I haven't touched the game in three weeks, so it was important to me to slowly ease myself into working on it again with some quick wins.

I changed the font to one called Forum, and that immediately made things look more like a fantasy card game.

Next, I replaced the Turnament cursor with something that fit better to the game. I noticed that the sprite lagged behind the hardware mouse, so I looked into it and managed to reduce the lag, but not completely.

After further looking into it, I learned that... this is normal. Every application has this issue. You can learn more in this thread.

So, I changed it to a hardware cursor, and the visible lag was gone. But I'll never forget that all applications lag behind when you move your mouse, i.e. if you create an FPS game, looking around has a lag (and I'm not talking about the mouse's response time, but time for the mouse coordinates reaching the rendered frame). I don't think the old games had this issue (Quake, Half-Life), but I might be mistaken. I can't imagine Carmack just letting this happen. :D But who knows. It sounds like an inherent "problem".

Next, I updated the map fragment cards, the satchel and all the buttons. The placement of the UI buttons is still not final (I mean, we're far away from anything being final final), but I'll figure this out in the future.

Then I played the game for a little bit and adjusted some numbers to fix an issue that led to Act 2 being much more difficult than it should be. The game currently has 3 acts, which means a boss at the end of each act, and if you defeat all of them, you win. Very "Slay The Spire", and I might change it in the future, but for now this will do.

I fixed a few other issues, and while playing another run, I found a funny endless loop. Basically, a card kept triggering itself. When an ally (including itself) got a buff, then it would cast regeneration on itself, which in turn triggered the trigger again, casting regeneration again and again and again. It looked like fireworks going off.

There actually is a fix for this already in the game: A trigger can get triggered a maximum of five times per round, then it would inflict the "overcharged" debuff, at which point the card can no longer activate any of its triggers. But for some reason, this piece of code didn't have that fallback yet.

After working on the game the whole day, Auri tested it in the evening and we found a few more things. The main issue we discovered was that the game is currently too easy, so a lot of the materia/lacrima and choices don't matter after a while, because you can just play creatures, end turns repeatedly and simply wait for the auto-battle to kill everything.

If you happen to find upgrades for cards or powerful materia/lacrima, the run is way too easy. I think I found a good formula for now to fix this, but fixing it means to walk a delicate line between too easy and too hard. The plan is to have different difficulty levels (such as ascencions in Slay the Spire, or perhaps simpler ones like in Dream Quest), but first I need to figure out the "normal" or "default" difficulty, which every other difficulty is then based on.

A more balanced distribution of lacrima will be necessary as well, such as common, uncommon and rare categories of lacrima and their appearance being dependent on which act you are in. And of course, making sure they are weighted against what you already possess to enable synergies.

This will require lots of playtesting by other people, which I'm trying to get too as soon as possible. Before I can do that, I will need to add some sounds though and balance out map and enemy generation.

For now, I'm happy with where the game is headed. Auri played for 45 minutes (and won), and I kept playing afterwards. During development, I also sometimes forgot I was testing the game, which is usually a good sign.

There's still a long way to go though, but I'm excited for the journey ahead.

🧙‍♂️ To be continued...