Oh boy, a lot of posts to answer here...
Played for about an hour and got a better but I feel there are either hidden/unexplained mechanics (e.g. I was unable to play a confidence upgrade on a confidence engine, maybe because it was going from 1 to 3?)
The upgrade mechanics are explained on the Engine/Upgrade cards themselves if you double-click them. But to better address your (and others') concerns, I have added a notification to version 1.1 that tells you why an attempted upgrade failed so that it's easier to learn these mechanics.
Quickly summed up, however: Upgrade cards can only be played on Engines/Upgrades of the same type and
exactly one level lower. In other words, you can only play a Confidence 3 on a Confidence 2 card, not on a Confidence 1 card or a Skill 2 card.
However the base of the game is very enjoyable as someone who used to play a lot of MTG you have a very good base for a card game i would love to see what this is like after the tweak that you will do and with the ability to build my own deck.
Thank you! Getting to this point in the game's design has been a highly iterative process that I'm going to talk about in detail to higher-level patrons/subscribers very soon, but it's definitely been rewarding to go from a dull, unchallenging game to something that feels like it has a certain "magic sauce" that only needs to simmer a bit more.
one other this i would recommend is that you merge both the challge and atcion turns into one, so its rather annoying to forget what turn it is and not be able to do what i want. or maybe may it and a game setting that you can have two turns or just one.
The phases are split because it will open options for later card designs and because I want Engines/Upgrades to have delayed effects in most cases. For example, if you play "Sensual Lighting," the added attack bonus is not meant to take effect on the same turn. If you could mix and match how to play cards, it would open up so many crazy card combinations that the game would get bogged down in analysis paralysis (which the game is already dangerously close to), so by keeping those phases apart, I force the player to think in simpler terms.
Having the 3 different types of attacks (Skill, Trust, Confidence) makes attacking hard as that increases the chance that RNG will fuck you over. Most of the time, I'd have enough power to kill a card of one or two types but the other type would be on the field, so there would be whole rounds where I couldn't attack the challenge cards.
The game is balanced around not all of your cards being useful each turn. In my winning games, I typically discard at least one card most turns. I find that turns where I am utterly powerless to deal with Challenge cards are rare enough not to frustrate me.
Having said that, this prototype does not show a typical match from the final game. Going up against Vanguard there would not mean that you'd face a balanced mix of Challenge card types. Instead, the majority of the cards would be of a specific type or within a specific thematic category to represent her unique personality. You will be able to prepare for this before a match.
The challenge cards are too tough. At points (admittedly towards the end), I'd see cards with 10+ power and I'd have to spend my whole hand to get rid of them, but even 6-8 power cards in the beginning would require nearly my whole hand just to stop.
Did you miss the mechanic that makes cards with multiple attack values deal damage once for each of these values that match the Challenge card? Some of the apparently more powerful Challenge cards have multiple weaknesses, so if you match your symbols with it (for example by playing a card like Deep Breath), you can often take them out with a single card. Don't waste your single-type attack cards against such big Challenge cards unless this would finish them off.
Make the thing you need to pay for cards something separate from heat. Maybe take the Hearthstone approach with mana that increases by 1 each turn, since this is a short game.
No, the current Heat mechanic will stay. It's a result of iterative testing and captures exactly the mood I want from the game. It does need more balancing though, but that's a different matter altogether. I also intend to change how I refer to some aspects of it. Currently leaning towards using the terms "Total Heat" (with "Heat" as shorthand on cards), "Usable Heat" (instead of current Heat), and "Temporary Usable Heat" (to make that type of Heat more intuitive). Expect to see something like this in 1.1.
Make it where certain challenge cards can't appear until certain rounds. Getting a -4 Heat round 1 is a death sentence for a game. Also adjust the strength of the challenge cards based on the turns.
These are both good suggestions, and I've been toying with both before reading this post. In fact, while I haven't landed on the exact results yet, the -4 Heat card will likely be changed into something that takes the current turn number into account.
Turn the coffee cup from an engine to an instant that gives you a bonus card on the next turn for a cost of 2.
From both my own testing and from what I've seen from other testers this past week, Coffee is actually perfectly fine the way it is and accomplishes exactly what I want from it. Its effect is much more powerful than it might at first appear, but it does come with a cost (the card becomes dead weight if you already have Coffee on the board or the play area is full, and it does reduce your potential Heat growth overall).
Importantly, Coffee is a Common-tier card. When I designed it, I did so in such a way that it would be incredibly tempting to play while at the same time not feel like a card you
must include in your own decks. There will be somewhat more powerful versions of Coffee available as Uncommon or Rare cards later, probably even in version 2.0, so stay tuned for that.
Also, I'll add that the whole idea behind the Trust series of cards will be that focusing on such cards will let you both draw more cards and play them more easily. Currently, only the latter part of Trust exists in the game, but you'll see it get more fleshed out for 2.0 when I add deckbuilding and a bunch of new cards.
Unlike some above I found the cards very easy to read, apart from the "attack type" in the top row of your cards. The numbers are easy to read, but the backing symbol I can barely see at all and was just relying on position to know whether it was trust, confidence or skill. Could you make the backing stand out more like it does on the challenge cards?
Those symbols were never meant to be more than a faint outline for aesthetic purposes, with the placement meant to show you what number represents what. I expected this to feel intuitive, but feedback shows that I could still make some changes. I will likely go with highlighting the attack values with a colored circle that will match a color on the Challenge cards, but we'll see. I want to keep it simple so that the cards don't become too busy or garish.
The problem in any game is to make it difficult in a fun way rather than difficult in an unfun way, so please be very careful about "fill your hand with crud" cards like immovable. The "deadweight" cards in Monster Train are really annoying because the game has so few draw/discard powers to get rid of them. However, one of the nice bits here was deliberately leaving alive the challenge card that forces you to discard a card, to get rid of immovable. Draw/discard powers are fun, so I hope the full game has some more.
There's a reason that you only find one Immovable in this deck, and it's a card unique to Vanguard as well. Additionally, the idea behind Model cards is that they represent the model's experience. As you play matches with Vanguard in the full game, you'll be given opportunities to upgrade her Model cards, turning cards like Immovable into something you'd actually want to play. The idea here is that you can make yourself the most awesome deck imaginable, but the first times you photograph a new model, her inexperience will still hold you back. More importantly, giving players another thing to upgrade in a tangible way will (hopefully) make for a satisfying reward mechanic.
Probably the biggest problem with the game at present is that inevitably sometimes you get a hand full of useless cards (no more room for a level 1 engine, none of the right engine upgrades, wrong attack type for these challenge cards) which is equally inevitably frustrating and unfun, so adding draw/discard powers that can be used during the challenge phase would really help with this. Maybe allow coffee to draw/discard 1 in the challenge phase to make it less annoying?
Trust cards will help with this later. Keep in mind that the premade deck in this version is not meant to be optimized in any way. It's pretty close to a starter deck except for the few example Uncommon and Rare cards, so there's not much fancy going on here. What was important to me with this version was to focus all the testing on a shitty starter deck to make sure the difficulty feels okay even with that, but you'll quickly be able to improve this kind of deck in version 2.0 and above.
Alternatively, how about borrowing an idea from Vault of the Void, where any card can be discarded for energy? Just say that any card can be discarded for 2 temporary heat in the action phase.
You know, I really like this idea. It might solve the early game balance issue. I'll give it some consideration and maybe try it out for version 1.1.
The engine-builder is even more dependent than most games on the cards coming out in the right order, as you need trust 1, then 2, then 3 etc - is the order completely random or is the deck biased in any way to make them come out in a half-decent order? Similar to Monster Train (again) where the draw is rigged so that you always get at least one "core" unit every turn.
The first draw is rigged so that you'll always start out with at least one Engine level 1 card, but after that, it's all RNG. A customized deck in later versions will be unlikely to spread out across multiple types of cards like this. You're probably going to want to focus on just one or two out of Confidence, Trust, and Skill. This deck is just poorly optimized by design to give you a taste of all three types. It's like playing a Magic: The Gathering deck that contains all five colors.
