Thanjs vivafringe for a thought provoking post. I think a win/loss ratio would be a great addition for stats purposes. Suggestion work L's be for it to kick into normal mode once you unlock all the cards.
Woa vivafringe! Thats an amazing write up! I'm all over this, but obviously you are judging from a more hardcore perspective. I can see all your complaints and i will see if i can integrate some of you very valid feedback in further updates. Thanks again
This game is great! Love the overall feel and the "one more time" -twitch you just can't resist. But is it intentional that sword- and shield-cards always appear in pairs related to their value? Sword 7 and Shield 7 and so on. Find it strange. But since no one has commented on this issue, I just kept playing, dealing with this rather odd mechanic...
@vivafringe: Great post, matches what I thought. And... that's why I play Normal mode. Haven't even played Constructed mode yet. <LordGek>The game could use statistics! Maybe a leaderboard that scores (overall win/loss)*gold or something similar. Perhaps an endurance mode where you post a score of the total of 3 or 5 consecutive games?</LordGek> It's a fun game, and nice that a slight change in cards can make a big difference in a game. The game looks to be off to a great start, I hope the dev does well enough to include some new cards, this is a fantastic casual game.
There's a new review up on Attack All Apps for Card Crawl https://attackallapps.wordpress.com/2015/03/17/card-crawl iOS Game Review: Card Crawl 4/5 | Attack All Apps!
The more I play the more I realize the game has one really big flaw that can totally ruin a playthrough. The game has a tendency to "cluster" ability cards towards the middle of the deck. I end up having to sell off or discard a whole bunch of stuff and then get gobsmacked by monsters where I could have really used some of those swords, shields and potions I had to discard. I'm seeing this pretty frequently. What doesn't help is that I am now convinced the sword and shields are always paired off. Which means when they are close to each other in the deck they have a tendency to "crowd" together. All it takes is a few nearby potion or coin cards and you have a train of cards you will never be able to use. I think it would help the game immensely if they would actually decouple the sword and shield cards.
To counter pure mechanical high score tactics and re-starting after every bad hand how about this: ...implement a winning streak counter/mechanic where you get increasing additional points on top of your overall score for each continuous win. If you combine this with the prerequisite that you first have to unlock all special cards before this feature gets active it would enormously increase replayability and provide a completely different way to achieve high scores.
The swords and shields ARE paired off but it's a bug and the devs have already submitted a fix. Since those cards are being paired it affects the card distribution so you end up with pockets of monsters, pockets of equipment, and sometimes the ability cards get pushed closer to the end or beginning.
This would be nice! It's how scoring in 868-HACK is counted (every 8 levels you restart at the beginning, but keep a running total until you die.)
I was going to mention 868 as well. It's similar to this game in that it's trivial to win, but difficult to win "well".
i've played 868-Hack but haven't looked closer at the streak scoring. I will do that an see how i can implement such thing.
Just saying, page 20, vivafringe's guide or whatever on this game is mostly wrong, I don't know how he calculated all that. Midas scarf transforms a card into gold and its gold is amount to the card's points, that's a maximum of 10 gold if you use it on the 10 hp monster, how the hell you get 20 gold? The post is so long and there's tons of incorrect calculations, Its too much work to point out everything it has wrong.
Mentioned at the beginning of the article, but I value damage to be equivalent to gold for calculation purposes. So if I convert a 10HP monster to gold, not only do I earn 10 gold, but I can sell 10 points of either swords, shields or potions that I otherwise would have had to use. That's how I get 20 gold. There is one big error that I found today: I believe you can get a higher max score from Betrayal + Midas Scarf + Lash + Forge + Morph. I will edit that in in a bit. Let me know if you see any other errors. Maybe read the entire thing first though, lol.
He also makes it seem that Morph will always bring up a 13 point card you can sell (which does sometimes happen) but it can also put a Goblin right in your face. So it's a fun card after all #
Yeah, morph is unpredictable, sometimes I get monsters as well. @viva The swap card, how did u get 16 gold? If you use the explanation you gave me a minute ago, a 10hp mob swap with a 2 potion or whatever it'll only give you 10 coins if you sell it at a cost of 2hp since the monster is still alive.
Not really an error but an observation based on my play that maybe Revive should be scored higher. In a perfect play scenario an early Revive would mean that you could sacrifice 12hp leaving you with 1hp to sacrifice to a Souleater (at least that's what I do). That means one card allowed me to take 22 points worth of monsters out of the deck and since you're trying to use as little resources as possible you want to end the game with 1hp anyways.
It's worth noting that something like this (and this is not only true for this one but for any game) is never the player's fault, though. It's a flaw in the game's design. If the competitively optimal way of playing is not the most fun way of playing, then the game effectively tells you to have less fun as a player who is naturally seeking to overcome the presented challenges as best as possible. The only reason we sort of accept these things with an answer like "Oh well, then you just have to play FOR FUN!" is because of how common these design flaws are (which is understandable given the youth of the craft of professional game design but anyways). The player should never have to do design work, and therefore should not be tasked with "finding the fun" in a game or with "finding the most fun way to play". A good game will automatically lead the player towards that path. In this specific example, one problem is that there is no downside to restarting. There is no metagame ranking or something that would suffer from resigning repeatedly or anything like that.
I agree with you on game design in general but not in regards to the comment you quoted. Just playing for high score DOES make this game a bit of a chore. Not just this game but most games. The score might really matter to some people and I do get a thrill of bypassing my highest score but I'm not breaking out spreadsheets to figure out the best way to min/max my way to success. That's probably why I spend so much time in normal mode and to me the idea is to keep unlocking all the cards. Which I can do, maybe more slowly, just by winning games. I've almost got the last card unlocked and I'll keep playing because then it just makes the game a little more unpredictable, which I enjoy. I get satisfaction from winning a game, though anything under 60 does feel like a Pyrrhic victory of sorts. I think if I started analyzing the game to just max score all the time I would suck a lot of the joy I feel from playing the game. Or as I've said about games in the past, I already have a job why do I need to make a game into another?
