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e.g. won like this multple times - after wrenches, axes still dominate the game due to balancing issues (better to be able to shoot through the deck fast, since the game doesnt let you keep cards in hand and decide when to play them. This is the core balancing problem: player has very little control, so things that make up for the lack of control win much more often)

I literally did not say that. I have won multiple times on brutal without wrenches. But it requires a lot more luck - luck that the shop will give you the cards you need (with very little tolerance, most attempts fail because shop just never gives you enough) and luck that the large deck in midgame wont screw you with a bad deal that ends the game early.

Wrenches do not have this problem.

(pre balance patch): Prospect. Or a variation on it.

forgot victory shot:

Balancing: much better

Brutal: I often got (literally) within *1 point* and died :D, until I used Wrenches.

Wrenches: OP

Everything-not-wrenches: (that you can reliably 'choose'; so e.g. getting enough nmineshafts is great, but it requires a lot of luck to get enough): not good enough, no strategies really work; they *can* work but see below (basically: it becomes random luck more than strategy - one bad deal and you die)

Balancing still needed:

 - more items in the shop (because you still can't choose your strat - escalating shop costs are just not good for balancing) ...

 - ... and more cards (so that the previous item doesnt let players 100% choose their own strategy; your core game-design is 'prevent players choosing a strategy, force them to react to the random roll')

 - reduce the cost of deletion: I lose SO MANY brutal rounds because I get 1 unlucky deal in the last level or penultimate level (this is a sign that there are too many cards in my deck, and I'm at the mercy of random deals, and that that is overshadowing my choice of purchases)

I'm a bit disappointed that you block picking up cards when the deck runs out - most games will shuffle the deck at that point. Score would have been higher but I kept having to end turns early beacuse I ran out of cards.

Love the downvotes. If you do the maths, most cards in the game are completely useless - because of the artificial limits there is a very low maximum number of turns that can happen, a very low number of reshuffles that can happen, which breaks most cards (they would work fine in a normal, non-limited, game). Only a very few actually scale as fast as the game increases the required limit - if you stick it in a spreadsheet issues like this become much easier to see.

80% of runs are lost in the first round - if you don't get the 2x ore required each turn not much point in playing on (you'll miss out on the +1 turns). More restartminer than retrominer. It's not so much 'a difficult game' as an unbalanced one - if you can tweak the balance I think it would be great, but right now most strategires and combos are irrelevant, they are overwhelmed by the "play it exactly one way or else you are guaranteeed to los", making it more of a puzzle (second-guessing the designer's preferred combo) than a game.

Tutorial is broken or is missing basic core info. It says I "won in 1 turn" but I never did any damage to the enemy. I "won" the next two battles without doing anything other than picking up cards, and then in the third I did the same but this time magically the enemy took no damage for no reason.

The dagger card could never be used despite me having the cost avaialble. Clicking does nothing.

Buying a second dagger said it would upgrade the card but it had no effect.

Either there's a lot of bugs here or tehre's some fundamentals of what the heck is going on that the tutorial desperately needs to explain.

I hadn't run out of power yet, had a few dots left, but whenever I stepped on to the 'I' by the river it said the bridge wasn't wokring and needed some power or it was drained or something. All other items worked fine.

Yep, I have all 5 items, including the bridge. it keeps saying I have no power for it. But I have no idea how to power it.

Great, big improvements, works nicely.

I found 5 items, 4 corpses, but couldn't find a way to recharge the bridge. Walked everywhere, couldn't figure out what was missing

WTF. Radeon 7600 and you're saying it can't handle AO???

AO has literally nothing to do with this. Unless 'disablign AO' also 'removes all your broken shaders that do something absurdly wrong'?

It will take litearlly 5 minutes of waiting while my machine grinds to a halt for me to get into the menu to be able to try this - that's how bad the current build is.

Oh! yes! You need to fix this: there's a high probability that the game is impossible because you generate starts where the only actions require gold. Which is completely unplayable. You need to change your startup routine so that it always (randomly) includes AT LEAST ONE action that doesn't cost gold to use.

So .. you start with 0 gold, but all actions require gold. There's no information, and no buttons work. Is this just super buggy and broken?

Ah! That explains it, I was completely confused by that - thanks!

Have you fixed the performance problems? Less than 1 FPS on a machine with 64 GB RAM and a 16GB GPU and 4k monitor is :( :( :( :(.
(it was always slow, but the earlier builds ran OK on high-powered machines)

Liked the idea but needs some significant work in improving the info about what's going to happen.

e.g. I had an enemy villager step next to my knight (docs say this is impossible, knight was defending adjacent squares. Docs are wrong? But this seems a basic gameplay feature).

Very hard to know what's going to happen, you just have to keep guessing and hitting UNDO each time something seemingly impossible happens.

Blockage still broken, still cannot build on planets it returns.

New build now also broke Pirates - after the first time it returns the stolen production, on all future turns it only steals production never returns any.

Latest build performance is even worse (didn't think it was possible) - radeon 7600XT, 6 core 5600x CPU maxed, 13 GB RAM used, on a Radeon total of 1 FPS or less. Whatever you're doing with the rendering you really need to re-think it :(.

Final update: changed the loading screen to have a link to the followup game (where I'm adding all the features and content I didn't have time for during the gamejam): https://tmachine.itch.io/shadowlink-2025

Crashed on turn 53 with no errors, but last message in console: "[Violation] 'requestAnimationFrame' handler took 173ms"

The end-turn button simply stopped working.

The lag spikes get worse the longer you play, you have some kind of memory leak.

The 'glitch' effect makes lag spikes 10x worse while they're on screen - however you've implemented that effect is bad, kills the browser.

Lots of times you cannot attack things and no reason is given. By trial and error it seems each ship has a min damage it will accept, and if you have less than that attack, the UI just ingores your mouse clicks?

Work in-progress: new build now uses ChatGPT to power the NPC characters - so they'll respond to any/everything you say, and it can be a bit easier getting info out of them (you don't have to use the magic keywords any more). I'm gradually converting the existing missions so that they work with the new AI-powered NPCs. Aiming for a new release in jan 2025.

If you're capturing the controls correctly for the major browsers then tab should be fine, it's just not something I'd think of trying :(, it doesn't work in most web games (because you have to disable the built-in browser controls). Same with RMB - it's annoying when web games break the browser so they can use RMB, and very few do it well (also: works badly on a lot of laptops, so most devs don't use it any more).

Standard for 'go back/out' is escape - and doesn't have a special meaning in browsers.

Most games I've played have an on-screen button for 'back' or 'exit', so there's no problem. I'd say 9 in 10 games have an onscreen button, whether or not they also have 'esc'.

Each individual mechanic has a lot of potential, but 'bullet hell' seems a very strange choice for most of these, not really working well with them. Perhaps if it started off slow and you gave people 10 levels to learn and master it, and it got gradually faster over time?

Great graphics, but I thikn it's too fast-paced for most of the mechanics to be worth using. With the enemies moving so fast, and the air dropping down, there's no time to care about potions or powerups or anything really - it's hard enough discovering "can I move to another crate or will it not allow me?" -- only way to find out is to keyboard hunt to remember the shift key while walking, then frantically press updownrightleftright trying to move while you're YOU DIED ... net effect: give up on crates, just run away from the wizards.

Thanks! It's not very obvious, but the early servers you encounter are deliberately missing all the unix commands, it's only the later servers that have a full bash shell, and then ls, cd, cat, ... etc implemented.

Got it - thanks! I liked the ending with the escape.

I found the restroom puzzle so hard because I had no reason to associate it with the solution - why would that be scribbled on the wall there? - I see that you were trying to make part of each puzzle be in a different room, but I think that one was a bit illogical.

For a postmortem I'd have liked to read about what/how you did things, e.g. the crystal changing FOV effect was interesting, and you called it out - but it would have been good to read what your algorithm was for it. Similarly: you said rot.js was a lot harder to get running than expected - why? What happened? What did you expect that turned out to be incorrect? etc.

I got stuck after the tooth and the book. I see four vases but nothing saying what they should be.

Excellent game, great use of secrets, and the use of ghost to give hints was brilliant. I hate the slidey jump and the delay on keyboard detecting jump pressed but that's probably just me.

Great narrtive, only minor issue is that the text was often hard to read (white-on-light-colored-background).

Nice art and level design. But playing on a laptop it's too difficult - it would work better if you had classic controls (e.g. up/w for jump) because these controls are too difficult without a dedicated mouse. Also the right mouse button did nothing - not sure if it was supposed to? Overall found it too difficult to play, the attack was too short range and using mouse for it made it slow to perform, the projectiles were often brown on a brown background, etc. Probably fine if you practiced playing it a lot or play a lot of platformers but it felt like it went straight to 'maximum difficulty' from the start.

Great art but very difficult. I found the popup text boxes very annoying - they're slow to animate in/out and so every time you click on something you didn't want to you have to tap lots of times waiting for them to go away. But eg on the bench that often means you tap once too many and it starts the same long boring text again. I think it would be much nicer if you showed a hightlight of which item you would pick up and/or made it disappear when picked up, so we could see it had picked up (and so we wouldnt keep interacting with it by accident), and if you removed the animations on boxes appearing/disappearing, just make them go.

Getting to the end of third room of minigames with guy on table then the game hangs and nothing happens - can bring up the pause menu but can't click on the door. Console log is full of errors about a wrong keyboard handler but I think that's a general problem throughout the game, not specific to the ending.

The rendering is buggy undermining the core mechanic - often one disc renders in front of others, but your collision detection priorities the disc that is in the background :(. Also keyboard doesnt work - nothing happens when pressing numbers, so it becomes quite slow and tedious using the mouse for everything. There didn't seem to be a time pressure, I guess that was planned but not implemented? Seems like a good start but needs some more challenge and something to make it a bit less repetitive - perhaps other characters appear?

Really like the mechanic with the bushes and want to see more levels with challenges based on where you place them, levels with limited numbers, some where you have 1 big and 4 small or similar so player has to choose etc.

Didn't like how quickly/easily I died (got bored with the jumps being too quick and dying too often and having to restart each time). For a game with basically 'no challenge' you can just make as many bushes as you like ... I feel that death should have little impact instead, and then it becomes a calm experience.

Feels like commander keen (especially with the floaty jump), good music, but I'd like to have had something more to do, more interactions early on and more terminals that do things. A good start, just needs to be expanded now with more mechanics. Good work on the palete dithering