Universal Five Card Quest - Tactical RPG Battles (By Rocketcat LLC)

I have come full circle in this game, I now see its brilliance. But since the update, it CHUGS along. I'm sure that will be addressed.

 

What device/iOS are you on? Update shouldn't have made things worse, but will check. Anyone else with this problem?

 

We were discussing the use of "Healer" for "Priest" earlier in the topic. I'm not sure if you found it already, but it shows in the party stats screen as Healer

By the way, Kepa, did you look into showing the full deck for each character class somewhere - on the stats screen or on the character selection screen? I know you were considering it at one point, but unsure if it made it into the game.

Cheers.

 

Right now my impression is pretty negative.

- It's super slow on iPad 3. Chugs like hell. Basically unplayable.
- Priest's Wither explicitly says "Will not kill Priest", and kills the Priest. Like, come on.
- The GUI lacks the basic information needed to play the game. It's pretty lame that a "skill" in this game is to figure out at which pixel the monster's HP is below 1/3, so that I can instantly kill them with Mercy. Status effects like poison/burn/bleeding aren't displayed anywhere (do those even stack?). How do I tell when a monster is about to actually hit me? Etc.
- I tend to be very good at tactical games like these, and was disappointed by the difficulty. An experienced card player will very quickly discover that they should spam all of the free actions and interrupts, basically ignoring the remaining cards. On my very first playthrough I made it to the jungle world. There's no real attrition - I can go in with 3 completely wounded dudes and survive the battle just by playing well. I probably would have gotten farther, but:
- The game now crashes whenever I try to reload my save. Wow.
- It does not enhance play experience to force a player to figure out the basic rules of the game. What the heck does it mean that Spiked Boot "can interrupt some lightly armored foes?" I tried to use it vs. a bear, who is NOT ARMORED, lol, and it failed. The game as is is basically a series of gotcha! moments where a player tries something and realizes it doesn't work. It's actually incredible that the game was so easy on my first playthrough in spite of all of the crap I had to figure out through trial and error.

It's a shame, because the actual core of the game, where you play one of 5 abilities against monsters in lanes, is pretty fun! It's lacking a lot of polish, though, which is severely hampering the play experience as is.

 

Sorry, double post.

 

- Tracking this down, not really sure yet why this would happen on some more modern devices but not others. What iOS version are you running?
- Every time on yours? Or just sometimes?
- Yeah we can improve some things here. I underestimated just how clearly signposted everything should be. The "about to actual hit" part and turn indicators seem really necessary, not sure just how far to take this, though. We could probably have the color of the healthbar change when under 1/3 health, not sure to what though. Maybe it could pulse slightly if low.
- Yeah I was worried about free action stacking being too good. We could still reduce this to increase attrition. Do you remember how many worlds you beat to get to the Jungle world? They're in randomized order.
- Do you remember when it started crashing? You'll probably have to clear your save on the title screen.

Spiked Boot works on smaller, lighter enemies that aren't wearing armor: Poachers, Dabblers, Zealots, all the Dos, Warlocks, Assassins. Not really sure how to concisely word the description. "Unarmored humanoid foes?" What's humanoid? What's unarmored? Is the Assassin's clothing armor? Is a Do or Warlock humanoid? Can't really do a list of the enemies in the description, because the list would be pretty long. Maybe the solution would have been to be able to tap on an enemy and it would display it as "kickable"? That or making the kick work on less stuff. I'm hoping that tweaking the descriptions would work for now, instead.

If anyone has any suggestions for improving individual descriptions, let me know. They're pretty easy to change.

If you have any other feedback, go ahead and post those too. We're working on an update right now for this sort of stuff. This sort of feedback is really helpful as long as it doesn't cross over into hyperbole.

 

Some of these things seem pretty easy to address. What color to change the life bar to? Any. Or, maybe pulse or highlight the Mercy card when an enemy's life goes below 1/3? As for the armor issue, that's harder with your art style. Maybe a very small shield icon or badge on or above armored units would not be too intrusive. Any indication of when an enemy attack is imminent would be welcome. Color changes, icons, glowing... anything.

 

I think pulsing might be best for the 1/3 thing.

Could change the kick text to "works on lightweight enemies", then say which enemies are lightweight in the Bestiary before the fight? Maybe even be able to call the enemy info mid-fight, too...

Working on the "enemy attack warning", though having some issues with it so far. We have an icon for it, it's a cracked skull.

 

The difference between a modern and a retro gamer.

 

Haha. To be fair though it's also the difference between a complex turn based game and simpler action one. With an action game with less conditional states there's more leeway for feeling things out.

 

Kepa: Thanks for the reply! Realized after posting that a lot of this stuff has already been mentioned. Sorry about that.

- Version number: 9.1
- As far as I know Priest dies every time. I've only tried it twice, though.
- I believe I got to the 4th world. Could also have been the 5th?
- Making the healthbar flash and rewording Spiked Boot to say "lightweight" are improvements, but honestly a much better solution would be to have some sort of visual effect (similar to gold in the current version) flash when an ability is going to "proc". So Spiked Boot would have an effect when it was going to interrupt, and Mercy would have the same visual effect when the opposing enemy was below 1/3. I don't know if you play Hearthstone but there is a really nice cosmetic effect that happens when, e.g., your spell's damage is boosted by a +spell damage minion on the board.
- Longpressing on an enemy to see all of its relevant characteristics ("kickable", "poisoned", "just had an attack blocked", "HP", etc.) would also be amazing, although I know that kind of shit is probably difficult to implement retroactively.
- I just tried it on my 4s phone and it runs much better. I'll give things another go on that device and let you know if I have anything else to add. As I said, the core mechanic is *fun*. It just feels a bit lacking on the polish side.
- Other people mentioned customization. I think in general customization should be pretty limited, since most of the time it just leads to content being ignored since it's not powerful enough to compete with the top tier of spells. Obviously just flat out more spells/classes would be cool (although unexpected), but I really don't think the game needs me picking each of my spells to be super super good.

 

Damn this game is so good. Difficulty curve is indeed quite high, but it clicked with me on the first game. Had a significant background in RPG gameboards, TCGs, CCGs and Miniatures that the transition getting into 5CQ was pretty easy.

I can see how it would be difficult to others though.

What i want to see as an enhancement, is some sort of glossary to be able to read through each of the cards for each class.

And of course, i cant wait to see the game expand with more character classes and scenarios.

 

Speaks volumes...

 

I wouldn't reduce the free turn cards, to be honest. The game doesn't seem to be that easy - has anyone actually finished it so far, asides from Kepa?

I find the balance to be somewhat fine, I suppose, though after more playing sessions I may change my opinion.

A few things that I wonder:
- Could your priests be killed by another enemy attack that happens on that turn? i.e. is the priest being killed when the red-blood-like-blobs come up? I haven't had it happen to me so far, though I also avoid using that card if I can.
- I am under the impression that I've had the mage be interrupted when preparing to cast the "heavy damage in 3 turns to all enemies" card. I have had the mage do other things in the subsequent turns (i.e. between those 3 wait-time turns), and I also had enemies attack him, unfortunately. Would any of those interrupt the casting? If so, please call it out in the cards.

Other than that, still having fun.

As Exact-Psience states, and others have in the past, a card glossary per character would be nice.

 

Okay playing through again.

- I had to play for a while before I figured out that Block just flat out prevents 20 damage. Doesn't seem to work vs. Archers, though? Beating a dead horse but really should just say that somewhere rather than me needing to figure that out on my own.
- Watchful Aegis is bugged to just leave the Guard in the "Blocking" sprite forever, even after it's worn off. Also it makes a "plinking" block sound vs. an Assassin hit but doesn't appear to do anything.
- Intervene does not attack if you switch to an empty lane.
- If you use Banish on an attacking enemy in a different lane (i.e. the monster is in the second row, and the Mage is in the first row with an empty lane across), the monster sometimes gets teleported but still does his attack. Vanish seems to work, though.
- What is Bulwark Shuffle supposed to prioritize? Doesn't seem to fetch Blink.
- Vanish just sometimes doesn't work? The Rogue will disappear, immediately reappear and do his attack, then get hit. Seems to happen most when fighting against Beasts? Weirdly I can interrupt a Bear if it's *not* in my lane, but I get the bug if it *is* in my lane.
- Protection says it reflects half, but it seems like my enemies always take more damage than me?

 

- Still trying to figure out the Wither thing. It's possible that if the game was lagging really badly for no reason, it glitched out the no-kill check for Wither. That's all I can think of right now.
- A "this will proc" effect is a good idea but I'd probably want to get rid of the "Shiny" cards if I did this. Also it's pretty hard to implement at this point.
- Yeah a lot of stuff is really hard to implement retroactively is the problem. Anything that we can't put it, we'll put in a big list to make sure it happens if we give this genre another shot.
- That's really strange that it would run worse on an iPad 3 than a 4s. The 4s is ancient hardware. We'll look into this, it would explain some reports that didn't make sense before.
- People really, really like deck building though. I think what I'd do if I designed another game like this is make it so you couldn't pick every single card at a time usually. Instead you'd often change sets of cards by changing your equipment. Like a sword would do more damage but mostly have plain attack cards, and a dagger would have weaker damage but have a lot of attack cards that also swapped your lane. And a new sword could add both more damage and more interesting attack cards.

A glossary was planned, not quite sure where we should put it if we try to put it in the game now. Maybe we could make the character screen in the pause menu have it somewhere? Will add it to the list of things to try.

I don't know how much the game will actually expand on content, if it does at all. We're mostly doing lots of quality of life feature requests and bugfixes right now. Also, it was supposed to be pretty simple in its design anyway. And finally, need to see if people like the next update or not.

 

Oh woops, didn't see the two new posts when I made the last post.

- Yes, another enemy can kill you if it attacks the Priest when she's playing Wither.
- Need to check on this. I thought we took player-interrupts out.

- Will change block descriptions to specify the amount of damage. Ideally, where would something like this go?
- Known bug, same with Rogue Riposte. Hard to fix with the system, giving it another shot.
- Ok, thanks!
- Will add Banish to the list of things to check.
- It has a higher priority for defensive cards, and Blink should be defensive, but it's a higher chance instead of an absolute.
- Ok, thanks for this report, I've been trying to track this down.
- Was your priest leveled in the Shrine of Power at all? Or did you have Precision?

 

No worries. Was about to post as well.

I think I just experienced Poison carrying over across levels and battles (Desert to Jungle), on my Guard. It had killed my guard in the last battle, and as I started the new one he seems to have started being affected by Poison as well, which pretty much killed him shortly after.

See if there's a bug around this.

Also, how long does Poison last?

 

I think actually what's happening is that the game just gets more and more sluggish the longer you play it.

On my second try I died on world 5 - the guards of the golden king are tricky, since they seem to not really have any attack windup at all? They just hit you over and over I guess, haha. I was kind of cocky and hadn't used any items up until that point, so let's see what happens if I preemptively use an item every time I fight one of those guys.

The game is considerably more fun now that I can play with reasonable framerate and have overcome the initial hurdle of learning the game. Obviously the flaws I mentioned are still there and should really be fixed (not everyone is as patient as I am), but I'm enjoying it a lot now that I'm "over the hump".

Right now strongest class appears to be Mage. Arcane Discard is just crazy. The strongest things in this game are free actions, cycling, and interrupts, and this does all 3! His other spells are mostly playable too, just because they all do tons and tons of damage.

Next strongest is probably Archer. Pathetic damage, but tons of interrupts, including 2 that are free actions. Really sick. One thing holding her back is that Tactical Shuffle sometimes bugs in a similar way to Rogue's Vanish. It's even worse for Archer since instead of being a free action, it sometimes takes your turn! Yikes. Also Insult to Injury seems really bad.