annoying.

Text... moves.... at... glacial.... pace....

tried both firefox and brave on mac = controls going in the wrong places

feels like a pre-alpha, 

performance is going to be a problem for bigger towers

balance is absolutely atrocious

It is still kind of fun, even though the bugs are somewhat baffling.

Being able to speed up the game is good. But it does interact with targeting in some way.

Smart targeting is a good idea. Though there is def something fishy about how it works with many weapons and fast targets.
It might take more than a three weapons to trigger the bug.

I don't know if "conquering" places in the world map does anything, but being able to filter or sort by difficulty would be useful.
Maybe the ability to set up a queue.

When upgrading the type of a weapon, it doesn't lock out the other options. You could switch back and forth, but that would of course be worse than useless, as it eats the "upgrade".

Yeah, the weapons don't properly target.

Vibe-coded bugs galore.

Game speed has a large impact on survivability.

With upgraded launchers in play, lasers and guns barely even fire at all.

Not sure if target selection actually works. Hard to tell.

Fast enemies seem to be the only real threat. And that's because your guns don't seem to target them fast enough to even fire at them.

I think it might be a memory leak, or just excessive memory usage.

Not entirely sure, seems to happen when too many thing happen at once. Might be multiple bugs. Often but not always I'm holding a piece for a longer time. Or it's frequent clicking. Either way, hope for a stable built so I can keep playing.

Nice one! But crashes from time to time and wipes the save.

It's just shovelslop.

The numbers don't make sense, and they don't work the way they say they do.

* Each time you die, look at the board, see if you spot a hint or pattern. There are plenty.
* You can count the time until you need a heart scroll by comparing xp row to heart row.
* Save the scrolls as long as possible. A late game scroll is worth a lot more than an early game scroll.
* Bashing walls is an absolute last resort 
* Look at squares, do simple math, check the book to see what monsters are still around.

Same, needed a strategy reset from making max score runs to trifecta-runs.