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[Chris Pavia]

Alright, I have a long flight ahead of me tomorrow, I'll use time to tune down the first bosses a bit. Should be easy, I think it's just a matter of lowering enemy health and some of the rune spawn rates. Also, with all battles the scroll speed starts increasing if you take to long to defeat the enemy, but that time is much shorter with bosses. Thanks for the feedback!

[deathtotheweird]

I beat the boss finally. I felt good about myself until I noticed you had patched the game. now I have no idea if I'm getting better or you just made it easier.

usually I dislike puzzle games, but I find this one very fun. something about it's apparent simplicity and presentation make it really enjoyable. and getting those quad strikes is pretty satisfying.

[Chris Pavia]

I didn't mess with the bosses in that last patch, it was just to add some help strings to the loading screens and fix a bug that was mentioned a few posts back. I am going to make the following tweaks soon though:
-Throw in a 1-hit critical strike Hex along with the 2-hitters for the t-rex boss.
-Slightly lower the amount of attacks/hexes the reaper boss spawns, or at least stagger between the current rate and a reduced rate each wave.

[Venomjack]

I have to say I'm loving this game the more and more I play it. I'm notice I'm slowly improving as I play on through. I also starting to love the first soundtrack aswell. You did an excellent job on this game.

[Chris Pavia]

Thanks, I'm glad you're enjoying it!

[pluckyporcupine]

Noticed another bug. Every now and then, on the level-up board, I'll click on a set of 3 and it'll play the sound but the set of 3 won't disappear.

Made it to a second reaper, this time, if I remember correctly. That one really beat me down. The onslaught of reinforced life steal tiles was relentless and ended up being my downfall. The healer's heal ability just didn't recover fast enough.

[Chris Pavia]

After watching a bunch of people at PAX play the game, I'm going to remove the click-and-drag to combine on mac/pc so it's only click-to-combine. The dragging is just too cumbersome on non-touch devices, and it sometimes gets in the way when things get frantic.

[pluckyporcupine]

I'm going to remove the click-and-drag to combine on mac/pc so it's only click-to-combine.

What exactly do you mean by this?

[Chris Pavia]

You have two ways of combining 3 chargers (circles) into a striker (diamond). You can tap on one, and drag a line across all three, when you release the last one is turned into a striker. This was the original controls for the iPad. But doing that with a mouse was tedious, so I added the ability to just click one of 3 adjacent chargers to combine them. But the dragging is still in there, and it tends to mess people up when they are frantically moving runes and they butt up against another of the same color and it starts trying to create a combo. So I'm going to get rid of that, just clicking is much faster anyway. Hope that makes sense.

In other news, the game has been very well received at PAX. Got it playing on a big TV, the gameplay looks so random it draws a lot of people in to watch it. They are all like "I have no idea what's going on, but it looks really cool."

[Chris Pavia]

Here I am in the middle with my Dungeon Hearts shirt demoing the game at PAX:



I had some crowds much bigger than this throughout the days. I should have build a shortened demo build because people would play it for a long time and I'd have to kick them off when line started forming.

Been making adjustments based on watching people play. I've gotta do one last pass on hard-mode (made it way too hard when I made changes to normal mode), then it should be done, hopefully tonight when I get home.

[Chris Pavia]

Oh, one more thing. The game gets much more difficult once you lose a couple characters, because their shattered runes get in the way. I'm going to add in the ability to tap a shattered rune to destroy it, clearing out space. This keeps the player interacting with them, and creates a additional minor time-sink for the player to contend with, while reducing the difficulty of so many useless runes taking up space. This feature won't make it into the 1.0 release, though it will come soon after.

[Gib]

Hyped for this!

[Hangedman]

Caught one of your keys on twitter...

A bit of feedback:

• Been enjoying it so far, although I will say it was weird that it threw me in without much explanation. I do appreciate the elongated tutorial with new elements being added often, but I kind of feel the 'go look at the bestiary if you want more details' thing is kind of disappointing. The levels just sort of blur together, one right after another. Par for the course for mobile games, I suppose. I think a momentary downtime after levelling where you can check out what the new powers do/go to the menu/check the bestiary would be good, cause it's kind of nonstop.
• I'm glad you're removing the drag to connect on PC, because it got in my way many times.
• The intro video looked like it was a bit weirdly scaled, slightly blurry, although that may have been because of my weird laptop resolution.
• I'm still not very clear on how to play it efficiently, especially when you start getting enemy strikers and square runes blocking your path. I found once I got further in I stopped strategizing and laying out combos and only had time to make easy strikers and drag other ones of the same colour into place around it for the mild bonus.
• On the square runes: I found more than once that some combination of them completely divided the board, which left me with little to no options for removing stuff on the left of them.

[deathtotheweird]

Ya, after the first boss all strategizing goes out the window. And I'm frantically shuffling things around trying my best to get single or double strikers off if I'm lucky. Which kind of makes the earlier levels feel like a puzzle game with it slowly devolving into a more arcade type game the farther you get.

[Chris Pavia]

Finally got a chance to check in from GDC. Linux version should hopefully be out with the 1.0 release. Thanks for the feedback guys! Don't have time to really discuss it at the moment, but I want to continue tweaking it after release (as far as difficulty/puzzle piece spawn values), so this is helpful.

[pluckyporcupine]

Congrats on the release man! It's a fun game. Already recommended it to a friend or two. :D

[melos]

congrats

[Chris Pavia]

Thanks guys! Taking a much needed break after PAX/GDC, then I'll mark it finished.

[pluckyporcupine]

Hey, since the beta, it's saying I own the game so I didn't/couldn't buy it. However, it's also saying I'm running v1.0.0 but I can't access leaderboards in-game and it seems like my scores aren't being saved online, according to Steam's leaderboards setup.

EDIT: Yeah, my scores definitely aren't showing up. I tried submitting one in hard by beating one enemy and then getting my guys killed and it's not there.

[Uykered]

It's great aesthetically, but having too move runes around is too tedious (unplayable for me).