Glad to hear it, i wouldn't be spending my time writing up a review or bug report if i didn't think there was potential here :)
While i think it's very cool to keep it free, i do think people should be compensated for their efforts, so my review is from the perspective that you'll be seeking to make a product people would gladly pay for, all games, even free ones, are viewed as a matter of quality vs investment, even if it's only time investment.
That being said, i shall wait patiently for your next update to see how this develops, good luck!
Cyrilion
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A member registered Jun 02, 2023
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I'm glad to hear it was useful to you, let me expand and explain those areas where there was some confusion, and reveal the incredible secrets of the hidden 3 :)
Balance can absolutely be a pain, usually game devs pick a base-line character or deck to use as their balance metric, in Slay The Spire for example the Ironclad is what everything in the game is balanced around, potential power increase from relics and upgrades informs the developer how much they should increase the challenge of enemies.
Currently Cardplay's campaign has 1 character, a basic enemy, and 3 challengers which get stronger as you progress which is fine, lets not try to expand too quickly, but it does mean that you can easily balance card combat in a vacuum, right now i do think it's too front-loaded with our hero having 1 and 2 cost attacks and blocks with 1 lust card, and as i said earlier requiring the entire campaign to get 1 card pack.
The base enemy has buffs, 0 cost attacks, and heals, he can do 20 damage easily in a round while the player is limited without cards, i would recommend giving the player a few starting cards to make a deck with so they aren't just blasted, maybe a starting card pack to open.
1. Completely agree, i think this will help a lot.
2. I've no doubt, a buff counter would be much appreciated yes please.
3. I forgot to re-order numbers after removing a personal complaint that i felt was unreasonable(Not being able to see enemy card intent makes it a guessing game, but depending on your personal vision as a developer this could have been intentional, and should not really count as neutral constructive criticism.)
4. Bit of a misunderstanding here, what i'm saying is that while you have the enemy deck open so that you can read what a card did(their buffs for example), the button to close the enemy deck is about 60% covered up by the lust counter, Esc doesn't close it, i was just sort of trapped in the enemy deck screen clicking around till i spotted it in the top right which i must have glazed over on first looking.
5. A matter of personal taste i think, some people expect visible enemy intent, other people like to guess, i do think it plays much too slowly though so i'm glad it'll be sped up.
6. Whenever i get a gallery image by winning or losing i also lose 20 Moanika, it both says so in pink text beneath the picture and i confirmed it in the shop that i was losing moanika, which feels like i'm being taxed for my reward.
Even worse is i would get the same gallery image as a prior loss and still lose 20 Moanika, i thought that this meant gallery images just cost Moanika, but it sounds like i was just getting the "Player loses Moanika on loss" whether i won a combat or lost. Maybe because i had low hp and bleed on some of my wins? I'm actually not sure what caused it if it's not intended for me to lose money on gallery image pickups.
I completely agree, fights are a bit tough, but it's really RNG that punishes, it's why i started just rushing damage so i could go 1 for 1 with the enemy until they get their bugged out buff.
Scaling enemy decks does sound good, my main complaint on the decks and balance other than bugs really was just that players start with nothing cool and card packs take too long to purchase when running the campaign, the black market arena definitely pays better though.
True, lust does do a bit of direct damage, i forgot to say that, my bad, it does still feel underwhelming, and i tend to just play it and then defense cards which means unless i've already had the enemy play their bugged buff card i'm just passing the turn and increasing the odds they will get their turbo buff before i can dps them into a death range, which may have soured my opinion of them.
Sounds like a plan, i just don't see the point in making a game an adult experience if it's such a small part of the game, it reduces your audience a lot for what is currently a very small part of the content and mechanics.
I like that, reminds me of Saria Reclaimed before it went under, you actually may want to check that out if that's the direction you're planning to go, a lot of people really enjoyed the game before the dev dropped it and niche wise i can't think of many games which you'd be directly competing with, though i would caution against scope creep, if you do plan to go that direction i would recommend completing the systems you want to use in this game and keeping the scope small so you can implement your refined combat systems into the larger game project later, having a complete game under your belt in your portfolio would definitely help convince prospective patrons that you mean business.
While i generally prefer 2D projects (3D often causes for me an uncanny valley perception issue) i am curious what you have cooking there, and best of luck on it as well :)
Just a heads up for anyone planning to play the game in 0.3.1, as well as for the dev.
1. The currency (Moanika) goes into negative values sometimes if you went to zero and lost and still had a greater negative, it doesn't seem to keep going down though.
2. The buffs that enemies have that state they effect them for a round actually effect them for the entire fight, the debuff part works normally though.
4. The X button to escape perusing the enemies deck is covered up by the "lust drop" counter.
5. Combat is extremely slow as cards hover in the air for about 5 seconds, making turns take quite some time.
6. You can get the same gallery updates costing you 20 moanika over and over.
Basically fights are much harder than intended and getting enough moanika to do anything with is quite difficult as you automatically spend 20 of your potentially 30 moanika a fight on gallery updates which makes it difficult to counter the broken cards the enemies get straight out, the best strategy seems to be just rushing them down and hoping they don't get a full fight buff early.
The lust mechanic also seems to be just "Do less damage with this card but have an increased chance of getting a gallery update to tank your savings."
The card packs cost 300 moanika as well, so you're looking at 10 to 30 successful fights in a row for one card pack.
This is especially egregious as there are 24 mission fights meaning you will likely complete the game before getting 300 moanika.
Also the Adult aspect of the game is Gallery CG's and card art so there's not much depth there.
I'd like to see an option to speed up combat, for gallery unlocks to be free, for card bundles to go down in cost significantly, for the lust system to be expanded in any direction that gives it meaningful mechanics because at the moment the game depth is just non-present.
I'm not trying to be mean or whatever and i'm sure this is your first dip into the developer role, but this is fully 2/10 AI slop with very few redeeming features at the moment, if i paid 2 dollars for this i would want my money back.
I can understand wanting to keep things within scope and not to take on too big of a project when you're learning, but if you're going to leverage AI then you don't get points for artwork, you need to make the mechanics interesting or there's nothing here, there are 157 adult card games on Itch right now, you're competing directly with games like Ero-Slayer or Freyline which mechanically blow you out of the water.
I'm going to toss you a follow and see where you take this project because i'm always excited to see new projects and where people take them, but right now this games pretty rough, it's only had 71 days since first release but you are putting your wrong foot forward by not giving people any unique or interesting mechanics and starting folk with such basic decks.
I can understand caution and wanting to start from a point of relative balance but i don't see how you can grow an audience like this.
Good luck, best wishes with your project!
I really enjoyed your other games and slay the spire, so i can only look forward to the future game happily.
One day i'd love to see a game using the best parts of the combined mechanics in a sort of gigantic project for me to autistically obsess over in the fashion of Portals of Phereon, i don't know that this will ever happen, but i can hope.
Either way, looking forward to it, hope you're having fun on your vacation!
Quick Update about the Game's Visibility & Future comments · Posted in Quick Update about the Game's Visibility & Future comments
Yeah thats what i expected, to happen, which is actually why i brought it up, as it may be a bug? Pretty easy to test by just taking a save file and tossing it in save editor online.I assumed charm was affecting it, but because there's no visible formula for me to use this was the most i could find easily. I just set my level back to 2 and ran through the available content, did find 2 hats and plug in the latest dungeon :)
I know there's also a hidden "Sway" stat exists, and there's stuff like the "collared" buff, but i since i don't get any of the numbers i can't tell much more than that they exist.
Magic/Power seem to scale normally and fine, like the scaling seems to be your base attributes raise with dungeon difficulty which makes sense both thematically and gamewise, (though it also raises the difficulty of older dungeons). The better items, increasing equipment load, and better elixirs definitely is what actually gives you power, like i had no issues nor did i need cheats to progress, just a matter of convenience when testing systems.
Also can you confirm whether it's intentional that the shop doesn't scale with dungeon progress/doesn't sell half the equippable slots of items? Or if they have just an extremely small chance of appearing? I'd found only basic buttplugs in the store in previous runs, and the well, but this time after extensive testing i only found it in the last dungeon. Also is the well at all affected by luck?
Charm *did* go up in damage, it just barely went up, like it was single digits change vs dealing hundreds of damage with spells/attacks, so the scaling might just not be working properly, or maybe some other bug? Can't really say, either way, again, thanks for the work Ellabelle, loving the game, looking forward to seeing whats in store next :)
Curious how the scaling system works and if the balance included shop changes, so i used a save file editor to put my combat level to 200, 500 skill points and gave myself 860 million gold. Far as i can tell, helmets and
buttplugs are unavailable in the shop or become available later as you proceed through dungeons, did like a hundred~ shop refreshes with no luck on either. Same after dungeon 1 both before and after i upped my combat level. ALSO super weird thing i only just noticed this patch, companions and enemies
scale with your level, your resistances don't, (obviously as combat level = to dungeons cleared you aren't intended to hit 200, but still, interesting to know)
What does scale are HP, Damage for combat abilities, Willpower, and in a strangely capped manner sexual attacks.
The difference between level 2 with charm gear vs level 200 with charm gear is about 5~7 damage, meanwhile willpower shoots up the roof and damage abilities scaling to like 20-50% of your damage stat, it seems odd that sexual attacks in an adult video game would have 1/20th the scaling, only affect 2/3rd the enemies, and get worse every level. Is this intended power scaling?Also luck doesn't seem to affect well drops, or shop items, or if it does then there's either a cap or its to such an extent
that 140 luck is not discernibly different from 10.
Anyway, loving the work Ellabelle, the new scenarios are pretty hot :)
Thx for the response :3
I really enjoy adult games with more going on than the usual tits and ass gameplay wise, not something everyone looks for in their porn games to be fair, but i like it, keeps me engaged, Like Portals of Phereon, Ero Dungeon, No Haven, Strive for X, lots of good stuff to be had, but it's always nice to have more options :)
That's what i figured, i'll be looking forward to the future updates :D
Yeah, i assumed that was the issue, if people aren't interacting with the systems then it's a lot to implement considering the use it'll get, focusing in on what people want is a totally fair call to make, most people don't want an expansive gameplay experience to interrupt the porn, which like fair.
Yeah that makes sense, it's just frustrating to have to edit the registry whenever an update comes out :(
Best of luck on the game Ellabelle, i'm looking forward to seeing what it grows to become :)
This games great so far, but i reached the end of content pretty fast as it's a very recent remake. I got the OG version running off newgrounds but i can't enter dungeons in it for some reason? Very annoying.
But i can do everything outside of that, so i feel like we can cover some ground here for those interested in what the differences are!
Also i'll go over what i'd like to see in the future of the game.
Firstly i want to cover the good changes(imo).
The minigame in the OG is insane, it has the minigame of v2 in a corner of the screen while you dodge out of and into different hearts in three lanes and collect all of the hearts with space, all quite fast, some are variable speeds, if you miss a heart and let it go past you then you take damage, if you touch a bad heart then damage, you cannot move left or right on the track you are always seconds from failure which basically means you wasted a day in game, after beating it once i was just frustrated, there is an option to have it autoplay but that locks you out of mid-grade rewards and higher, so either get gud or get fukt. Needless to say i *much* prefer the new system, though it does get boring quickly, at least im not playing guitar hero at 3x speed with land mines while i juggle fuck bars in the top right.
The art is *much* improved, if you go to the tavern in V2 and gamble you'll see the art quality before hand in the patrons.
The new assets look worlds better, though i do believe some of the new art assets for items and backgrounds are AI generated which will lock this game from being a steam sale. This could be temporary, idk.
The UI/UX is improved, yes, i know it's still not good, it's better, hopefully Ellebelle will add more tooltips when we hover over stuff, maybe text telling us which submenu goes where? It's present in the home menu's inventory and skill options but is weirdly missing from what any of the stats mean, and just not present at all in the dungeon.
They just added the ability to unequip items as of the last update(0.14), this was not present in V1 somehow.
There are resolution options now! The old game is locked to a tiny screen, i will say the new version doesn't seem to do 1920x1080(the most common resolution iirc) if you change it even once, no idea why, but that's easily fixed if you are comfortable editing your registry and never touch the button again.
The animations are very nice in the new version, i dont know if that was dungeon content but i didn't see them in the old version.
Now onto the Neutral changes
Food system isn't present, and doesn't appear to be coming back as the parts of the house that were used for that have different purposes now. The good is that's one less thing to keep track of, though originally this was supposed to be a difficult high preparation dungeon crawler and will likely follow that theme here which also means we lose on a buff mechanic in the game which is bad for the complexity of the game, there's a billion coomer games that have no complexity, i would much prefer if this one had more to do laterally like the old version does. We also don't need to worry about starvation or hiring cooks, so we do lose game depth here.
You no longer have rent payment to worry about.
The farm doesn't get weeds, which also means you dont need to hire gardeners and we lose complexity to the management part of the game.
Now we come to the bad, though much of this i suspect we will see return as this project comes together.
You cannot level up base stats in the new version, there's a leveling/XP mechanic in V1, and you can directly pump your vital stats without equipment, not so in V2 as of now.
There are so many more items in V1, it's actually crazy, likely this just needs assets and implementation though.
The town is half the size, we lost the Herbalist, Mining Company, and Church in V2, these were all places to hire specialist companions/workers and had unique benefits such as the mining company being an investment system to grow wealth, the church offering buffs and benefits to playing pure, and the herbalist had the plants which helped de-clutter the general goods store
Reasonably i understand downsizing as there was a drastic change to how companions work and workers were scrapped or are not added yet, but this means our only shop which has RNG sales daily now does the work of all shops combined which makes the Sales table really cramped, we could use more diverse shops to have random drop tables more spread out so you dont have days of no reagents or have to wait 20 in game days to see equipment you can use, which i have run into, and it's a problem if you're save scumming the wells drop table to get items since the stores unreliable. Also i will say i like the management section and it really sucks to see the game turning away from it.
What i'd like to see here is a return of some game depth in management and construction, but i understand if the scope of the game has changed, and i would love to see different stores in town so the drop tables on the RNG daily sales isn't so brutal.
The Sex move acquisition, it's too easy, you can get tons of goblin cum with one good run in under day 5, go gambling, and if the well/store don't fuck you then you can get all the skills almost immediately, it would be phenomenal if the skill system was expanded and we could use the excess cum power elsewhere, maybe for XP or to learn regular skills as the premise of the game is that through cum magic we learn wizardry extremely quickly, all i'm seeing is daily buffs and sex skills, my wizard doesn't know a single spell unless she slurps teacher dry, this doesn't make sense in the games story, though it does make the elixirs more potent game design wise. I would prefer if the skills were learnable but the elixirs empowered them if we did learn them.
V1 has you learn the skills in direct order with the brothel training by doing the minigame, you eventually have to do it yourself, it's more difficult/rewarding but also i do prefer v2's ease of use, it's just too easy.
The Economy is terribly unbalanced in V2, everything is more expensive, and you make less money per day in the brothel, i spent like 2 irl hours gambling to get a companion and some equipment, which i then could not wear because it was too heavy and i didn't have strength buffing reagents.
The dungeons even worse, literally you make tens of gold per fight in the first one, and the cheapest item is like 50 gold, I'm hopeful this will be addressed with later changes.
Way less companions, there are like 1/8th as many companions, this has to do with the change from having a management system to just using them for daily cum. Less isn't always bad if it allows you to add more depth, this is not the case here.
Scope is much reduced but with little pay off, managements cut, half the RPG elements are missing, the brutal prep for the crawl has like 1/3rd the options. It is very early in Development though so we can hope to see a come back here. We did get like 3 animations and some looped sounds in the trade off, definitely not worth if that's the extent of it.
Now i'd like to discuss how i would want to see this game go forward.
Add more tool-tips please, let me hover over things for information, half the stuff is guesswork and trial, especially the dungeon, do you know when i figured out the red/blue arrows were initiative order? Just now while i was looking over things.
Nerf that fucking drummer, kills my runs more than anything else, corruption makes buffing allies suck, and he can full restore willpower in one turn, also he hits like a truck, what the fuck. Literally more of an issue than the troll.
The Minigame could use more options, i'm not saying i want hyper train omega heart rush back, i am saying it gets old fast, also the finish button doesn't let me see them creampie wizard which is sad, just because i'm not trying to get more than 100 goblin cum doesn't mean i want to not get my reward for winning the fight. as the animations/art are probably the most time consuming part of the conversion i hesitate to request more diversity here, but it could use something, maybe let me use the sex skills with a cooldown for more cum or higher multiplier, idk, it's just a little barren.
I'd like to see more diversity of preparation options before entering the dungeon like in V1, it gives me much more to work towards refining and upgrading which helps with the longevity of the game and would add more money sinks besides items/companions, which could then be more reasonably priced.
But if you are decided on the move away from the management style of V1 then i would very much like to see deeper RPG mechanics such as more town events/quests, it's so barren, you can haggle, black out, gamble, or work in the brothel. Thats all.
There's no quests except the main story, basically the only RPG elements are the combat/items, you can only define your character as more or less slutty, you can barely interact with the world, and the systems are very shallow. I would like to see more here.
Back to art/animations, it's fine as is, i would like to see more variety, at least a new three for different creatures such as in the next dungeon. Obviously more hot artwork is appreciated.
The economy is awful as i touched on early, it takes waaay too much to buy stuff for what we're getting from working at the brothel and dungeon delving, a full run of the first dungeon nets you about as much as a perfect day at the brothel, just under in gold, and depending on RNG another 700+/-300 in item sales. You will likely not be able to full run the dungeon without a more powerful companion, and equipment.
What this means is you scrounge for gold at first, you probably get about 100 gold a day from brothel and two levels of the gobbo dungeon, the well or gambling is the only way you make money at first, forget the dungeon until either you're kitted out or you have the third companion or higher, which will take you either a long ass time irl gambling, cheating, or spamming through days to get enough to afford the dude/stuff.
This sucks tbh, i would like it if the brothel payout scaled with charm, the dungeons will scale as more come out i assume, currently companions are crazy expensive one time purchases, but we can only wait to see how this goes as new content and therefore new money routes come to fruition.
I look forward to seeing the new story progress, but i would like to see side quests and other characters so it can feel more like an RPG rather than a bare bones porn game, but from their other work i'm positively optimistic.
Edit, i forgot to add a couple things
i would like to see an expansion of available talents to bring to the dungeon, like 2 more slots, or for passives to always be freely brought, or for passives to have slots for me to swap in/out 2-3 passives, i would also like to be able to swap out the basic attack with my better damage options. The current system doesn't allow me to bring any damage spells or finishers if i want to be able to play as a slut and not be focused down/have a benefit to slamming enemy wills down. Take spank, healing blowjob, passive for taunt, cute passive, masturbate to regen willpower. No other options are competitive if you have an ally better than the first one.
Some way to direct companions, it feels so bad when you slut your way into control of a minion and then your companion focuses them, or casts buff/heal spells without need.
Let me drop the willpower of the lady units please, i understand if not but it's so frustrating to not have a recourse other than to speck into tank items, blast enemies down and only use like blowjob and self buff out of the sex skills.
Same issue, found your reply that claimed with notepad++ and line 996 my problem could be solved. Queue me trying to find the solution to my problem for 3 hours since the console text doesnt give me any hint, i don't know what file to edit, and hilariously enough you need to edit two different places, neither of which is 996 for me, i have deciphered your riddle Calrocka, and with it i have gained the ability to actually buy dungeon maps again, but holy hell would it have been faster if i knew where to start other than maybe 996 :(
Anyway, to fix this issue make a fresh download, open your fresh StriveConquest\src\core folder and find "input_handler.gd", this is the file causing issues. Open it in notepad++, open your modded versions "input_handler.gd" as well.
Ctrl+F and find 'location_purchase_event' and copy everything from it to scene.open(data) (which is at line 996 on the fresh install to Calrocka's credit)
Then find that same line in the modded version, it'll be around 970-990, and paste the fresh versions line over the modded versions line.
(Now if you were like me you'd start your game up and everything would break and crash and you'd try and figure out which lines are needed to keep or need to be replaced, do not be like me, be like Calrocka who just compared text lines to see what was different as i later did.)
Last Step, at lines 56-64~ you will find a bunch of lines starting with "var exploration_node" and ending with "var active_faction = {}"
However in the modded version it is missing "var selected_area" at line 61 between var active_location and var active_area
Copy var selected_area and paste it on line 61 so that your line up looks like this:
var exploration_node
var active_character
var scene_characters = []
var scene_loot
var active_area
var selected_area
var active_location
var selected_location
var active_faction = {}
Save the notepad++
now you can buy dungeons again :D