Those comments of "why isn't this a free update" genuinely confuse me but I try to ignore it. Paid games are already having a really really hard time just breaking even, let alone earning a profit. Every dollar from Swap 1 has gone back into Swap 2. The art isn't free, the music isn't free, the sound effects aren't free, the UI isn't free. For people to tell me I should have just spent the last 4 months making a free update drives me crazy. I'd have to stop doing this as a job then because I couldn't afford to eat. Thanks for speaking up!
Thanks, Chris. You sold me. I will buy it and take a look. Can you answer my previous question ("With the progression system, are you supposed to play each level in each of the three difficulties first and completing them before moving onto the next level? Or are you supposed to first every level (including or excluding the final boss) for 1 star first and then return for another round for 2 stars and finally 3 stars? Which order is the intended progression?") For this question, I was referring to the levels before the final boss. Just looking at some gameplay footage, I can't tell if the later levels are meant to be played only after you have completed at least the heroic difficulty of the previous levels, so that you can level up your character sufficiently to beat the later levels even at the lowest difficulty. In other word, is there some implicit gating in these later levels so that they need to play in some "general" order?
@y2kmp3 I'm finding this game very difficult. Maybe I will do better on the weekend when I'm not so tired. But I fail a lot, and it's feeling very grindy. You want to earn stars. That's done by beating missions. Each mission contains about 3 battles. You use the stars to boost your skills. Luckily you can respec your skills at any time. If you beat a mission on the second difficulty you get another star. And for the hardest difficulty as well. I've been able to beat the first and second level on the easy and intermediate difficulty settings, but I can't beat the fourth level on easy. If there is gateing it isn't super obvious. It seems free form. Hope that helps.
@y2kmp3 There is no particular order in which you must complete the content, though you do need 10 of the 12 overall stars in order to face the boss. I intentionally wanted a variety of content available at any given time, this let's you ignore a particularly difficult or frustrating level and progress in other ones. Each level has a different composition of enemies so certain people find certain enemy types more or less challenging, usually depending on their party composition as well. @Rawk What party are you using for the 4th level? Also make sure you have at least 1 if not 2 stars in health upgrades. I notice a lot of people go pure attack and that's not necessarily recommended Also for the bombs the mage is key and perhaps the alchemist, too. Never let a bomb go off if possible!
Chris, I now have an opportunity to try out your game. Overall, I am quite impressed by the core game mechanics and the game's retro visual aesthetics. It is an interesting take on turn-based strategy that is surprisingly deep and challenging despite the simple core premise. So far, I have managed to complete only a few levels (but still finished Heroic in the first location). Even with the admittedly paucity of levels, I am finding the game to be exceedingly challenging even so early on. To this end, I am also quite ambivalent on whether or not the game's skills based approach over chance is sound. Perhaps you can help me to better understand the intended gameplay approach to this game so that I can get a better handle on why I am struggling with most levels (even on easy / standard difficulty) such early in the game. 1. You previously said that the locations where enemies spawn are random. What about the types, the numbers, and the orders of these enemies? Are they entirely fixed from level to level so they are always the same? 2. It is obvious that certain party builds (composition of characters and their chosen skills) will always fail to beat a level because they lack the necessary attacks or defenses. However, I am getting the feeling that the game is extremely strict in which build will work and which build will not. If so, this narrowness of solution space is worrisome. This is because the sheer number of combinations of possible builds means that there may need to be a large number of trials to find a viable build. In my limited play, each battle takes approximately 10-15 minutes. Thus, the sheer number of repetitions to find the right build may appear to be too grindy (even if it not intentional). During the beta-testing, can you tell us some stats on how large the solution space for each level? As an example, I played Heroic in the first location with 4 skills points to distribute. It took me 18 trials using 8 different party builds (with different characters and different skill point allocation) to find a working build to beat this level. The process took 2 hours of intense play (not casual by any means). In the end, I am not sure at all if I won because of skills of picking the correct party or because of sheer chance. This illustrates my ambivalence and confusion. When I fail in a level, I can't tell if the fail is due to 1) the characters are not high enough in level (not enough skill points) 2) incorrect mix of characters in the party, or 3) bad random enemy spawns. Because of I can't tell which reason, I am at a lost in how to better strategize, and I feel that I am just playing the game in a way that you did not intend as a game of strategy with too some random trial and error. As an extension to this issue, in your beta-testing, how frequent have you encountered situations in which a working build is found to beat a level but that the same build will fail on a replay because of the different sequence of locations of enemy spawns (assuming the game is played to equal skills)? This question is important because it is a proxy indicator of skillz vs. chance in a game that combines both gameplay elements. Can you help? PS: There is a minor bug in the music setting. It does not stick when the app relaunches.
y2kmp3, Thanks for the detailed questions and responses. Appreciate your time and curiosity towards the game's design 1. Each level has 4 enemy types. This is fixed. These enemy types spawn somewhat randomly in terms of sequence although they are weighted from 1 to 4 in terms of priority. The randomness here that can make a level slightly easier or harder is that let's say a wolf spawns 2 tiles away with nobody in front of him (hard) versus spawning 3 tiles away behind another enemy that is not moving forward and thus the wolf waits for that enemy to be killed first (easy - if you can hit through the enemy). These slight variations will most often balance out by the time you've killed 25 enemies but not always. If you die on a level with under 5 enemies remaining, chances are if you tried again you would pass it. If you're dying with 10+ enemies left, I'd wager it's not the randomness but instead your composition or swapping choices. 2. Encouraging different parties for different levels was a deliberate choice. I didn't want someone to stick with a single party and beat the entire game without having a reason other than boredom to change out their members. Usually where I notice people going wrong with party compositions are when they completely ditch melee characters (monk and werewolf) in favour of long range attackers. This seems good at first but is very quickly punished (maybe too brutally) by the 3rd level and onwards. Having characters to absorb damage and to fight melee enemies is crucial. You simply can't have an archer or a bard fighting a melee enemy for too long and still survive. I would argue that your party composition is really quite flexible and it's more to do with are your swapping decisions that determine your result. It's not a puzzle where you must use X characters to beat Y level. With that being said, it's likely not possible to beat a level with bombs on it if you don't have a character that can hit the bombs through other enemies (mage's firewall, summoner's attack, alchemist's attack), or you likely can't beat the 3rd level without a tank (monk or wolf) as there are a larger than usual number of melee enemies. These are simply there to provide a shift in party composition towards something different. It's to give a new challenge to overcome that feels different than the previous one. It certainly does not mean that precisely 1 combination of 4 characters is the key and no others would work. One thing that's likely not executed very well in the game is a clear understanding for the player that they simply lack the encouraged number of boosts to beat a certain level. For example I notice a lot of people getting stuck on the 4th level because they've beat the first 3 and nothing more. The 4th level is damn hard if you are only coming at it with 3 boosts so it's encouraged to go back and earn a few more by beating the first level or two on harder difficulties. This isn't as clear as it should be and there are no tutorial prompts to suggest this so that could be improved. Speaking of boosts, that's also quite a noticeable game changer. I see a lot of people picking regular attack, which if you're swapping really well helps finish levels quicker but it also makes the game more punishing when you mess up. Putting boosts into health and heal will really let you recover from a mistake and give you more time to learn the deeper layers of swapping. Also, I see a lot of people only healing when they have a character near death. It's good to get into a nice rotation of swapping your healer in every 3'ish turns even if things are going quite well, this keeps health up for later and especially with the bard having her heal over time active as often as possible really changes the battle instead of using it only to avoid certain death. I feel like I'm rambling now but I completely understand your confusion with failure and the game not necessarily making it clear what you need to do differently. If you have some specific examples of things you thought would work or were confused as to why they didn't work, like a party composition or a boost composition on a particular level that might help me further understand and learn from experience a little better. Appreciate the conversation and the bug Chris
I actually loved The Boy With Bombs enough to buy Swap Heroes as a thanks to the dev. Ultimately I didn't enjoy Swap Heroes and ended up deleting it but I still go back to The Boy With Bombs sometimes as it has a nice flow and is an overall great high score game. Heck I'm #4 on the leaderboard for it though technically #1 is an obvious hacked score. Reading this thread I'm not sure Swap Heroes 2 is my kind of thing still... but I would seriously consider buying a sequel to The Boy With Bombs. That game survived many game purges from my phone for good reason, it's fun. Anyway best of luck with Swap Heroes 2. Cool to see iOS6 still getting support as the base level for games.
I'm starting to like the elusive nature of the strategy. There is a very fine line between a successful party and skill build and a failure build. I've had some recent success by going heavy on the defense and healing skills and running the bard and the alchemist with the Mage and the swordsman. When things get rough I swap the two healers back and forth and grind out the victory. I've now hit a wall with that strategy and it's time to try another build. I think one thing that was throwing me off is that the art and music is so darned cute that I didn't expect the strategy to be so punishing. Great game. I'm definitely hooked.
Hi, Chris, Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful response. It helped a lot with understanding the intent of the gameplay style and tips on how to better strategize the party. Indeed, I am one of those players who initially felt into the trap of trying to beat the 4th location with only 3 skill points or boosts. When failing the same level repeatedly with roughly the same enemies left behind, I started questioning whether or not the party I chose was skilled enough for the level. The observation of a same failure point (as you alluded to) is a key hint that I found useful. Consequently, I returned to the first level to level up the characters by playing Challenge and Heroic modes. One minor confusion about the characters' ability description is "XX HP over 3 turns". For example, the bard heals 45 HP over 3 turns. What does this mean exactly? Is it 45 HP PER turn for 3 turns (for total of 135 HP)? Or 15 HP PER turn for 3 turns (for total of 45 HP)? Also, does the heal effect continue on even if the bard is moved to the back so that all 3 attack character units can continue to heal for 2 more turns while the bard remains at the back? What about the Mage? The same confusion I have about attacking 45 HP over 3 turns? If I move the mage to the back after the first turn, would it continue to attack for 2 more turns? Under what circumstances would a Mage be preferred over Alchemist? The Alchemist has higher health and higher melee damage and heals more? Is it something about the turn effect that may make a Mage superior? The bombs are big threats which I have yet to fully figure out how to deal with, especially when are locked behind another character? I discovered that swordsman's skilled attack (blade spike) can go through other characters? You mention the mage, alchemist, and summoner); are you referring to regular attacks? Is regular attack the BETTER way to deal with many bombs than constantly swapping to launch skilled attack? Here is one example I like to use to analyze points of potential failure of my strategy (see screenshot): The level was played with 5 boosts (2 health, 1 attack, 1 heal, 1 skill). As you can see, I beat the level only by a thread. All members of the party were literally decimated. Strangely, they were all doing very well until the last 10 characters or so, and then there was a cascading failure with a bunch of bombs for which I could not recover in time and could not dispose quickly enough before they explode. Even though I beat this level with this party, am I correct that I should have used a mage instead of the archer? A common strategy is to put the swordsman in the middle and then constantly swapping her to the front in the MIDDLE so she can attack ALL 3 lanes and ALL enemies every other turn? Is this not a viable strategy? Thank you in advance for indulging my curiosity. As I said before, I was thoroughly impressed by the depth of the strategy in this game despite the simple core precise and mechanic. Thus, I am very interested to know if these elements I just mentioned are intentional as part of your design and if they are just coincident properties of the game which I am overreading into existence. PS: Glad to help you spot the music setting bug.
Hey y2kmp3, "One minor confusion about the characters' ability description is "XX HP over 3 turns" This means that it heals X HP total over 3 turns. For example 45 over 3 turns is actually 15 per turn for 3 turns. If you use the skill again before the 3 turns have expired, it doesn't stack but instead starts it over again. Same as the mage, and yes these effects work while the mage/bard are moved to the back. You'll notice the fire in the lane will keep burning and the little music notes next to your characters means another heal tick is coming up. "Under what circumstances would a Mage be preferred over Alchemist?" Do you mean bard here? Mage and alchemist aren't really comparable as one is a healer and one isn't. The downside to an alchemist is that you have to heal more often to get the same HP restored as a bard. He also can't hit the enemies in the back at all. I notice a lot of people switch to alchemist when they get him and swap out bard. The bard's heal, if kept up consistently is actually extremely powerful and is a good place to start if you're finding the game difficult as alchemist is better in emergency situations but overall won't keep your health as high. His heal also doesn't scale as much as the bard's with boosts as it's based on percentage so she gets the bigger improvement. If you did mean the mage, that's actually my single favourite character in the game. Her fire wall is just too good to pass up. It is especially effective against the bombs as it kills them in 2 ticks. One character I usually ditch quickly myself is the swordsman. I noticed in your screenshot you're using swordsman and not mage on a level with bombs. That's tough! Best way to handle bombs is mage's skill (hits all enemies in a line), alchemist's attack (hits through and everyone except the furthest row), and swordsman's skill (this can help damage them but because it's so weak it won't kill it in a single hit). "Even though I beat this level with this party, am I correct that I should have used a mage instead of the archer?" Correct. The mage is superior on levels with bombs to the archer due to her skill hitting through to the bombs in the back. "constantly swapping her to the front in the MIDDLE so she can attack ALL 3 lanes and ALL enemies every other turn? Is this not a viable strategy?" This isn't a bad strategy, though it likely won't beat the more difficult levels or harder difficulties. The sword damage is so low (10, max upgraded to 15), and enemies start having upwards of 80+ HP. This is where characters like the archer, wolf, and monk come into play. They smack single targets for the highest single damage output. This is why at the harder difficulties I think it's best to actually replace swordsman and see how you do. Thanks for the conversation! I really enjoy it and appreciate you making me think about my own game thoroughly. It was made with a lot of personal intuition and not much user testing. Because the campaign is relatively short I wanted to side on more difficult, at least to start. I'm debating tuning it to be slightly more forgiving in an update!
Hi, Chris and all, the first game didn't really grab me. But then I read all the comments about this one, so I reinstalled the first one and really gave it a run. As often happens, the second time around was the charm and I decided to get this one. Im really liking it but I have one issue, which I had with the first one also. The tap sensitivity is really off. Sometimes I want to move fast and I have to tap a couple times to get my character to switch around. Is this deliberate or something that can be fixed?
Thanks again, Chris, for the great explanation. You are correct that I was referring to the bard rather than the mage when comparing to the alchemist. You are also correct that I have been making the swordsman a stable in all of my builds. So far, I am able to use my builds to complete Standard, Challenge, and Heoric for first 3 locations. For the last 2 locations, I will try out your suggestion to switch out the swordsman. One major challenge I have yet to master completely is dealing with TWO bombs near the back, especially when they are not at adjacent links. Any suggestion on how to deal with them if I am relying heavily on single-lane attack. An oddball build I have been trying is to use both alchemist and the brad TOGETHER and switching them often to spam heal the group. I then rely on the alchemist and swordsman for distant attacks and werewolf to do skill attacks for melee. It is very effective for levels without bombs but fails quickly in those with bombs. Any suggestion on how to modify this to deal with levels with bombs? This is the bane of the 4th world on challenge or heoric; no matter what ranged attack I have, it quickly fails once I have two bombs together or one after another on two different lanes and behind enemies. This is extremely frustrating. Also, I think I am not using the summoner correctly. I find the fact that I can't spam-laiding down the dragons (which obviously is a deliberate limit) to be a severe limitation. Are they some circumstances in which the summoner is superior to the mage? The dragon is also blocking melee attacks and making the werewolf idle too often.
Great game! Yeah the bombs suck, but I think I hate the caterpillars more. It seems you're asking the dev to tell you how to beat the game. Beside appropriate party/upgrade choices, you only need two things to beat the game: a little concentration and a bit of luck. As the enemy/lane formation is somewhat random, sometimes it just requires running at a level until you get a lucky line up. Given the game's size, I assume it's hard and grindy by design, otherwise it would be over in ten minutes.
So glad you like it! Appreciate you trying it again. The tap area should be accurate but I do notice people tapping too quickly before the enemies have taken a turn. After your players attack, the enemies attack, move, and then spawn. If you are tapping your characters before the enemy spawning has completed it will not register.
@y2kmp3 I will say that summoner is probably the single best character to use against the bombs as she can always hit them and kill them in two attacks without having to activate a skill. The dragons are also used as much in damage prevention as they are damage output so you shouldn't be using them to necessarily block the werewolf's attack but instead shield the summoner herself or other weak characters. I'm glad you were able to get 10 stars. The last 2 difficulties of the 4th level are likely even harder than the boss itself. You also don't need all 12 stars to take the boss down so you could ignore that if it proves too difficult or frustrating, at least for now. Though, the key to beating that is definitely the summoner and mage both in your party as that gives you two routes to hit any bombs!
Update: Embarrassingly, it took me so long to write this post (below) that I did not see your #58 post reply to my post before. Still, I like to get your feedback. Chris, Adding one more observation to my previous ones which I like to share with you to get your feedback... Just (finally) beat Ghost Town Challenge. Yikes! Doing so brings attention to the issue of flexibility of valid party solutions which I asked you previously. I recall you said that many party combinations should work when played skillfully to beat the levels. As I am basically near the end of the game (I think), I believe this is a good time to return to this subject for a more thorough discussion. I am still NOT convinced that there is a sufficient large valid solution space in this game. Let's take Ghost Town Challenge as an example... As the game has 8 characters from which you can only choose 4, it means that there are C(8.4) = 70 all possible character combinations or party compositions. Many of them are not likely viable choices and can be quickly excluded. For example, the fact there are distant bombs and enemies implies that there must be at least one member who ranged attack. As well, there must be at least one member who can heal. Since there are only 2 characters who can heal, this latter constraint immediately narrows down the possibility to C(2,1) * C (6,3) / C(2,1) = 20 character combinations or party compositions. Although I have no firm proof, I suspect that a viable party must have at least 2 ranged attackers (not just 1), thus this additional constraint will likely reduce 20 to an even lower number. The problem is that, even with 20 (or a bit less) possibilities, I am finding the process of trial and error using each of these possibilities with different permutations of team boasts (at this time, I have 10 boasts) very tiring at times, in large parts because each run takes so long to do. As before, when the party failed, I couldn't tell the reasons why it failed and thus did not know what to change to retest the scenario. During your playtesting, can you tell me how many DIFFERENT party configurations were you able to create that can beat this particular level? Or these, how many of them would work fairly consistently (for example, >80% chance win when played skillfully). For this level, the ONLY party that worked for me is: Mage, Bard, Wolf, and Summoner Many other configurations I have tried which did not work for me (on multiple times): 1) Swordsman, Mage, Bard, Wolf 2) Swordsman, Bard, Archer, Wolf 3) Mage, Alchemist, Wolf, Archer 4) Mage, Alchemist, Summoner, Wolf 5) Alchemist, Bard, Mage, Wolf 6) Alchemist, Bard, Wolf, Archer Is it your intent for the player to systematically try out different combos? Is there any way to make this trial and error more efficient? Even though I beat Ghost Town Challenge, I am not convinced that I deserve full credit as the victory is more likely because the bombs just happen to drop in the correct lanes when my Mage or the Summoned Dragon just happen to be there or just about to go there for a skilled attack. The higher the levels, the more victory is dependent on chance rather than skills. It should be the other way around (more based on skills than chance). PS: Please answer the bomb questions I have before.
