>>1078158
>>1078562
This shows very strong potential. Playing through this, even though the actual gameplay ended up mindless, I had fun trying out different builds, and it had me thinking about the possibilities of things and how addictive this could get if resource management and enemy/space management were actual concerns.
>Visuals
Enjoyable, read pretty clearly, save for the helpers, which took me a second to register as helpers, though I couldn't properly intuit the whole wand spray mechanic.
>Controls
They were pretty simple to use, nothing too counterintuitive, though I did dislike that you couldn't just rotate in place for easy melee positioning.
>Difficulty
There's none if you're building wands. Very light difficulty with Sword and Board if you're bad with exploiting chokepoints or bad map rolls.
There's 0 reason to run anything that isn't wands (besides self imposed challenges and seeing what the other items are about.)
On my very first run, I got 4 of a kind with wands, ran endlessly through floors, easily getting the 4 of a kind wands because it was so easy to trash cut down on non-wand items between floors.
This is more of an inherent property of adapting Poker Hands with less numbers to work with (13 cards (K,Q,J,A + 10 - 2) vs 5 items (Scroll, Wand, Sword, Pot, Armor)), where it just becomes exponentially easier to get the hands you want, especially with a starting deck size of 20
and minimum deck size of 15.
>Amulets
The Amulet system is just busted as hell, since gold comes real easily and there's no real limiter on how many amulets you can get besides your own cowardice. It feels like there most definitely should be more push and pull regarding the Amulets you get and the difficulty to get them.
Especially the +1 to hand size amulet.
>Resistance/Vulnerability
The Resistance system hardly ever comes into play since you can "out-skill" most enemies with the raw damage boosts from 4 of a kind/5 of a kind or straight flushes.
>Health Scaling
I think having health scale with levels was a mistake. While I don't haven't played much "true" Rogues/Rouge adjacent games (save for Doom the Roguelike), I think the health scaling made mistakes way too forgiving, especially with how fast and hard you scale with good item management.
>Conclusion
It was a good way to burn an hour. I don't know if you're going to iterate on this further (as you have other projects like ROGUE-FP and stuff), but if you ever do in the future, I'd like to see some stronger limits on scaling and stronger enemies that make the player think intelligently. Maybe add it as a mode to the RFP project or something.