necrobumping this a bit but the game’s still getting updates so it’s probably fine
I played the game on the day before the trial rotated, so I’ve played both the Theta Trial and Iota Trial.
Overall it’s a very well designed puzzle game that gets a lot of depth out of simple mechanics. The short term battle planning is challenging enough to be engaging, and the long term resource management aspect adds a greater strategy and means even the easy battles have interesting decisions involved.
In the Theta trial, I would have said my main issue with the game was the lengthy animation times making the pre-planned battles too long and tedious, but this was fixed for the Iota trial, which was nice.
My biggest issue with the Iota trial was actually it’s signature mechanic - the “Stall Bonus” at the end of the round is ridiculously easy to exploit, as you can stall infinitely against half the enemies in the game (3/5 in Iota since megatons were totally absent for some reason). This makes it incredibly easy to get the maximum 750 point bonus on almost every round, and it’s just not interesting to grind out 75 rounds every match. For this reason I decided to play for the lowest score possible, and I found that to be much more interesting - a “Speed Bonus” could be a cool gimmick for a trial.
Speaking more generally:
The game dumps a lot of information on the player at once, which I believe is a problem you’re addressing with a tutorial campaign, though a related issue is that the game’s resource management aspect gives the false impression that making mistakes early on could doom a 2 hour run. While trials are semi-hancrafted by you at the moment and therefore kinda expensive, an Easy/Hard mode would be nice to reassure new players that there’s room for error.
The resource management aspect means that there’s a lot of room for unbalanced figments (buffing/nerfing one type of figment or spirit could be a cool theme for a trial), though I feel some figments are too single-dimensional. Kamikazi figments have incredibly little depth to them, their health is basically irrelevant, and 4 kamikazi figments will win any battle guaranteed (aside from super low fuse megatons). While it could be argued this makes them a valuable resource, it also doesn’t make them very interesting. Not totally sure on how best to nerf them - perhaps introduce a “shield” spirit that can’t take more than 20 (10?) damage in one hit?
I’m thinking it might be worth nerfing Attack Song. Since the singer gets basically no XP, it allows you to bring powerful Attack Song figments to set up a sweep, and then all the XP goes to whatever arbitrary tiny figment you like, rather than the 60 health attack song figment that’s actually winning you the game.
This is obviously an intentional strategy, I just found it to be too effective. The “shield” spirit might do the trick, though it may also be worth trying out just halving the buff.
