Revila - A tactical deck builder set in a dark, mystical realm

xyz

SeaApes It's great. Went for two runs, on the second one got to the boss but it defeated me. Will give it a few more runs.

SeaApes

Thank you for checking it out!

We are still working on finding the right balance to make the game feel challenging but not frustrating. We have a small backend to get some basic data like win rates or the stage progression, so just playing a few runs already helps us a lot. That said, if you have some specific feedback we’d love to hear it!

xyz

SeaApes Yeah, it's really good. I managed to reach the second boss, but I always get there with low hitpoints and can't defeat it.
I expected a different boss creature 😉.

The most frustrating thing is when you work your way far into the level and then you get several consecutive hands with big numbered cards but need to throw them away due to bad color combinations, at that point your realize that the game is lost.

Here are some random remarks. I'll focus on things that could be improved. Overly, it's a very good game.

Good stuff:

very polished, cards are bouncy and pleasant to click on, the card ripping effect when you kill an enemy is really satisfying
easy to get into, rules are not complicated at all
mood and theme are nice as well
dare I say it; after a few runs it starts to get addictive

Could improve:

the game should perhaps be more generous with hitpoints, either by lowering the damage or giving more powerful/frequent regeneration cards
I'm not a deck builder expert but I feel the ratio of plain vs special cards could be improved in favor of special cards
once I learned the basics I could be happy with animations/transitions happening even faster
I like the feel of the font but it's quite hard to read. Maybe use something more conventional but similar in spirit.
it's very satisfying when you clear all cards in a round. Some effect/compliment could happen there.
symbols are too similar. I primarily relied on color coding to distinguish them. Color blind people may have really hard time there, especially with such unsaturated colors. Make graphical shape the main way to distinguish, and color coding just an addition on top of that. Maybe even use some figurative symbols that can easily be named. If you like to keep them abstract, make them as simple but as different from each other as possible. Case in point; symbols on standard playing cards
The game is a bit too gray. I know I sound like a broken record regarding this but so many indie devs make their games dead gray. I understand you're going for a dark/bleak/undead mood but that doesn't mean everything needs to be so inertly gray. There are bleak games that give off a seemingly gray vibe but in fact have a lot of hue variety in their grays that makes things pleasant to look at (some examples: quake 1, fallout 2, darkest dungeon...).

Btw, I don't think you need to switch to Godot 4 for a game like this. You may end up losing a lot of time with migration while not really getting any benefits.

MikeCL

Oh, this looks cool! I will give a go as soon I find some time.

SeaApes

Awesome! Thanks a lot for the playtest and detailed review 🙂

I managed to reach the second boss, but I always get there with low hitpoints and can't defeat it.

Yes the second chapter/deck is a big difficulty spike. Maybe too big. We will continue to adjust the balance within the next updates. Any chance you remember how many runs/tries it took you to beat the first chapter (roughly)?

I expected a different boss creature 😉.

That's cool! We are currently playing around with new boss ideas and hope to introduce a unique boss for both chapters soon.

The most frustrating thing is when you work your way far into the level and then you get several consecutive hands with big numbered cards but need to throw them away due to bad color combinations, at that point your realize that the game is lost.

Yeah, I agree! We tried to minimize that frustration with the abilities of the valkyries (next to the draw pile), where you can change or refill your hand cards. However we might need additional mechanics for the player to tackle the randomness. Since those abilities alone are not strong enough or can even lead to a worse situation if you have bad luck.

Here are some random remarks.

Thank you. This is very helpful for us! We will take these points into consideration and see how we can improve on them.

xyz

SeaApes I defeated the first boss after only a few runs. The second level I still can't finish after at least a dozen of runs. This is the farthest I've got:

In general it feels like the game is shying away from making the player feel powerful.

The worst problem is definitely getting stuck on a single opened card that you can't get the right symbol/color to kill. And the worst scenario is when you must waste several hands of strong cards trapped in that position. Since there are many fights to endure until the boss, the luck is almost guaranteed to screw you over this way.

It also looks like the more dangerous enemies (bats and color shifters) are just thrown in completely randomly. Some fights can end up having a very large proportion of them, resulting in inevitable loss of many hitpoints.

Because of that I was inclined to always choose defensive powerups that boost hitpoints. On couple of runs I tried doing the opposite, picking only cards that are attack focused but still couldn't get through any better.

Both valkyrie powers still rely on dice throws so they don't really feel like a dependable way out in times of trouble. And sometimes they can make things substantially worse.

Those powers should be more... powerful 🙂, at least some of them at the later stages of the game. This perhaps could be done by making them (more) deterministic.

Two additional valkyrie power ideas:

symbol dispelling on all visible cards - move it from cards to a power (or have both).
instantly kill an enemy

Both of those guarantee to unstuck you.

The powers could also pile up instead of being replaced. This'd make player feel becoming powerful as they progress. The number of uses of a power could also increase with levels.

I'm sure you've toyed with some of those (and better) ideas but I'm putting them down anyways.

There's also a possibility that I'm just extremely lousy at playing the game 🙂

SeaApes

Thanks again for the insights, your thoughts and ideas! Very cool to get a detailed opinion on different aspects and mechanics of the game! 🙂

Eventhough we want the game to be challenging, it seems like it's currently way to punishing and frustrating especially in the second chapter. We already have some ideas how to ease the difficulty curve in the future and you brought up some good ideas as well. Our plan is to release the next update in about a month. Hopefully we can improve the balancing in some of the aspects you mentioned.

xyz The worst problem is definitely getting stuck on a single opened card that you can't get the right symbol/color to kill. And the worst scenario is when you must waste several hands of strong cards trapped in that position. Since there are many fights to endure until the boss, the luck is almost guaranteed to screw you over this way.

Yeah, that's a big issue. In addition to your ideas (unblocking powers, more deterministic mechanics), we might adjust some of the stage layouts to reduce the chance of players getting stuck in the "single card situation" in the first place. For example in this layout its pretty common to get stuck in the middle pile and is therefore quite likely to lose a lot of HP:

xyz It also looks like the more dangerous enemies (bats and color shifters) are just thrown in completely randomly. Some fights can end up having a very large proportion of them, resulting in inevitable loss of many hitpoints.

Enemy distribution should not be random. At least not in terms of enemy types per stage. There is a random shuffle for placement, but the composition of enemies should be fixed for each stage. If it feels off, it's possible there’s a bug in the distribution logic. I’ll definitely have a look to double check.

xyz There's also a possibility that I'm just extremely lousy at playing the game 🙂

You were only 5HP away from beating the game! You made it farther than most players. I think we just made the balance too hard, since we played this game an unhealthy amount of times ourselves 😅

SeaApes

Hey, we are excited to share the new update v0.4.2 for our game Revila with you.

You can checkout the new version here:
https://sea-apes.itch.io/revila

We also published a new devlog on itch, where you can find the full list of changes for this update:
0.4.2 - Arrival of the Utlagt Brød

This time we decided to take part in the Improve My Game Jam 41, just to give ourselves a fixed timeline for the update and have the chance to get some more feedback from other developers. Here are some more details for the biggest changes we made:

New Boss Utlagt Brød
In this update we introduce Utlagt Brød, the new boss for the first chapter. We experimented with a lot of ideas, most of them relied on the introduction of new mechanics. We felt that the first chapter is already complex enough. So we decided to save these ideas and maybe use them for later chapters.

For the fight with Utlagt Brød we finally went for the idea of having enemies spawn in waves instead of fighting against a complete enemy pile from the start. In our opinion this feels like a good mix between (a new) challenge and keeping things simple/understandable. We are curious what you think about the boss fight!

And as the cherry on top, we luckily stumbled across @EricMatyas website https://soundimage.org and found a track which fits the boss fights perfectly in our opinion. If you ever search for high quality assets for your game, go visit his website - there are tons of music, textures and more!

Shortened first chapter Freya
We also shortened the map in the first chapter and removed the fourth stage fight, where the player was confronted with a lot of Blodsugers (the bats). We saw many players losing their run there and never progressing further.

Refined Valkyrie Abilities
We got a ton of very good feedback especially here in this forum (Thanks again!). We structured it, so that we don’t forget anything and can address different aspects over the next updates.

For this update we tried to find a first solution for being blocked and have to throw away a lot of hands, better described by @xyz here:

xyz The worst problem is definitely getting stuck on a single opened card that you can't get the right symbol/color to kill. And the worst scenario is when you must waste several hands of strong cards trapped in that position. Since there are many fights to endure until the boss, the luck is almost guaranteed to screw you over this way.

...

Both valkyrie powers still rely on dice throws so they don't really feel like a dependable way out in times of trouble. And sometimes they can make things substantially worse.

Those powers should be more... powerful 🙂, at least some of them at the later stages of the game. This perhaps could be done by making them (more) deterministic.

So we changed the Valkyrie Abilities for both chapters and …well tried to make them deterministic and more powerful 🙂 Hopefully we hit this goal.

In the first chapter the player can now upgrade their hand cards one time per stage fight. All cards will gain +3 Attack and get their symbol removed.

In our opinion this gives the player a lot more control and feels much better than before (previously you could randomly redraw hand cards one time per fight). Now the player can make a strategic decision when to use this ability and has a good chance to unblock at least once per stage fight. The Ability of the second chapter is also adjusted. If you happen to play the game, we are curious about your thoughts about this change.

Future plans
We know that a lot of good feedback points made in this thread were not addressed in this update. That’s why we will sit down, plan our next steps and the things we want to tackle.

Thanks for reading and checking out the game! 🙂

xyz

SeaApes Yeah, that's a big issue. In addition to your ideas (unblocking powers, more deterministic mechanics), we might adjust some of the stage layouts to reduce the chance of players getting stuck in the "single card situation" in the first place.

I think you can get stuck in any layout if symbols are randomly assigned to all cards at start. Perhaps you can "cheat" the player a bit for their benefit and assign a symbol just before the card is revealed, using some heuristic depending on what else is visible. Just as an example I got this situation right at the start:

SeaApes Enemy distribution should not be random. At least not in terms of enemy types per stage.

Yeah, I later noticed that assortment of enemies depends on the fight but some fights that contain bats I got much more of them than on other runs.

As for balance, I think the run is almost manageable with a bit of luck but the boss itself is too hard, unless you get very lucky. A tiny bit too much luck required for my taste.

SeaApes I think we just made the balance too hard, since we played this game an unhealthy amount of times ourselves 😅

That one is a classis 😃

MikeCL

Nice, amazing visual art direction! Great job.

This is not typically the type of game I normally play. But I tried it. It's probably me just not understanding the rules of the game. But how I can damage the cards feels very random to me. As I understand it, I can only damage the cards that have the same symbols? This works sometimes, but other times it doesn't. What are the rules? Just trying to understand.

I love the font. But I would reserve the font for Titles/Headers and use a more readable font for normal text.

I switched on the background to be "advanced". Does it have a big performance impact? Just wondering why this is not the default. Doesn't seem to be that performance-heavy. But I could be wrong.

Played it on desktop / Zen browser fullscreen.

SeaApes

Thanks a lot for checking the game out and your feedback! 🙂

If you have any idea (besides more readable font) how we could make it easier to understand the rules, let me know. You can click on "?" in the top right corner to access the basic card rule explanation. But maybe you already saw it and it's not clear enough.

I will try to give an example:
This enemy has a green Symbol, 2 Attack Slots and 13 HP.

First, you have to bring the HP down to 0. Since the enemy has 2 Attack Slots you can put 2 cards which sum up to 13 or more, e.g.:

5 + 8 -> 13
7 + 7 -> 14
3 + 10 -> 13
...

The symbol of the cards doesn't matter. So you can put also red, green, blue or yellow cards onto the enemy in this step.

If the enemy is at 0 HP you have to put a last card on it to defeat it. Here the symbol must match the enemy symbol. So to defeat the enemy above, you have to put a green card on it. So you should be able to defeat it.

I hope this helps? 🙂

We see a lot of players struggle to understand the rules. So if you have any idea how to improve it, this would be very helpful.

xyz

SeaApes So if you have any idea how to improve it, this would be very helpful.

Here's my take. I think you're keeping things too close to the classical static playing card design, at the expense of clarity. You can communicate what's happening much better if you're willing to rearrange and contextually animate card graphics.

Enemy cards

On enemy cards, number and symbol are in queue relation. They should be same size and close together. So 11# or even better, aligned vertically where the number is closer to the player suggesting it needs to be dealt with first so:

+------+
|  :)  |
|      |
|   #  |
|  11  |
+------+

Tiny symbols in corners are then not really needed because you don't have much card overlap. You can still keep them for a "card look" but include the number too.

When enemy hitpoints are depleted, the remaining 0 can be faded in opacity or even better completely removed from the card because it doesn't carry any useful information any more. I'd also make the "cracked" effect somewhat more prominent.

+------+
|  :)  |
|      |
|   #  |
|      |
+------+

Player cards

On player cards, number and symbol represent two options. You either attack with a number or with a symbol. They should again be the same size and the number should not be colored because it has nothing to do with symbols/colors. Since those are two options, I'd put them side by side, but vertical alignment may also be fine, where the number is above (closer to the enemy).

+------+
|      |
|  5#  |
|      |
|      |
+------+

+------+
|      |
|  5   |
|  #   |
|      |
+------+

Interaction

Here you can go crazy with visual communication.

When player card is dragged over an enemy card:

if the enemy still has hitpoints, fade the opacity (and possibly size) of symbols on both cards but make both numbers pulsate. If the attack is not possible, still pulsate the numbers but draw a standard red forbidden symbol over both numbers.
if the enemy doesn't have any hitpoints, there will be no number on its card. Fade the opacity/scale of the number on player's card and pulsate both symbols. Draw the forbidden sign over both symbols if they don't match.
if the player attacks a symbol card with a symbol-less card, fade in a matching symbol on the player card, and pulsate both symbols. The faded in symbol could be styled a bit differently to suggest its transient nature (e.g. just outline or some texture over it)
if the player attacks a symbol-less card with no hitpoints, fade the symbol and the number on player's card and draw a menacing skull over them 😃

There are some combinations I didn't cover but I think you get the gist. Use animation, transient graphical elements, and various forms of highlighting more prominently to communicate what is happening and what is contextually relevant.

SeaApes

Regarding the performance of the background:
On most devices it should have no impact. I think we made the option "advanced" also the default in all downloadable versions. In the browser the option advanced can lead to lower fps. Especially if you play the browser version on mobile devices.

The setting "simple" are basically 2 low-res sprites.
The setting "advanced" are ₃₀ high-res sprites each with a shader assigned (to make the trees slightly move in the wind).

As far as I have tested the shader is not the problem. It seems like each sprite takes a separate draw call, which takes some time and reduces the fps on lower end devices. I played around with different settings and sprite atlas. But without success.

xyz

SeaApes Talk is cheap so I tried a quick mockup to see what could actually work best, anticipating animations I mentioned above and minimizing interventions over what you currently have

On enemy card:

all information is on the top of the card so it's visible when the player drags their card from below
hp and attack slots are grouped together because they belong together
hp and symbol are of the same size implying they are part of the same "queue"
hp and symbol are ordered from left to right implying that hp are first in the "queue".
when hp are depleted, they disappear and the symbol can move onto their place (or maybe this is not necessary, needs to be tested, but hp should disappear either way). Optionally the cracks could get the color of the symbol as well (some dark tint)

A vertical variation of this I described in the previous post is also possible but that'd probably require redrawing the illustrations with more horizontal or oblique compositions.

On player cards there could also be a subtle vertical line separating the number and the symbol, indicating that they are in an either-or relationship.

Over and out 🙂

xyz

xyz
Some more on enemy card layout:

Alternative to what I said above, the layout could be:

+------+
|   #  |
|  :)  |
|      |
|  11  |
+------+

This is close to what you have now, I'd just make the symbol the same size as the number. It can be centered or in the corner. Centering is better for suggesting it's a queue but cornering allows more space for the illustration.

When hitpoints are depleted, the number disappears and the symbol is moved into its place (in a nice animation with a particle trail and a pop at the end 🙂

+------+
|      |
|  :)  |
|      |
|  #   |
+------+

The attack slots can also disappear in this state.

JusTiCe8

@SeaApes you've made a good game with your team, congratulations, I like it.

I think @xyz gives already a lot of feedback, and I have some more for you:

agree with the font, it's not easy to read and some characters are confusing, even some numbers,
I'm some kind of colorblind (there are many different types), and I have no issue with symbol & color, it's just some symbol are too close to each other and may be confused, esp. these two:
the "attack slot" wording is very confusing, usually it means "it can attack 2 times/2 different ways", not "it must be strike 2 times", I advise using a different words like "hit points", or just "hits" or something like that, maybe "it can/must be hit 2 times"
at first I was very annoyed by the "you must hit with X points at least" message
such non obvious thing can push people away, just because of that !
same apply to leaving enemies at 0 Hp but still well alive, something has to be done here I guess,
I don't think there is any explanation on how many damage opponents do (looks like +1 the HP they have)
(same kind of issue) why bat attack on each turn and not other monsters ? we don't know and maybe they should not attack as soon as they are flipped, seems pretty unfair,
maybe player could "rest" between round and gain +1-10 HP (or max 10-25% of what we lost)
card draw/deck SHOULD not have a sequence of low/high cards and identical symbols => draw 1/2/2 or 3/2/4 and you loose a full turn if no enemies can be dealt with ! Sometimes I've got only wasted low cards, sometimes it's all wrong symbols. Random draw is quite not very great actually.

For the bat and enemies damage, you may add a little explanation the first time it's happen, you know, like what is used in many/all advanced solitaire games (when you first meet frozen card, cards covered with vine which need tool to remove, ... )
It also about boss protection which suddenly appears "out of nowhere".

xyz hp and symbol are ordered from left to right implying that hp are first in the "queue".

Don't forget languages read the other way, such a layout may take care of native language of players

for your performance issue "each sprite take a separate draw call" => maybe it's not avail in Godot 3, but there is sprite batch draw call which is more efficient, see doc:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/performance/using_servers.html
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/performance/gpu_optimization.html
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/best_practices/data_preferences.html

Using Firefox and only web version I don't encounter any performance issue with my good old Asus ROG G750JH (Geforce 780M GTX)
If you could and want to, switching to Godot 4 could help a lot despite it would need lot's of work too. You can still start a conversion while keeping the other alive and if you fail, at least you'd tried.

Thank you for making this game and I'm looking forward to design improvements and more content.

SeaApes

Thanks again for the input 🙂 We already fiddled around a lot with the layout and I think we will continue to do so for a while. So this is a great list of suggestions we can consider!

SeaApes

JusTiCe8 Thank you! We really appreciate the detailed and constructive feedback we receive in this forum 🙂

You brought up a lot of good points that were not on our radar. We already started organizing the feedback and planned changes for several aspects mentioned. I think it will take some time/updates to address the most significant issues, but we will try our best to improve the game step by step.

JusTiCe8 I'm looking forward to design improvements and more content.

That's cool! We will post an update as soon as we have a new build released.

JusTiCe8

Hey, got another idea, for what it worth.

Nothing, absolutely NOTHING, force you to have a deck of card, shuffle it once, then draw cards from it in any particular order, except what you decide for your very own game, after all YOU make the rules.

That said, why not going easy at first by browsing the entire deck and pick cards according to enemies still to defeat at that time. I mean, if any of them hasn't be stroke already, prefer to pick high value card, no matter the symbol, then when most of them have already been struck once, prefer to pick low value cards. And you got the next : when they are at 0 Hp, prefer to pick matching symbol.

All of these special rules applies to low level difficulty and first battles, then game could pick less and less best cards until it become fully random (and messy sometimes.)

With a 40-50 top cards deck, it will be very quick to browse the entire array even multiple time every frame so it would be unnoticeable by players.

xyz

JusTiCe8 Not sure if I'd exactly go with rigging the deck shuffle but there must be a guarantee (and a way to internally check) that a fight is winnable with a given deck shuffle. Non-winnable situations should not be put in front of the player.

I think I already mentioned it before but imo it'd be better to alter enemy card symbols just-in-time instead of deck cards, as symbols are the main mechanism that forces the player to waste whole hands.

The drawback of any kind of benevolent rigging is that you lose the "purity" of playing a real world solitaire, if that's what the game was aiming for.

I'd also think about removing the attack slots altogether, so that any enemy card can be attacked any number of times. Could make things too easy though.

JusTiCe8

@xyz right, that's an idea which could make the game nicer and a bit more enjoyable/less challenging/random.

Regarding rigging: if you know Balatro, it's pretty obvious the dev rig the deck, most likely ALL, drawing as on easy stakes, you've got plenty of good hands right away, but when stakes become higher... less an less useful jokers, poor hands, quite like the hell of bad luck has been unleashed on the player.

Maybe, in order to don't get a black or white kind of thing, add an option to have strict random draw or "adjusted" or whatever name is chosen to describe it.