Grindhog Day
The life of a low level mob, who the hero grinds for meagre XP or uses for resources, is not all that great. You wait around for the hero, get defeated and respawn for it all to happen again. But what if the low level mob could mod his own code to break out of this thankless cycle?
In this incremental deck-builder you buy, upgrade and delete card in order to build a deck powerful enough to gain 10XP in a single loop, so that they can finally level up and fight back! With bytes as your currency and limited time before the hero arrives, strategise to give your next loop the strongest start and rack up better and better cards to reach your goal.
Upgrade cards or discard them as they become useless - managing your deck is paramount to saving this poor little piggy!
If you enjoyed Grindhog Day consider checking out my latest steam release - Flipto!
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( WARNING : heavy gameplay spoilers )
for anyone interested, i'll kill the fun and summarise the dominant strategy.
1) buy ONLY an initial +20/30 score 2) always upgrade score until ~250 3) upgrade 2 cards with draw-time-exp 4) remove cards until down to 6
theoretically, this gets you down to a 16 day record. not 100% sure, hard to test.
there's a lot of dead-end strategies so i can't fully explain the rationale, but it basically comes down to "only 9 exp" being worthless
you need 10 in a single day, and 10 is a big number. especially when you're starting at 0 with +0. that takes a _lot_ of upgrades, and every upgrade costs a ton of money
you can farm passive income of course, but that's slooooooow. it's the easy inevitable solution, by farming up to 500 passive and upgrading a card to +10 exp. slow slow.
but it turns out that a simple infinite of {draw time exp} + {draw exp} is just enough to win, takes less upgrades, and those upgrades cost less money. nice.
and upgrading score instead of passive is more RNG-dependent, but still gets you to hundreds of gold much faster
so keep a small tight deck, upgrade as often as possible, and pray.
(i'm skipping some details, like removing down to 5 and then buying a Draw card to play your highest score card twice, but the general point stands. because regardless of theory, you'll often be wasting days without upgrading or progressing in any way. a perfect run is extremely unlikely. RNG giveth, and RNG taketh away.)
hmmmm there... might be a lot of hackermen
Been on this since it came out. Very addicting, but I'd feel less at the mercy of the RNG if one simple thing changed: The upgrade store's bin was affordable since the beginning and increased price with every removal from the deck.
Basically, before I can afford to even use it, I'm already out of reach of my personal record or I've been able to win without it (if I'm extremely lucky).
Some items are also absurdly expensive. There are turns where I can't even dream of affording anything in the upgrade store, so it feels pointless to even look at it.
While I've been able to do around 35 loops before, now - even though I feel like I understand the game more and am more capable of strategising - I end up doing way worse, ending up in the 50s and 60s sometimes, all because of the randomness of it, which I would be able to fight if I could actually afford to deck build by removing cards.
Awesome work, hope you release a version that fixes this for me! :) also, highly cute art and animations.
Hey, thanks for the feedback, it's really cool to hear how deep you've gone on the game! We can't make any changes until the ratings period for the jam ends but after that I'll have a look at tuning the balance, it was a bit of guesswork for this version because we didn't have much time to test it.
The card removal and upgrades are intentionally too expensive to buy early as keeping your deck small makes thing much easier, I wanted to force players to bloat it up a bit before they started slimming it down. There is a bit of smoothing on which cards show up in the shop too but this could definitely be tweaked a bit more to be less swingy.
Great game! Can't believe you managed to make it in such a small amount of time. No seriously, I think you cheated :)
Thanks! I think
It's so good and addicting. The Randomness kills me. GIVE ME XP, I HAVE EARNED IT.
Love it.
I give up, GG Wayne you are still 2 loops ahead :P
Ha, it was a pretty lucky run but I didn't get to play though that many times before the deadline so I didn't realise how good the score was!
This game is properly addicting- the theme is incredible; the art amazing. Well done!!
Thank you so much!
very addicting lol
Thank you, and I commend you on your strong grindset!