Supermodel Snapshot - Version 1.1

Ah, that's different. It's something that shouldn't be too problematic to fix, though it will have to be done across all similar effects. Thank god for the state machine I implemented for this game making changes like these straightforward.

You misunderstood the very first bug. Using the steps I gave, you can start a turn with _excess_ usable heat that should have been awarded and then cleared, although the heat gauge won't update until you interact with the screen in some way (i.e. pick up then put down a card in your hand without playing it).

Okay, that's a lot of feedback. Thanks! Let's see... - Usable Heat is intended to carry over between turns. Being able to interrupt the discard status change is not intended, however, and will be looked at. - The red border on the Challenge card you mentioned is most likely there because the game is busy with something else. The border tells you if the play is valid *right now*, a state that might change at any given moment. - I've seen reports of the game having soft locks in the final turn before, but I don't have enough information to lock down the cause. If you run into this situation again, please provide a screenshot of what your board looks like while it's frozen. - I'm not going to put illustrations on the Challenge cards, partly due to the lack of available space, and partly because the concepts communicated through those cards would be incredibly tough to illustrate. I'm considering ways to make effects and keywords more recognizable, for example through small icons or color coding. - I will look into ways to show valid card plays without necessarily having to draw cards all over the place. It's technically tricky to do and could cause a LOT of annoying bugs (just look at the lack of border in the first turn, a bug I'm unable to understand why happens in the first place), so it's not a high priority. If it seems viable to do at some point, I will definitely try. - Showing card rarity during gameplay isn't important from a gameplay point of view, but it's meant to make you feel good. Seeing your deck gradually grow from nothing but grey, dull cards into a colorful set of powerful abilities is supposed to feel satisfying, and so the colors are used the way they are. It's part of the dopamine rush of games like these. - The cards that deal damage to multiple Challenge cards at once are not really intended to be upgraded, though the reasoning behind it isn't necessarily obvious. I divide cards into Confidence (focus on earning Heat), Trust (focus on drawing cards and playing them fast), and Skill (focus on attacking Challenge cards). The "sweepers" as you call them are meant to offer Confidence and Trust decks a way to deal with Challenge cards since they are less capable of relying on direct attacks. A deck focusing on Skill cards doesn't want to rely on sweepers and is meant to attack directly, with lots of cool effects that you will only see as the game expands. The point is that the sweepers aren't meant to be hugely powerful, at least not yet. The ones that truly offer competitive damage will come at immense Heat costs in later versions, so expensive that you either need to reduce the cost (Trust) or have a lot of extra Heat (Confidence). Skill will be unlikely to use them. - You're not correct on that 25 Heat before turn 5 thing. If you have 5 basic +1 Heat Engines in play on turn 5, they alone will earn you 20 more Heat until the end of the game, and you are likely to upgrade them further. Heat gain is exponential, and your Total Heat is likely to be quite low until the second half of the game. This makes it difficult to estimate whether or not you'll win by the halfway point through a match. What matters is which Engines and Upgrades you have in play on the final few turns when they matter the most. The true game-killer is if you haven't fully populated your play area by turn 5. If that happens, you might be in a bit of trouble. - Regarding the "more Trust" suggestion, this should resolve itself once deckbuilding and more cards are in. Trust decks will, among other things, allow you to draw more cards, which fixes the issue you describe. - The Engine power levels you mention matter only for this deck and this challenge. You will have plenty of cards with extreme Heat costs in later versions, which will make you thankful for that excess Heat that is often wasted in the current version. Again, thanks for the feedback. It is very useful.

Version 1.1.1 feedback: Bugs: - Can carry usable heat across turns. In the action phase, with full usable heat, discard a card then quickly end the turn before the "+2 usable heat" animation has completed. You won't see the extra usable heat immediately, but in the next turn, attack a challenge card and I think you should see 2 usable heat suddenly appear above your current total heat. - I know there's a bug with the challenge card not highlighting on the very first attack, but I think I got a different one where the card border actually turned red even though it was a valid attack. (Possibly by attacking with one card then quickly dragging a second card over the challenge card? Perhaps this was just the game saying to wait until the previous attack animation completed?) - I also once got a hang at the end of the final turn. Not sure what I did to cause this. I may have had two instances of Snapshot open (to play the main title music), clicked "End turn" on the final turn and alt-tabbed to another window. When I alt-tabbed back, the final score screen didn't show and the background image kept moving until I tried to drag a card in my hand, whereupon the final score screen came up. Difficulty levels: you're totally right that the goal for total heat combined with the number of challenge cards drawn per turn translates to overall difficulty. I had gotten so used to the initial version that I won the first two levels on my first try, so I spent the rest of my time on the default difficulty for a challenge. Discarding -> 2 usable heat: this feels good, and incentivizes drawing through your deck, which I suppose is the intended play pattern. I'm able to upgrade engines to level 3 much more reliably now, and only really struggle with having enough usable heat in the early game. I even thought that 2 usable heat might have been too generous, but then I lost several times from playing greedily or getting bad draws, so now I think it's about right. Challenge card images: my biggest piece of feedback is that I would prefer to be able to know at a glance what challenge cards were played rather than having to read the text on each card, especially when having to distinguish between cards of the same challenge type. At the moment, the challenge cards are only really distinguished by their text (and challenge symbols). Once you've learned about the kinds of challenge cards that can be played, it would be so much easier to understand what's going on just by glancing at the board if the challenge cards had images. Glow effect for when a card can be played: this is feedback I gave earlier, which I would like to expand. It is definitely a nice feature to be able to drag one card over another and see a green or red border indicating whether it's a valid play, but I think the information could be communicated even earlier. My suggestion would be to look at MTG Arena and see how card borders sometimes glow while in the hand, although I realize there may be technical challenges to achieving this in Ren'Py (maybe just giving an outer green/blue border would be enough?). The glow/border could also change color based on confidence/trust/skill type. The places I think something like this could be used are: - During the challenge phase: any card in your hand that has a valid attack target glows. - During the action phase, a card in your hand glows if it can be played: you have enough usable heat and, when relevant, a valid target (i.e. for upgrades). - When lifting a card out of your hand during either phase: all valid targets glow (i.e. all challenge cards that could be attacked, or valid upgrade targets) even while not actively hovering the card from your hand over them. - Also, I'd like to second what another commenter said: card rarity is less important during gameplay than the game mechanics. If you still want to visually distinguish between card rarity types, maybe having the outer rim of the card border be black/silver/gold could work instead? Card idea: increase damage of sweepers. It took a little time to learn that "increase attack values" doesn't include sweeper effects like "Deep breath" and "Overpower". It might be nice to have some upgrade do this in the future. I know you said you didn't want feedback on balance, but I had these thoughts while playing and wanted to share. Feel free to skip. No catch-up mechanics: if you're below 25 heat on turn 5 or so, it doesn't feel like you can reasonably catch up. At the moment, it feels bad going into the final turn knowing you didn't gain enough heat and not having any draws in your deck that could possibly rectify this. More trust: since there is a trust challenge card that duplicates, the deck either needs proportionally more trust cards, or more sweepers that specifically damage trust cards. Engine power levels: my current thinking is that the skill engine upgrades are the most powerful (since challenge cards are drawn every turn, more damage is always good), followed by trust (reducing cost is good only if you have playable cards in hand), then confidence. I'm not sure whether just gaining more heat is enough of a payoff. Once you pass your goal heat, getting even more heat has diminishing returns compared to the other two effects.