Fairly interesting, at least for the first run through. Upgrading the dungeons and running them again didn't see very fun, so I didn't clear level 2 fully.
I started at dungeon 2, which proved to be silly because those cards weren't worth playing until I also got some from dungeon 1. Fortunately the hard enemies were still easily beatable with the starter deck. But then once I got to dungeon 1, the synergies unlocked and the enemies just melted away.
The game stuttered a lot, which I initially attributed to the animations, but even saving the game produced a brief freeze, so there may be something else going on.
I’ve been thinking about the game’s balance. I didn’t want the first dungeons to be too hard because playing without cool cards against tough enemies doesn’t seem fun. So, until the player gets some cards that work well together, the difficulty is intentionally low. I ended up nerfing the starting enemies a lot to keep things from getting frustrating.
From what I’ve played, by the time you finish the first two dungeons, you can already put together a few different deck combos. So, I think it’s a good point to start cranking up the difficulty a bit. By then, players will also know more about the cards, so it makes sense to add more of a challenge.
About the freezes—at least in my tests, the latest update made things better compared to before. But there are still some brief pauses during battles, like at the end of a turn. Those pauses are intentional because of a quick cache cleanup I have to run. It’s necessary to avoid bigger freezes during battles. Later on, when there are more cards with visual effects and players are pulling off crazy combos, the cache would get massive without it.
The problem is that Ren'Py doesn’t use the GPU, which makes performance trickier. That’s why the cleanup causes those quick pauses. If I can find a way to hide it better during battles, I’ll fix it, but for now, it’ll stay like this. (The plan is to finish the game, build my card library, and eventually move everything to Unity. That way, the game would feel a lot smoother. But that’s only something I’ll tackle later, when I have more time to learn Unity—assuming people actually enjoy the game, which I’m still not sure about)
As for dungeon level-ups, they’re mostly there for replay value right now. You don’t get much beyond some extra coins and skill points, (Some skills are pretty cool; I suggest trying a few. For now, it’s not necessary since the enemies are easy, but later on, they’ll be really useful.)
Honestly, I don’t usually play past the first run either. It’s just a fun little option if you want to mess around more.
About saving, my system is a bit different. You can only save in specific areas because, with how complex the game is, those spots are safer for saving. And yeah, it takes about five seconds because it’s auto-selecting a save slot. It’s roughly the same amount of time as manually going to the menu and saving anyway, I can’t really speed that up.
Thanks for the feedback about the difficulty! I don’t want it to feel like you’re playing with your eyes closed, but the early game is meant to be easy to get into. I’ll be adding tougher challenges as you progress.
