I like ArtFoundry's idea Concerning HP sets on the castle. I also think that it would be an intelligent idea to assign damage to said castle in accordance with either the Attack or Magic damage stats. This builds suspense and also it doesnt give the computer a cheesy last minute win when you have actually built a strategy to win. It also will allow rounds to last longer depending on the number castle HP assigned. This game absolutely lends itself to some sort of story mode where by there could be different opponents with different monster sets and various Castles/Strongholds for the player to overcome. Just the thought of this is an exciting prospect. I really hope the development team can see the overall potential here. Possibly even franchise potential if they can drum up enough drama in the characters and various locale in the game! Ryan, I hope you are reading these posts with your team. As you can tell, we love the direction of this game. But, we want MORE. And, are you guys hiring writers? I would love to do it. And, I need a job.
Happened to me to but that's the way the cards shuffle I prefer it that way though It's like real solitaire, I lose far more than I win but that makes the wins so much more fulfilling.
BTW I've encountered a bug where out of nowhere it wont let me pull another card. The game isnt frozen, I can still pause or access openfeint, but it wont let me deal another card.
At least if you can pause you can pause and exit the game, start a new one. Did it come after a chain of cards bumping each other? I think I saw that happen once after a long complicated chain.
True, but that's pretty minimal. What I'd like to see (and maybe this is better reserved for a separate web page, but in game would be nice) is a full set of rules/conditions, just like Magic has. It's not a huge issue, but would be nice to have.
I posted some thoughts in the original thread (LOVE IT) but wanted to add a few more. The game is still hard after ~20 games (random bad luck) but not as hard as I thought. Once you understand the different strategies, it's actually not hard to win. The hard part is actually getting lots of gold. I had a pretty good run yesterday where I through down treasure (they stack) which result in an 8/8 monster worth over 300k gold. I was trying to knock him down with a 2/1 bounty hunter, using lots of stat mods to do it. I would have killed him, accept I pulled 3 monsters in a row and died. These stacked treasures are how people get so high on the board. I like this, because once you understand how to win, this adds a completely optional layer of complexity in skill. If you're just starting out, it's hard enough to win so you can go for that. But you can play the same game and try to max your gold, in order to rank on the top boards. It's the same game, but the player controls the difficulty. I love it. I nth the 'a campaign would be fantastic' sentinment. I don't think it belongs in this game -- it's a great, complete experience as it is -- but I agree that you could turn it into a franchise by expanding on this concept, with the different castle/monster sets as others have suggested.
If you stack a bunch of treasure on a monster slot, then throw a monster on it, and THEN proceed to push him down off of the board, does that count as a kill (to collect the treasure)? I love this game so far and bought both expansions. I really enjoy the built in "redeem code for cards" option, but it feels like such a tease. Suggestions for the future: Give us the ability to add more than one equipment to a card (maybe a special ability?) Give us the ability to sack a piece of equipment Possibly another special ability could be added, where if two characters are at a standstill, but if one can get either it's strength or magic double his opponents, then it would give him the win in the fight. A "freeze" potion, which makes a character immune to being pushed (one time use) A "clone" character that when placed, you can select any other character and he gets their stats (minus equipment/item bonuses). If no other characters are on the board he can either go to the discard pile or be played as a 1/1 creature Vampirism: A creature, after a tie in battle, steals 1/1 from opponent and gains this as a permanent bonus Poison: Each battle, a poisoned creature loses 1/1 until death Long range: A creature can attack another creature no matter their placement in the opposite line Mad Bomber: A creature that blows itself up, killing opponent instantly but does 1/1 permanent damage to the card above/below him I guess that's enough ideas for now
Nice! Thanks! I bought the other 2 packs as well. Game is VERY tough! I am 8 and 51! LOL! But I cant stop playing it!! Still learning and figuring out what certain cards do. EDIT: LOL! I played a few games after posting and I actually won 2 games in a row and got my high score of 62,800. I am now 10 and 54 with 2 draws. You learn a lot as you play. Different symbols on different cards affect the outcome of the fights. Very cool and fun! AND HARD!
OMFG!! Just killed a dragon worth 792,000 got a couple of achievments and my all time high score and the effin game locked up!! It didn't keep my high score. I'm so pissed right now but still can't stop playing!!
Answering your questions, Feb 28th Hey everyone, Again, thank you for all of the feedback. I want to assure you that several of us are watching the board daily, so even if it takes me a few days to respond to your posts, they're being logged, including bug reports. Thanks for your patience. To answer some of the questions I've seen over the past few days: Q: Any chance of getting a promo code? Any chance of a lite verion? A: At the moment, we're at our limit with the Game Developer's Conference coming in a couple weeks. When the next version comes out, we may have some opportunities to give away a few more. A lite version is not currently planned, and is unlikely. Just so you can understand why we came to that decision: The game's scope is very small. The expansions and achievements aren't critical selling points to a lot of players and there are no other features to limit in a Lite version. Reducing the number of cards in the deck is a significant balancing challenge and in the end we felt that a limited deck would be an unsatisfying and ineffective enticement to purchase the full version. Likewise, a time-limit is a dubious incentive purchase the full version. As any one session may only last a few minutes in the first place, there's no way to effectively limit the experience and leave players wanting more. They'd merely have to quit out and restart. Q: The free expansion code doesn't seem to work... A: Check the date on your iPhone/ iPod, since the code has a start date (mid Feb) and is set to expire after April 30th. It's been my understanding that jailbroken phones can't make in-app purchases, and that includes the code system, despite some reports to the contrary on this forum. I'll have to do some more research on why it's working for some people, because I know that's definitely not Apple's intent. Q: If I have to reeinstall the game, how do I get the free mini-expansions again? Is there or will be another way to get the expansions? A: The free expansions with limited-time codes will eventually be rolled into the core application, so if you have to reinstall you'll eventually be able to get those back. There will be a moratorium period before we include them so you'll be able to enjoy your early adopter status for awhile. Purchased expansions can be reacquired just by "purchasing" them again. Like the AppStore, you will not be charged twice, it'll just download them. There are already several planned expansions so it's just not feasible to create multiple apps, nor do we think that end-users would want to boot up a different app just to use a different set of cards. Q: Also: I got stuck in the endless loop once, where you place a hero, things get shifted, repeat until you quit the game - is there a chance that quit game could turn into a surrender so you can at least score that game? A: The game can detect most endless loops in the current build you must go through the loop 5 times to trigger the Draw state, in the next update Draw detection will be improved. As for the crashes, probably running out of memory the game does use quite a lot of memory due to the size of the cards. The good news is, an out-of-memory crash will usually still allow the game to be restarted where it left off when it crashed. Q: How did the guy at the first place in the leaderboard could have something so insane? If i'm getting higher than 15000 i'm really happy. A: Right now, the key to super high scores is treasure stacking, though I walked by JC's office the other day and heard him discussing ways of counter-balancing that tactic, so use it while you can. By the way, we're investigating an achievement or some other reward for beating Mustapha Mond on the leaderboards. He's one of my compatriots in the studio and though I can assure you that he has no insider information giving him an edge, he's just too good and getting cocky. I want you guys to take him down. Q: Are there any plans for multiplayer? A: There are no plans for the addition of multiplayer to Dungeon Solitaire, as it would require a significant redesign. However, that does not preclude the idea of a sequel designed from the ground up for multiplayer in the future. (From Artfoundry) The game seems unbalanced a bit - people have complained about not picking enough heroes.* I had one game in which I drew only 2 heroes in 20 cards!* I'd be interested to know what the numbers of monsters vs. heroes are.* A: Like traditional Solitaire, there are games where you just get a bad shuffle, sometimes several in a row., Believe me, I feel for you. I don't even rank on the leader boards and I suspecgt that I bend the laws of probability in a negative way as a super power. That said, we did a lot of play testing with the ratio of heros to monsters and we will continue to take your feedback into account and rebalance as nessessary. As an aside, we found that someone in Japan has already put up a page with a card breakdown. Granted, if you don't read Japanese the text won't help, but you can get the visuals: http://puzzle-app.com/?p=5395 (From Artfoundry) There are times when I'm not really sure what the outcome of a card or battle will be... A: The short answer is, I'll ask the programmer to break it down and post them, as there are specific rules that the game follows. And you're right, some of these rules should be added to the help section, such as which outcome effects take precedence when stacking. (From Multiboy2k) I think k that it would be an intelligent idea to assign damage to said castle in accordance with either the Attack or Magic damage stats.* This builds suspense and also it doesnt give the computer a cheesy last minute win when you have actually built a strategy to win... A: Very interesting, and the team is pondering that idea now. (From Multiboy2k) This game absolutely lends itself to some sort of story mode where by there could be different opponents with different monster sets... A: Another great idea and certainly a possibility if the game takes off. There's a lot of excitement behind the game internally and we'd love to see where we can take the game. (From Riggy) If you stack a bunch of treasure on a monster slot, then throw a monster on it, and THEN proceed to push him down off of the board, does that count as a kill? A: The monster goes back into the stack so that shouldn't count, however, I'll confirm that with the team. (From Riggy)Give us the ability to add more than one equipment to a card, or remove equipment in use A: As a matter of fact, players could change equipment in earlier versions of the game and it completely breaks the experience by opening up far too many exploits. One-use effect cards (like countering a "death on tie" battle effect) or perhaps a more forgiving easy mode that allows equipment changes are intriguing. We're logging your other suggestions as well. Thanks!
What about the idea of adding story campaign mood? Or playing as monsters? Playing aganist A.I? Different raws eg 7vs 7 or 7 vs. 5 and so on... Are you interested in any of those ideas
Game Impressions Solitaire is right, this game plays itself. The only strategy to the game is to place your heroes and try to get bonus items on them so that they will finally be able to kill/move opposing creatures off the board (but not the top of the board, or you will lose). Your heroes are almost all weaker than the monsters, and almost all fights result in ties. Almost none of your heroes can do better than tie even the weakest monsters; even after they have an item added they are little more than a wall. You HAVE to get one good hero going, because if you dont start removing monsters you will quickly lose. So the only challenge to the game is to try to randomly draw a good hero and item before you lose. Even when you figure out this strategy, you will still lose a lot, because if you dont draw your good heroes, and good equipment to add to them, then you lose. I cant recommend any "strategy" game where you can often lose before being able to make any meaningful choice in the game. Too much of this game involves replaying until you get a good draw. The game also manages to break itself, Ive already had a couple of games end in infinite loops. Heroes return to the deck when defeated, so if you get a monster remaining on the board that will push your heroes off the board he is usually unbeatable, because rarely can any of your heroes beat a generic monster. So you end up with a deck of heroes that have to be placed in the last remaining space, which will tie the opposing monster, resulting in pushing your heroes off the board refilling your draw deck with more useless heroes to place against the monster. The game lacks meaningful choices, and quickly plays itself. Your choices are limited, and too often made for you. The potions expansion helps, by adding random event potions that can actually improve your heroes, but Im not willing to pay for more expansions to try to improve a bad game.
And how is your explanation for all these fantastic leaderboard scores? Maybe you haven't figured out the real strategies yet. Sounds like it.
Where do I say you can't get a high score? I don't mention scores anywhere, so what if there are high leaderboard scores? Do the presence of high scores somehow make it a better game? Do you even know how you get a high score? Here's a hint, get a high powered hero very early, get a skull bonus early as well, then use that combination to kill all the creatures, with the bonus gold items when possible. If you can do it with the bounty hunter, and the reset potion even better. None of this takes any skill, it's all luck of the draw, if you get the right cards you win, if not you lose.
I am enjoying the game, random draw is not everyone's cup of tea. If you play any CCG it is fully dependent on the draw. Have you ever played Magic the Gathering and not be able to get enough land to play your creatures? Same deal here... mostly. Complaining that the game's random nature breaks it somehow does not seem like a fair assessment of the game, when it is a main pillar of the genre. Can the game be improved, absolutely. But for a quick dash it is fun. And when you do get that killer combo it feels hellagood. Perhaps adding some minor deck building would answer the rough critique given a few posts earlier. But still when building your own deck you still can randomly come up short on what you need to win. This genre does not appeal to everyone, however I feel the developer has created a nice little app that speaks to the CCG fan that wants to blast out a game quickly. Munkie!
I've played the game a bit more - up to around 20 games now - and I'm at a more even count of wins vs. losses. So maybe I was just inexperienced in the beginning (though it honestly doesn't feel like I'm playing much differently). I do think though that playing with the expansions (the two free ones - don't have the DLC ones) seems a bit easier. But it could also just be things have averaged out now that I've played more games. Definitely a fun game, but I'd like to see more - giving the castle HP would be good, and adding a campaign mode would be nice as well. And I'd definitely like to see a list of all the cards in the basic set and expansions (on a page I can read - don't know Japanese).
Please don't change the main formula of the game. It really works as is and is alot of fun to play over and over. I don't know if you have ever heard of a Japanese card game called World of Monster Maker, but it is a dungeon crawling type card game based on the Milles Bournes mechanic, and it is a blast to play. This game has that same cool vibe to it. Not everyone will get it, but you have made a really great game. If you do make any drastic changes to gameplay, like castle HP and stuff, I hope you put it in the options to play the "classic" way as well if we choose. Also, I love the fact that you can choose to use whatever expansions that you want, so please keep that the same when adding new cards and such. Thanks!
Good news for me, I manage to get working the in app purchase in my iphone, bougth the two expansion but the code for the mini-expansion still not working for me
Regarding the free pack - it doesn't show up in Open Feint (only the potion pack and the two DLC packs appear). Also, to the devs, I recently reported through the app store the endless loop bug (well, maybe not endless - read that it was supposed to end after 5 loops, but maybe I didn't get that far) - I have screenshots of the card layout if you want them. PM me if you do.
