I've beaten it with 2 characters so far and enjoy it a fair bit. Obviously Dream Quest is a tough game to try to surpass, but this has many more decisions in actual combat than DQ did. The "swipe right/left" mechanic really works well and has some nice non-trivial decisions. Furthermore, The UI shows a lot of love and is very pleasing in a tactile way that Card Crawl/Solitairica were. It's also awesome to see the dev (Slothwerks) engaging with the community here. I want to be clear here that even though it's going to look like I'm ragging on the game, I'm enjoying it and am thrilled new devs are trying out deckbuilder roguelikes for iOS . I'll list my main concerns below. In some places Slothwerks has already identified a lot of these areas for improvement, but I'll reiterate them just so they know they're on the right track . - Improve the reward system. Right now you play with a gimpy deck for a few rounds, and then just by trying to beat the game with each character one at a time you have plenty of currency to fully upgrade everything easily. It's a lot of work, but DQ's system is obviously the gold standard here - have a ton of sidegrades and unlockables that you get through achievements, and an alternate (but fairly grindy) way to unlock stuff if getting a specific achievement is just way too annoying. - Rework (or scrap) highscores. I'm a very competitive gamer (I love to chase leaderboards!) but have pretty much no desire to chase Meteorfall's highscores. Score is fun to chase when it's closely tied in with the game's core mechanics. For instance, in Imbroglio your goal is to pick up stars and you have to walk around doing that to stay alive. It's pretty natural and intuitive that if you pick up more stars in one session than another, you played better in the former. OTOH, in FTL score is pretty much a pointless afterthought. I know tons of people that played that game and pretty much no one cared at all about score - it was unrelated and incidental to the mechanics of the game, which guided the player towards trying to make a cool ship and kill the final boss with it. Meteorfall is way further towards FTL than Imbroglio. It might actually be worse than FTL! For FTL the score seemed to at least scale with what you wanted to do - explore stuff and kill stuff. For Meteorfall, a high score chaser gets punished by trying to spend his gold to upgrade his deck. That feels really bad. Overall if a player gets a low score but kills the Lich, I think the player is perfectly justified in just ignoring the score altogether. The score is way too orthogonal to the real goal of the game - killing the Lich. It's worth noting that DQ did not really bother with a highscore leaderboard, and I think it did just fine. It understood that you wanted to get to the end and then maybe, just maybe, kill the Lord of the Dream. For me to want to chase highscores here, I think it would need to reward a player who was trying to make the strongest deck possible - right now it rewards the player who makes the crappiest possible deck that can just barely defeat the Lich and every monster you encounter. - Temples are way too good. The fact that they're currently free usually makes them a no-brainer (with maybe some rare exceptions when you have a heap of gold and need to use the blacksmith). I would definitely make them cost gold and maybe even scale up in price on repeated uses like DQ did. - There's not a lot of variety in deckbuilding, partially because of the small cardpool but also partially because your starting deck is very scaleable. I find myself mostly slotting in 1-2 new cards but otherwise adding nothing to the deck, choosing instead to trash/upgrade cards from it. - Stamina vs. Health balance is pretty wacky. I am not sure if even Mischief wants to take stamina for her bonuses. - As is there will not be much for me to do after I've cleared with the 4 classes. Higher difficulty levels or a harder 5th level would be much appreciated. Okay, that's it. Thanks for the game, and I'll be looking for new content or new games from Slothwerks in the future.
- Gold is too sparse atm for temples to cost money unless it's a really small amount I think. - I never pick health for Mischief as you can usually get a high level Eviscerate (and sometimes 2!) earlyish and from then on it's 100% first turn kills including vs the Lich. Overall I'd say stamina is a slightly better pick than health because taking it's more proactive - don't need health if your turn played out well, and stamina helps with that
Suggestions Love this title! A few suggestions: 1) Right now, shops and treasure chests have little utility, as the emphasis is on culling and upgrading. Switch this up by limiting the blacksmith to one upgrade. (Dude only has two hands, after all.) This will encourage players to take additional cards after chapter one. Maybe increase the shop stock to 4 and tweak prices appropriately. 2) Give the different map locations a variety of distinct events to add more flavor to the game. Allow the events in different locations to suit different strategies, allowing for some degree of strategy in map selection. 2a) Maybe fix the set of events in a map location and shuffle their order to reduce genetic drift? Dunno about that one. 3) Make the unlocks goal-driven, a la card thief. (If you decide to add more unlockable cards, you may need to allow deck configuration. Hmm. Maybe just more characters.)
Great feedback! - The inspiration for having scores at all came from games like Card Crawl / Card Thief, which feature things like Daily Runs where people can compete for scores. Frankly, I couldn't care less about highscores / achievements in games for the most part, and I'll be the first to admit that I don't fully understand what drives players to chase high scores. The 'gold = points' idea came out of a realization that scores were too clustered, because the only other way to score points. The goal there was to introduce some risk/reward - pushing for a stronger deck but a lower score is less risky than pursuing a minimum viable deck. I do think DQ does this better by just flat out encouraging players to come up with crazy decks to defeat the LoD. If you read the DQ sub-reddit, there's a somewhat active community still trying to crack the game with certain classes and deck archetypes, which I think is really interesting. - The deck variety is an interesting problem. I do plan to add some new cards for all classes, and possibly introduce some light configuration (eg: pick 3 cards to add to your starting deck from a pool of 6) You're right though that part of the problem is that the starting cards are generally pretty scalable once upgraded. I think this is an issue with Mischief more than the other heroes, because stab/eviscerate are just so good, and you start with them. - Higher difficulty is something I'm looking at. Endless mode (as some people suggested) is difficult because cards/stats aren't defined in an algorithmic way; it's all hand tweaked.
1. I think treasures are actually pretty decent, especially with upgraded cards later on. Shops though, I think could use some work. Not quite sure how to fix this one yet. Perhaps upgrades are too easy to get as you suggested. Will think on this one. Raising upgrade cost would be another possibility. 2. I would like to make the locations more unique, and I do think location specific events would be cool, if I could come up with enough of them. 3. This one is another 'in hindsight' one - I think it would be a lot of work to retrofit the system at this point, but I do think it would have been more compelling/harder to unlock everything if card unlocks were tied to completing a certain action/task.
Game Center Bug One small bug Ive noticed: Game Center (which otherwise works) isnt registering my wins. Thus far Ive won with Greybeard and Bruno. And neither indicate so in the Achievements. (All other Achievements seem to catalog fine though.) Just a heads up. iPhone 7 running newest iOS.
Yeah - I think this one should be fixed in the next update (currently being beta tested) I reworked the 'victory screen', and the code that actually did the work of sending the score got missed - woops
Really nice little game! So far I've been able to beat it with Greybeard. Is there a way to not add the cards you can buy to your starting deck? i.e. to enable/disable them?
Not currently, though I may add this in the future. One correction is that the cards aren't actually added, they replace basic Attack cards in the deck. The game implies they are added instead of replacing basic cards, which I need to fix. I think in most cases, you should find that they're strictly better than the Attack cards they replace.
Is the next update/fix coming soon? Still waiting for the new event system. (if you have enough money then shop/blacksmith will show up more, something like that.) If the potion can be used in anytime in combat without costing a action like Slay the Spire, it will be more useful for tactical strategy. BTW, it is a really great rogue-like game for commuters, thanks dev
Should be soon! Feedback I got from beta testing the new version has been positive. Right now, I'm just waiting for sign-off on the QA team @ ZPlay (also the publisher for the version of the game in China) and then I'll submit the new update to Apple / Google.
Game thoughts @ Slothwerks: First, I wanted to mention that I'm enjoying the game quite a bit. I picked this up due to positive comparison with Dream Quest, and I'm glad that I did! A few thoughts: 1) Add my voice to those who would like to see unlockables. Part of what keeps me playing games like this is the knowledge that there's more stuff to get, more options for playing... 2) Any chance you could limit the possibility of cards being a reward for leveling up? I've had runs in which I barely see a temple, and my deck is bloated with cards I can't get rid of - in fact my current game is 2 card rewards and no temples, and I'm in ACT 2. 3) You had mentioned in a previous post that the cards that can be unlocked via gems aren't supposed to be better, but rather just different. If that's the case, could you allow us the option to NOT include them in our deck? Thanks for listening! P.S. I really hate Snotwulf.
Glad you're enjoying so far! #2 - This one I actually took from Dream Quest, which I think forces a similar decision. I think it's actually easier in Meteorfall than DQ to trim a deck as it is, and removing the card level up I think would make it way too easy to build exactly the deck you want. I think part of the fun is making the best of a bad situation, which sometimes includes taking cards you didn't want to. #3 - I'm looking into this for a future update. Just to be clear though (because the in-game text isn't ) - the unlockable cards actually replace a basic 'Attack' card in the starting deck. I'd consider them to be at least a bit better than those basic Attack cards in all cases. If there are certain unlockables you think are particular bad, let me know.
Finished the game with all classes, congrats to me! I think the only downside is that I feel some characters are better than others, so if you're high score chasing, the game is a bit unbalanced for some of the classes. Still, I had a good time! EDIT: the simple way to solve it could be by having a leaderboard for each class separately.
