Pretty great founding concept, with a nicely charming style (includes the OST), my personal complaints would be that the board fills with not-so-useful gems and the fact that defensive spells are very weak in comparison to enemy attacks (for eg: shields can reflect with damage, only two heal and shield points per the run I had, and one time I healed a whopping 0 HP).
But overall, good and promising, good luck with the Steam release!
FWIW I am trying to be careful with healing because unlike Block you take it out of the fight. I don't want a situation where optimal play is to get one enemy left and spam heals, because some players will end up doing something I know isn't fun...
This means most heals have some restrictions like being exhaustible, dealing damage at the same time, or just being weak enough an enemy would outpace them.
Gwen's Rejuvenation spell heals 3 but has Decay so it goes 3, 2, 1, 0. But that's still 15-30% of her default maximum hp every fight (the same as the camp). It also has a short, double-green cast sequence that exists inside lots of other spells. So, as an example, if you were to pick up Rejuvenation + Leaf Cutter x Sling then on turn one, for three stones, you do a 15% heal and 6 damage because you cast them together...
Well, that's my thought process anyway!
(Also on Ceridwen Pact + Death Coil is broken and I'll probably change it, heh)
Yeah I absolutely understand, I sort of forgot it had decay. I think this failed to account, though, to the fact that enemies tend to collectively deal more damage than you can heal. Maybe Decay can be given a set amount of turns before it starts? Or the Rejuvenation spell can count on how many enemies are on the field? Additionally, the camp in my playthroughs also felt pretty weak, when I saw it, I expected it to be a full or half heal, but :boowomp: And yeah, I personally don't like luck to decide a run or not (rather than just how well it goes), so that's extremely subjective and with it being a Rogue it'll definitely be way more in favor of its audience.
In my experience, this game isn't terribly luck dependent. I nearly 100%ed the game prior to the update deleting my save file, and I didn't actually ever lose a run. The camp doesn't heal much, but Ceridwen doesn't even use the camp ever unless she gets really bad luck right before the boss fight, and Gwen can use the extra 6 hp usually but there were only a handful of times I was going into the boss with sub-10 hp. Post-update the new spells being mostly worse does make Gwen runs harder, but I still haven't lost one yet (though I have twice finished on turns mushroom man would have otherwise killed me had I not finished him first).
You're right, though, that the difference between runs is rediculously rng dependent-- getting +mana/turn makes the game a LOT easier, and you get that at least once ~60% of the time it feels like. Gwen runs where you don't get plus mana are HARD, and one of the two almost-deaths was a Gwen run where I got no mana and only 4 spells (the shop was trash and I was dumb and didn't check first). And then a run where Air Blast gets Barrage+Giantslayer, for example, makes Gwen look better even than a bad Ceridwen run. If the game were extended so that the weaker runs didn't all win anyhow, that would be pretty annoying.
If block was ever decent this would make sense, but Gwen gets like 2 block sometimes I guess where Ceridwen gets health for every soul stone which is generally part of casting powerful spells anyway. Death coil + hex is crazy, of course, but even without that channel + starting spell can produce 3 soul stones in a turn, and those stones also let you cast powerful spells like the 4 damage 1 weaken starting one, or other better options. Gwen getting three block on a turn usually comes with almost no upside-- probably some thorns, which are lost at end of turn and usually do 2 damage-- and then all that block is lost. That's not to say Gwen is unplayable-- she's great and her starting spells are better defensively than Ceridwen's starting spells because block+weaken means you do effectively have 3 block almost every turn as long as you get moderately lucky, and you can put up with damage on the runs where you don't get lucky. But her main advantage is that not having soul stone spells in the drawing pool makes getting certain other useful spells-- most importantly high-damage spells like Air Blast-- more likely. So Gwen needs to kill all the enemies before they can attack, mostly, managing health as a resource to deal with bad luck while Ceridwen can comfortably coast and do whatever, relying on her mid-late game defensive power to overwhelm anything the enemies can dish out.
If you want block to be relevant, we need better defensive spells, or block on offensive spells. Right now defensive spells that are utility (like channel) are the only ones I ever take. Block doesn't feel like it makes progress, and there's rarely spare mana for things that don't make progress. Maybe a Toughen+block spell where toughen is like the opposite of strengthen (but presumably wears off because its a player thing) would change up how I play Gwen, but it would probably be kinda overpowered. Fundamentally, a defensive spell good enough to be slated into a build is kinda overpowered since it's pretty anti-synergistic with hyper offense and if it's good enough to overcome that, then its good enough you'd want it in every deck. I think if you gave defense more mechanics so that they could synergize together the way different offensive spells can complement each other that would be the best option, but since weaken is classified as an offensive effect the design space is pretty limited-- offensive spells have lots of possible targets to mix things up with but defensive spells can only target and be based off of the player, and the only defensive effects currently in the game are heal and block (other defense cards are really doing some kind of utility feature helping you make progress in an unusual way at the cost of not doing anything else, like channel and that board-wipe spell).
-edit- Turns out I was misremembering the default attack spell for Gwen. No weaken. Man she sucks XD
Just checked this out and I absolutely love it! I am aspiring to create a deck builder of my own in the near future and seeing such a well thought out indie deck builder is a great inspiration! What engine are you using to create this game? I have worked a bit in LOVE 2D and Godot and was wondering if you have any suggestions in particular for a deck builder.
Edit: I am a tad slow on the uptake and noticed that the intro clearly shows "Made in Unity". Nevertheless, any suggestions from an accomplished game dev such as yourself would be greatly appreciated.
Yeah, I'm using Unity right now. I'm considering switching to Godot for future projects but I have very limited experience at the moment.
I'm not sure about "accomplished" lol, but I can give you my thoughts. And my honest advice is not to worry about it? Just use what you're comfortable with. Most of your gameplay logic will be independent of any game engine and you're not going to need some specific render feature.
Thank you very much for your reply! By the way, if you are ever in need of a hand in working with Godot feel free to reach out to me. I have an ample list of resources I can refer you to and have some decent experience working with the interface.
Very fun and cool game! I was frustrated at the start with the 1st hero as it is hard to recover hit points and you don't understand the combos so well.
Playing with Gwen was alot of fun and is very rewarding tho :D
also coming back to the 1st hero after clearing the 1st level works better, but still if you don't draw defensive spells it gets iffy
It's very rewarding to understand combos and setups better and then make big chains, especially the banking system of mana is very cool!
Yes! Right click will revert one step and holding will cancel completely. Sorry, I know this is unclear. I will put some controls on the screen next update.
In case you wanna use it, a while ago I came up with a way to make Unity not lose save data stored in PlayerPrefs when you update a web game. Source code is at https://3p0ch.newgrounds.com/news/post/1086279 You'll make everyone lose their data when you push an update implementing this for the first time, but then all future updates won't lose everyone's save data.
Oh! This is super interesting. Reading through this code I think I could drop PlayerPrefs completely! Just plop the normal json save files I use for the Win build into something consistent like "/idbfs/witchingstone/"and it will Just Work?
Sounds like it should work, and if you think you might change the structure of your save files in the future and would rather just have to change the normal save files (for a desktop/console export) and not worry about also changing how PlayerPrefs saves the data then that approach might be less work in the long run. Just be sure to either ensure backward compatibility, or change the idbfs subdirectory if you do make any changes that break backward compatibility and you actually want to lose the old data.
On the other hand, if you don't think you'll need to mess with the code for save file structures, it might be easier to just pop in the class to override PlayerPrefs for HTML5 exports and be done with it.
Yeah, it’s much easier not doing any PlayerPrefs stuff at all!
I think I have something. It was a little bit more complicated but, after doing some voodoo mentioned in the comments, it seems to work! Survived me making a couple of new builds at least.
Of course the next public build will kill existing webgl saves, but it would have done that anyway... Sad times. Thanks for your help!
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Pretty great founding concept, with a nicely charming style (includes the OST), my personal complaints would be that the board fills with not-so-useful gems and the fact that defensive spells are very weak in comparison to enemy attacks (for eg: shields can reflect with damage, only two heal and shield points per the run I had, and one time I healed a whopping 0 HP).
But overall, good and promising, good luck with the Steam release!
The second character's healing is much, much better. You can heal 20+hp per fight.
Thanks! But I feel like a healing spell should work for all characters maybe.
FWIW I am trying to be careful with healing because unlike Block you take it out of the fight. I don't want a situation where optimal play is to get one enemy left and spam heals, because some players will end up doing something I know isn't fun...
This means most heals have some restrictions like being exhaustible, dealing damage at the same time, or just being weak enough an enemy would outpace them.
Gwen's Rejuvenation spell heals 3 but has Decay so it goes 3, 2, 1, 0. But that's still 15-30% of her default maximum hp every fight (the same as the camp). It also has a short, double-green cast sequence that exists inside lots of other spells. So, as an example, if you were to pick up Rejuvenation + Leaf Cutter x Sling then on turn one, for three stones, you do a 15% heal and 6 damage because you cast them together...
Well, that's my thought process anyway!
(Also on Ceridwen Pact + Death Coil is broken and I'll probably change it, heh)
Yeah I absolutely understand, I sort of forgot it had decay.
I think this failed to account, though, to the fact that enemies tend to collectively deal more damage than you can heal.
Maybe Decay can be given a set amount of turns before it starts? Or the Rejuvenation spell can count on how many enemies are on the field?
Additionally, the camp in my playthroughs also felt pretty weak, when I saw it, I expected it to be a full or half heal, but :boowomp:
And yeah, I personally don't like luck to decide a run or not (rather than just how well it goes), so that's extremely subjective and with it being a Rogue it'll definitely be way more in favor of its audience.
In my experience, this game isn't terribly luck dependent. I nearly 100%ed the game prior to the update deleting my save file, and I didn't actually ever lose a run. The camp doesn't heal much, but Ceridwen doesn't even use the camp ever unless she gets really bad luck right before the boss fight, and Gwen can use the extra 6 hp usually but there were only a handful of times I was going into the boss with sub-10 hp. Post-update the new spells being mostly worse does make Gwen runs harder, but I still haven't lost one yet (though I have twice finished on turns mushroom man would have otherwise killed me had I not finished him first).
You're right, though, that the difference between runs is rediculously rng dependent-- getting +mana/turn makes the game a LOT easier, and you get that at least once ~60% of the time it feels like. Gwen runs where you don't get plus mana are HARD, and one of the two almost-deaths was a Gwen run where I got no mana and only 4 spells (the shop was trash and I was dumb and didn't check first). And then a run where Air Blast gets Barrage+Giantslayer, for example, makes Gwen look better even than a bad Ceridwen run. If the game were extended so that the weaker runs didn't all win anyhow, that would be pretty annoying.
If block was ever decent this would make sense, but Gwen gets like 2 block sometimes I guess where Ceridwen gets health for every soul stone which is generally part of casting powerful spells anyway. Death coil + hex is crazy, of course, but even without that channel + starting spell can produce 3 soul stones in a turn, and those stones also let you cast powerful spells like the 4 damage 1 weaken starting one, or other better options. Gwen getting three block on a turn usually comes with almost no upside-- probably some thorns, which are lost at end of turn and usually do 2 damage-- and then all that block is lost. That's not to say Gwen is unplayable-- she's great and her starting spells are better defensively than Ceridwen's starting spells because block+weaken means you do effectively have 3 block almost every turn as long as you get moderately lucky, and you can put up with damage on the runs where you don't get lucky. But her main advantage is that not having soul stone spells in the drawing pool makes getting certain other useful spells-- most importantly high-damage spells like Air Blast-- more likely. So Gwen needs to kill all the enemies before they can attack, mostly, managing health as a resource to deal with bad luck while Ceridwen can comfortably coast and do whatever, relying on her mid-late game defensive power to overwhelm anything the enemies can dish out.
If you want block to be relevant, we need better defensive spells, or block on offensive spells. Right now defensive spells that are utility (like channel) are the only ones I ever take. Block doesn't feel like it makes progress, and there's rarely spare mana for things that don't make progress. Maybe a Toughen+block spell where toughen is like the opposite of strengthen (but presumably wears off because its a player thing) would change up how I play Gwen, but it would probably be kinda overpowered. Fundamentally, a defensive spell good enough to be slated into a build is kinda overpowered since it's pretty anti-synergistic with hyper offense and if it's good enough to overcome that, then its good enough you'd want it in every deck. I think if you gave defense more mechanics so that they could synergize together the way different offensive spells can complement each other that would be the best option, but since weaken is classified as an offensive effect the design space is pretty limited-- offensive spells have lots of possible targets to mix things up with but defensive spells can only target and be based off of the player, and the only defensive effects currently in the game are heal and block (other defense cards are really doing some kind of utility feature helping you make progress in an unusual way at the cost of not doing anything else, like channel and that board-wipe spell).
-edit- Turns out I was misremembering the default attack spell for Gwen. No weaken. Man she sucks XD
This is a wonderfully difficult game, with cute art, lots of planning, and a ton of fun to play and play again
Witching Stone Gameplay
it was a nice little moment realizing that the end of a spell can be the start of another!
Just checked this out and I absolutely love it! I am aspiring to create a deck builder of my own in the near future and seeing such a well thought out indie deck builder is a great inspiration! What engine are you using to create this game? I have worked a bit in LOVE 2D and Godot and was wondering if you have any suggestions in particular for a deck builder.
Edit: I am a tad slow on the uptake and noticed that the intro clearly shows "Made in Unity". Nevertheless, any suggestions from an accomplished game dev such as yourself would be greatly appreciated.
Yeah, I'm using Unity right now. I'm considering switching to Godot for future projects but I have very limited experience at the moment.
I'm not sure about "accomplished" lol, but I can give you my thoughts. And my honest advice is not to worry about it? Just use what you're comfortable with. Most of your gameplay logic will be independent of any game engine and you're not going to need some specific render feature.
Thank you very much for your reply! By the way, if you are ever in need of a hand in working with Godot feel free to reach out to me. I have an ample list of resources I can refer you to and have some decent experience working with the interface.
Very good game, fun demo
Very fun and cool game! I was frustrated at the start with the 1st hero as it is hard to recover hit points and you don't understand the combos so well.
Playing with Gwen was alot of fun and is very rewarding tho :D
also coming back to the 1st hero after clearing the 1st level works better, but still if you don't draw defensive spells it gets iffy
It's very rewarding to understand combos and setups better and then make big chains, especially the banking system of mana is very cool!
So far it's a very good game. I can't wait for full game OwO
Damn! Wasn't ready for the demo to end, well done :D
Is there a way to unselect the first stone you pick in a turn
Yes! Right click will revert one step and holding will cancel completely. Sorry, I know this is unclear. I will put some controls on the screen next update.
In case you wanna use it, a while ago I came up with a way to make Unity not lose save data stored in PlayerPrefs when you update a web game. Source code is at https://3p0ch.newgrounds.com/news/post/1086279 You'll make everyone lose their data when you push an update implementing this for the first time, but then all future updates won't lose everyone's save data.
Oh! This is super interesting. Reading through this code I think I could drop PlayerPrefs completely! Just plop the normal json save files I use for the Win build into something consistent like "/idbfs/witchingstone/"and it will Just Work?
Sounds like it should work, and if you think you might change the structure of your save files in the future and would rather just have to change the normal save files (for a desktop/console export) and not worry about also changing how PlayerPrefs saves the data then that approach might be less work in the long run. Just be sure to either ensure backward compatibility, or change the idbfs subdirectory if you do make any changes that break backward compatibility and you actually want to lose the old data.
On the other hand, if you don't think you'll need to mess with the code for save file structures, it might be easier to just pop in the class to override PlayerPrefs for HTML5 exports and be done with it.
Yeah, it’s much easier not doing any PlayerPrefs stuff at all!
I think I have something. It was a little bit more complicated but, after doing some voodoo mentioned in the comments, it seems to work! Survived me making a couple of new builds at least.
Of course the next public build will kill existing webgl saves, but it would have done that anyway... Sad times. Thanks for your help!
Great game! 10/10
🙏 thanks
Fun game! Good luck on the full release.
Thank you!
Hi, i'm a EN>IT Translator, Would you be interested in an Italian translation?
Maybe at some point! Right now it's chopping and changing a lot due to development, so just sticking to what we know.