- May 2, 2018
- 9
- 4
Ah yeah, I read that you composed the music yourself.
I really like the music during the gameplay, it fits a Photosoot-theme well in my opinion.
It is very upbeat but not really intrusive.
I think you did really good, keep it up!
I really like the music during the gameplay, it fits a Photosoot-theme well in my opinion.
It is very upbeat but not really intrusive.
I think you did really good, keep it up!
You can easily have no decisions to make because you can defeat the Challenges. It's the nature of only having that one thing to do on the final turn: defeat Challenges. The only non-damaging card Effect you might use (in the deck you've given us) is the one that draws cards; there's no reason to keep your engine around at that point so there's no drawback to using it. You would only do so, though, if you can't win otherwise.
Plenty of games have similar final turns (boiling down to "spend all of your resources on victory points") so you're in good company. I just like it when the other parts of the game still matter at the end.
- Jul 22, 2020
- 54
- 15
Ignoring the change that I'm actually interested in seeing, why in particular do you consider a turn one level 2 Engine a "problem". Like I mentioned I understand cards are currently common and I have no idea what you have in mind terms of card design also people will probably end up making mono or dual type decks for consistency. Based on the currently seen Tier 2 the only one that kinda nutty to get turn one is the +2 Heat/-2 Cost while the other 2 are break even or just less Heat than 3 lvl 1 engines on turn 1.
Is the idea to have 5 mana be the baseline cost for level 2 Engines so when we get to see the Uncommon+ Level 2 Engines and your pre-emptively trying to prevent things like Dark Ritual, Necropotence/Doomdays turn 1. I can certainly see how having to consider degenerates 4x ramp mono trust discount or crazy stuff like that might be better to go on the safe side.
Dark Ritual is absolutely something I have in the back of my mind at any time I include an Instant effect that gives you resources in a game like this. It might seem innocent on the outside, but it can seriously screw some things up.
In any case, I designed things like this because I want to encourage players to focus on level 1 engines before diving hard into upgrades, though I expect (and encourage) some custom decks to beeline straight for high-level upgrades. I also don't want to make the Common-tier cards too good. I'd rather not have any of those cards be at a power level where people routinely include them in any deck and any strategy. By keeping level 2 Upgrades just out of reach of a single card play, I subtly steer player choices without forcing any specific playstyles.
Regardless, "Ready When You Are" is getting changed slightly in version 1.1 in a way that will have rippling effects across the entire game. I'm excited to see the results.
- Jan 26, 2018
- 12
- 24
First off, just in general it's great.
The presentation is excellent; I appreciate the work you put into the music and animation, and the core mechanics feel interesting. I'm excited to see it in an ongoing game where you can progress the deck.
My feedback:
1. The AOE-but-type-restricted cards feel super underwhelming in this demo (I don't think I ever actually wanted to play them, just pitched for dmg). It sounds like you addressed this above - outside the demo, each model might lean heavily towards one type or the other? So you'd intentionally take the "dmg all Trust" cards against a model more likely to have Trust Challenges, then swap out for Confidence against another? If so, then it makes sense they feel bad in demo since they're essentially a bad deck choice for well-rounded opponent.
2. "Heat" is used both as Victory Points and as "mana", leading to some terminology confusion. It seems like you've tried to refer to the "mana" one as "temporary Heat" most of the time, but I still found it a bit confusing ("spend" Heat only spends temp, but "lose" Heat loses VP as well? Gain "temporary" Heat isn't actually temporary, it persists to the next round right?) If possible I'd suggest coming up with a separate term, something like Arousal/Heat or Heat/Energy to disambiguate...
3. Difficulty is going to be tricky. I've won more than half my attempts at the demo, but then I play a lot of card games (Arkham and Marvel LCGs, StS/Monster-Train/Griftlands, etc.) There's a lot of new player pitfalls in card games of this type ("I like this card and might want to play it in a couple turns, I'll hold on to it!" - thus wasting free draw, "I don't want to 'waste' my cards on attacking, I want to play them all!" - thus neglecting the Challenges and getting heavily punished, etc.) which makes it extremely difficult for non-veterans of the genre (see this thread where so many people are saying they literally always lose at it). But if you dial back the difficulty in general, it will be utterly trivial to folks with card game experience. So presumably you'll want some sort of optional difficulty increase/decrease, but even that could be tricky to balance.
Best of luck, this is a super promising start.
The presentation is excellent; I appreciate the work you put into the music and animation, and the core mechanics feel interesting. I'm excited to see it in an ongoing game where you can progress the deck.
My feedback:
1. The AOE-but-type-restricted cards feel super underwhelming in this demo (I don't think I ever actually wanted to play them, just pitched for dmg). It sounds like you addressed this above - outside the demo, each model might lean heavily towards one type or the other? So you'd intentionally take the "dmg all Trust" cards against a model more likely to have Trust Challenges, then swap out for Confidence against another? If so, then it makes sense they feel bad in demo since they're essentially a bad deck choice for well-rounded opponent.
2. "Heat" is used both as Victory Points and as "mana", leading to some terminology confusion. It seems like you've tried to refer to the "mana" one as "temporary Heat" most of the time, but I still found it a bit confusing ("spend" Heat only spends temp, but "lose" Heat loses VP as well? Gain "temporary" Heat isn't actually temporary, it persists to the next round right?) If possible I'd suggest coming up with a separate term, something like Arousal/Heat or Heat/Energy to disambiguate...
3. Difficulty is going to be tricky. I've won more than half my attempts at the demo, but then I play a lot of card games (Arkham and Marvel LCGs, StS/Monster-Train/Griftlands, etc.) There's a lot of new player pitfalls in card games of this type ("I like this card and might want to play it in a couple turns, I'll hold on to it!" - thus wasting free draw, "I don't want to 'waste' my cards on attacking, I want to play them all!" - thus neglecting the Challenges and getting heavily punished, etc.) which makes it extremely difficult for non-veterans of the genre (see this thread where so many people are saying they literally always lose at it). But if you dial back the difficulty in general, it will be utterly trivial to folks with card game experience. So presumably you'll want some sort of optional difficulty increase/decrease, but even that could be tricky to balance.
Best of luck, this is a super promising start.
Yup, that's basically it. These cards might get reworked later, but this is the basic idea, anyway.
The terminology has been updated for 1.1 and the concept of Temporary Heat has been eliminated altogether (actually merged with Usable Heat, see below). The new, standardized terms are these:
- "Total Heat" is the total amount of Heat you have gained in this match. This is the value that you must increase to win the game.
- "Usable Heat" is the amount of Heat available for you to spend on things like playing cards. When any effect says that it costs Heat, it refers to Usable Heat unless otherwise specified. If you end your turn with more Usable Heat than Total Heat, you lose any excess Usable Heat.
- "Heat" is shorthand for BOTH Total Heat and Usable Heat. If you gain Heat, you gain both types. If you lose Heat, you lose both.
There will be multiple difficulty levels (two easier ones are introduced as early as in version 1.1 this week), so that will help. In the final game, there will be an interactive tutorial that steps you through an example game to better illustrate some of the strategies involved, but I'm not going to implement that until every game mechanic is firmly cemented.
I plan to have multiple tiers of difficulty levels in the final game, some of them deliberately designed to be literally impossible until you have tweaked and upgraded your deck to deal with that exact challenge. There should be plenty of replayability for players at all skill levels.
I looked at it again, and I noticed the small Challenge type on the bottom, which confused me with the fact that it could be directly challenged with the three different types on the middle of the card.
When I spoke about needing heat to attack cards, I meant using these cards:
So if I were to make a suggestion based on this information, get rid of the Challenge type at the bottom and instead make it whatever the Challenge Icons in the middle of the card are as the types for that Challenge. Because right now, you basically have two different types of attack: Direct Attacks on the top of your cards that target the middle icons on the Challenge Cards, and Effects that attack a whole different aspect at the bottom of the card.
I originally misinterpreted the 'OR' effect as a random choice between the two . . . which caused my loss a few times.
'Otherwise' and 'If not' make the most sense to me.
Also, I strongly agree with the discard to restore energy mechanic from Vault of the Void. I think it would make the early game far less punishing and it would let you start ramping much easier without having to rely so much on RNG. Being about to use your first upgrade on turn 4 is terrible and feels terrible.
You already know that the -4 heat is a bit overtuned. I would also recommend reducing variance by making it so the same challenge card can't appear multiple times in a turn . . . Got 3 of the 'discard or summon another challenge card' to show up and having +7 challenge cards wasn't something I would have been able to deal with if I hadn't essentially drawn a god hand that turn.
I will say the best part of 'This is fine' in my opinion is that it lets you recover usable heat.
And at this point I'm not certain if the attack phase and action phase need to be separate. The only real effect I've noticed this has is make it so you can't upgrade a skill engine to boost your attack that turn. Merging these phases would also reduce the punishment for miscalculating how many cards you can actually play that turn.
Edit: Oh, and my issue with the Coffee card is that you can't do anything with it if your engine slots are full. This makes it a dead draw soooo frequently and you can't attack with it and you get nothing for discarding it.
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Those are not considered attacks by the game. That's why you can use these to damage the card that cannot be attacked.
No, this is not going to happen. There isn't a one-to-one correlation between these values and the keyword, nor will keywords be limited to the icons in the future. You are seeing a tiny subset of the game's cards in this version, some of the simplest cards at that.
The reason this is problematic is that I have such limited space in which to put words on these cards. Even "if not" is too wordy. I did just try out using "ELSE" instead of "OR" despite that not making perfect grammatic sense, and it just barely fits. I'll give that a go.
These cards are not drawn at random. While inexperienced players will be blindsided by that kind of thing, a player who understands the rules of the game should be able to predict incoming Challenge cards.
At the beginning of the match, a Challenge deck is built and kept off-screen. It contains a set amount of each card based on what I want from that scenario. In this example scenario, there are no more than 3 copies of any one card, most cards have 2 copies, and one of the cards only appears once ("Forgot Something"). Use this to your advantage. If a type of card that you know is common (such as "Failure" with its 3 copies) has yet to appear toward the end of the game, the odds of it appearing (in multiples!) are huge. Gaming these odds is part of Supermodel Snapshot's advanced tier of strategies and should not be ignored once you understand the fundamentals.
There will be more opportunities for that in 1.1 due to the streamlining of Heat.
They do, though as with so many other things, the limited scenario in version 1.0 doesn't show why. Some cards may have abilities that can be triggered by playing them on a Challenge card, for example, and that wouldn't work if the two phases were joined.
I guess I was under the impression that the deck was a lot bigger and had a lot more cards. I'm not certain paying attention to that deck without some way to manipulate it will be all that enjoyable for me. Something like 'surveil' from mtg on the challenge deck would make it a bit more interactable than card counting. Its sort of like how StS enemy actions aren't really all that random, but most people don't want to try and deduce what a normal enemy is going to do in 3+ turns from now.
And I do hope there will be more deck manipulation in general. With the cost on some cards being so high, you only want them in hand when you can use them. And I can only imagine that there will be even more costly cards to cast.
Regardless, I'm looking forward to another deck builder of a rarer flavor. There isn't too many erotic ones . . .
There will definitely be deck manipulation in this game, particularly with Trust cards (and perhaps Skill for the Challenge deck). The current deck has been deliberately kept simple.
I like the difficulty of the current version, but something that I believe that a lot of people have frustrations over is how punishing not having tempo is, as if you don't get at least 3 engines by turn 2, then you are kinda screwed, and while having the mulligan helps, it can create a sense of hopelessness if you do not get those early engines.
The upcoming 1.1 will open up more options to help mitigate some of that.
Maybe im not understanding the game... You win by having "total heat" over 50 after taking away the points from the challenge remaining cards? if so last turn is essential even if you dont earn more.
I dont have a problem with the cofee card because "this isnt working" exists, I usually play coffe at the start and about turn 4 or 5 discard it
the worst cards in the game are the specific "do 4 damage to skill/confidence/trust" because they cost so much and they do so little damage its almost never worth to play them
Keep in mind that even not understanding the game im winning about 1 in 3 games, so not bad
I dont have a problem with the cofee card because "this isnt working" exists, I usually play coffe at the start and about turn 4 or 5 discard it
the worst cards in the game are the specific "do 4 damage to skill/confidence/trust" because they cost so much and they do so little damage its almost never worth to play them
Keep in mind that even not understanding the game im winning about 1 in 3 games, so not bad
- Jun 22, 2017
- 10
- 7
I was concerned when I saw the early comments saying the difficulty was too hard (or even impossible), but I gave it a try for 20 matches after playing the first match and losing spectacularly, then two more matches where I got close, I was able to win 13 of my next 17 matches. I do thing the difficulty could still be dialed down a bit to account for the fact that not all players of the sort of games found on this site might be veteran deckbuilder players, but I think what you've done here is a solid first iteration.
I don't have anything new to add mechanics wise, but I will throw my opinion in on some of the previously mentioned stuff:
- The double-click to get a better explanation of the mechanics might be too obsucre, since multiple people mentioned it.I'd imagine you're going toimprove the tutorial eventually, and doing that plus making the tutorial accessible anytime (and possibly broken into pieces to easily reference the mechanic you need info on) rulebook-style would solve hat issue IMO.
- The Challenge that reduces Heat by 4 is pretty brutal early. I like the suggestion I saw to make it -4 temporary Heat.
- I like the separated phases for exactly the reason you suggested in your reply to the person suggesting to have just one phase; I saw some nasty combos that I tried doing early on that would have destroyed balance if the phases weren't separated.
The only other comment I have is aesthetic; I could have used some ramped-up sexiness as the heat rises. Perhaps this is already the plan?
Thanks for this game! I wish I were in a position to support your efforts financially.
I don't have anything new to add mechanics wise, but I will throw my opinion in on some of the previously mentioned stuff:
- The double-click to get a better explanation of the mechanics might be too obsucre, since multiple people mentioned it.I'd imagine you're going toimprove the tutorial eventually, and doing that plus making the tutorial accessible anytime (and possibly broken into pieces to easily reference the mechanic you need info on) rulebook-style would solve hat issue IMO.
- The Challenge that reduces Heat by 4 is pretty brutal early. I like the suggestion I saw to make it -4 temporary Heat.
- I like the separated phases for exactly the reason you suggested in your reply to the person suggesting to have just one phase; I saw some nasty combos that I tried doing early on that would have destroyed balance if the phases weren't separated.
The only other comment I have is aesthetic; I could have used some ramped-up sexiness as the heat rises. Perhaps this is already the plan?
Thanks for this game! I wish I were in a position to support your efforts financially.
There will be an interactive tutorial in the final game and, hopefully, a "Civilopedia-like" in-game manual.
This card is adjusted in version 1.1, which I plan to release today. I'll leave the exact details of the changed card as a surprise.
I do hint at this with the increased focus on zoomed-in shots on certain body parts toward the end of the match. The final game will have more of that, plus bonus extra lewd images if you do particularly well, and photos that get increasingly racy, even pornographic, as the story progresses. Supermodel Snapshot is going to remain merely suggestive, with the naughty stuff reserved for Supermodel: Defenders of Desire later.
Version 1.1 is now out for
Patch notes:
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.Patch notes:
- Added two new, less punishing difficulty levels to help ease new players into the game.
- The Common level 3 Upgrade cards now generate an additional Heat per turn, making them a more attractive upgrade option.
- "Turned On" had its Heat cost reduced by 3 to compensate for the above change since it does not generate more Heat than before.
- Playing cards on top of your own cards (i.e., upgrading or discarding them) now requires the cards to overlap more closely. This makes it easier to play cards when your play area is crowded.
- Situations where some Challenge cards are "skipped" while dealing indirect damage should no longer occur.
- Attempting to play an Upgrade card out of order (such as trying to upgrade a Skill 1 card with a Skill 3 card) now notifies the player why the upgrade failed.
- Added error handling for the unlikely event of failing to draw Challenge cards, for example, if the Challenge deck runs out. The game should no longer throw an exception when this happens.
- Streamlined and standardized the terminology for Heat and removed the concept of Temporary Heat:
- "Total Heat" is the total amount of Heat you have gained in this match, which is the value you must increase to win the game.
- "Usable Heat" is the amount of Heat available for you to spend on things like playing cards. Any effect that says it costs Heat refers to Usable Heat unless otherwise specified. If you end your turn with more Usable Heat than Total Heat, you lose any excess Usable Heat.
- "Heat" is shorthand for BOTH Total Heat and Usable Heat. If you gain Heat, you gain both types. If you lose Heat, you lose both.
- Rebalanced the "Insecurity" Challenge card to make it less punishing overall, particularly in the opening turns.
- Rebalanced "Ready When You Are" to make it more useful.
- Fixed a bug that caused "This is Fine" to generate more Heat than intended.
- Adjusted the hue of red and green values on cards for clarity.
- Manually discarding a card now gives you +2 Usable Heat.
- Cleaned and updated the tutorial.
- Replaced the "OR" wording on Challenge cards with "ELSE" for clarity despite the resulting grammar being suspect.
- Jan 26, 2018
- 12
- 24
Well the mechanic changes helped a bunch.
I played two on the "Default" difficulty and crushed them both. Something like 65 Heat on the first one and 74 on the second.
The ability to get 2 Usable Heat from discarding cards is such a big help. It makes the "dead draw" feel less shitty, and also enables you to afford engine upgrades sooner, which feels better on two fronts. If you decide to tune the difficulty back up a bit (which I'm not necessarily advocating) I don't think I would do it by cutting this mechanic.
I played two on the "Default" difficulty and crushed them both. Something like 65 Heat on the first one and 74 on the second.
The ability to get 2 Usable Heat from discarding cards is such a big help. It makes the "dead draw" feel less shitty, and also enables you to afford engine upgrades sooner, which feels better on two fronts. If you decide to tune the difficulty back up a bit (which I'm not necessarily advocating) I don't think I would do it by cutting this mechanic.