Hello everyone!
After working on the game for a while, the biggest gripe for many players was that my game doesn't follow the StS formula of having intents.
At some point I decided to add them in the shape you've seen so far.
But, turns out that it was still probably not enough.
The game as it was, was in a weird spot between not being tactical enough, nor "classic RPG" enough.
And while I still think the system had its merits, I have to understand when I should be stubborn, and when I shouldn't.
With this update, I've implemented an intents system much closer to the one in Slay the Spire, while still maintaining my countdown system.
The biggest challenge was the fact that enemies actions were decided right before they came, so deciding them right after the last action risked ruining the overall game balance. I worked around that, fixing a few specific cases where it could give issues.
The second problem I had was the fact that stronger enemies have multiple actions per turn. While in the previous version all intents were "condensed" into one single icon and tooltip, this wasn't going to work when I need to show values for attacks. The logical thing was to have multiple intents somewhere around the enemy, but it wasn't as straightforward as it may seem.
The final solution was to move the countdown icon to the right of the enemy's HP bar, and stack all intents on its left. I needed to move some enemies sprites to avoid having intents cover them in crucial parts like their faces, but I think that in the end the result is good looking (and it's way more menacing to see a tower of 5 intents next to a Mimic lol).
Enemies will now have an exclamation mark over them when at 1 Countdown, which will turn into an arrow icon during their attack. I hope this will help better follow the game's flow.
Together with this big change, you may notice some other small tweaks to the game.
I've rearranged the enemies position on the screen, to better avoid the risk of them overlapping with cards, and to space them more evenly between each other.
I've also reworked the tutorial to reflect the new changes.
Please note that now the tutorial will be forced on your next run, then it will be inaccessible. I plan to add a way to access it after first launch.
That's it!
I'm working on making the game run as bug free as possible at the moment.
Early Access launch is around the corner, and I'm both excited and stressed a lot!
Thank you as always!