Interesting. Well, one of the reasons I feel Dazzle is so great is that it frequently allows you to clear skulls you couldn't or to really efficiently clear all skulls on the board. Making coins valuable would be great. I'm anxious to see how that works. Right now, coins are basically the sand you sift through to get to the goodies. What I'd love to see is a way to build a "character" around any of the major game elements: that is, you can go defensive based on shields (and blunting and spikes etc), go offensive based on sword manipulation, go touch-to-kill with potion bonuses and life boosters, or go mercenary with a 'build' based on coin collecting and lighting fast item turnover. And for all those builds to be roughly even in effectiveness! (is that asking too much? )
Something feels a bit off with defence, I can't put my finger on it. I've never gone for a solid "tanky" build because I don't think enough defence comes along to do it. When an item upgrade reduces 1 damage from an onslaught of enemies, it's not very appealing. Could go in two directions with this. Either increase defence gains so it's a bit more effective, or actually reduce defence gains but make defence reduce damage per skull rather than off the total. OR, come to think of it, making the "per skull" reduction an ability that lasts a few turns. It'd be hard to balance, but would make defence really useful. The item shop fixes might totally change the landscape on gear though, see how that goes! But really, at the moment I only keep defence up enough to activate spikes and blunting. It stops being a viable way to tank lots of skulls pretty quickly, because extra defence is essentially -1 damage, when you're taking a lot of damage pretty quickly. That's what I find appealing about spikes and blunting, they're upgrades that fit well into a "surviving the hordes" situation, then drop off in effectiveness versus a boss, since they're both "per skull" abilities.
I agree. Only, I am still unconvinced that spikes is worth it. Blunting is nice, thought. Either way, both are nearly useless at higher levels. Even picking those upgrades at every opportunity, you don't get enough to make it worthwhile, imo.
The fix for the store though has to have some way to save a game, not just reduce downgrades for it to really nerf Dazzle. Teleport and Disarm are more powerful, but Dazzle is right behind them because it can save the game in a single push of a button. At least on harder, a lot of my success has been due to prioritizing choices based on will they hep me live one more turn.
Hey all, the new update has been submitted for AppStore review, and includes quite a few improvements this time around: - A rebalanced item shop that biases heavily against down/sidegrades, and will also sometimes sell a one-off scroll that activates an ability instantly on purchase - sometimes grabbing a pile of coins can quickly get you out of a tight spot - 10 new special monsters to die a horrible death to - Tweaked a few abilities: freeze now freezes special skulls, explosive armor damages special skulls and does more damage, shatter reduces attack to 1, slight cooldown changes to half a dozen skills - Global leaderboards in OpenFeint & Game Center, as well as a cleaner local score screen that separates scores by difficulty - A few bug & exploit fixes: no more teleporting into a treasure chamber to grab 4 items And a bunch of other small changes and additions as requested!
Scary awesome! I can't wait to see these new scary beasties! Clearly the Item Shop needs a big, "Under New Management" sign as whomever was running it previously was a swindling twit!
Awesome, a rebalanced store should help a lot, particularly on hard and below. The ability to keep a bit of life leach on the weapon is what I am most looking forward too. You making any money on this yet? It deserves the crack into the top charts for sure.
I fear way too many will just dismiss it as a weak Puzzle Quest clone which completely misses the point of this cool-ass game!
Universal? Sorry if this has been asked already but was wondering if there were any plans on making it universal?
I'm really looking forward to the new update! Can't wait to see how my scores compare with the others and the new shop sounds great! As the others said, I hope that the time you put into creating this game has paid off for you financially. I have some big-name RPGs installed and this little gem keeps sucking me back in time after time! Kind of reminds me of my obession with Rogue Touch several years back. Unfortunately I think that the economics of the app store causes many potential buyers to simply look at the screenshots and think "99ยข game". It's a shame really...
If there's a way to get TA to do a front page thing, that sure would be great. Maybe a one day free sale? I really enjoy the simple, clean graphics....but the poster up there is right: high end graphics is the surest way to increase perceived game value. And the inverse is also true.
This game has not much in common with puzzle quest apart they both have a grid board!!! Looking forward for the update as well.
Well, money isn't everything No concrete plans at the moment, I'd certainly like to make it universal but right now there's other priorities, like getting a lite version out Yeah, might do something like this, potentially making use of the OpenFeint game channel or something similar
Aw, this makes me happy indeed. Love this game! Also: "no more teleporting into a treasure chamber to grab 4 items" ... =O ...how am I only now just hearing about this? why did I not think of this earlier? hehe. Not to cheer on exploits, but have to admit that's inventive!
My thought exactly! I'll need to try this exploit for the few days it still exists...although, as it has already been pointed out, money is still kind of useless.
Yeah, pretty great exploit actually, using Teleport, Treasure Chamber, Double Gold & Treasure. Cast Double Gold & Treasure Chamber then cast Teleport, pick up the first screen of coins with Treasure, collect the seconds screen of gold manually, and then another screen of gold the following turn. Get something like 4 item shops in a row this way Kudos to the guy that found it
