Originally posted by James Finn:

The debug minigame (IDK what it is if it isn't a minigame. Everything's aesthetic kinda bleeds together) wiped my beginner deck out really quickly (with like an 11 influence attack from buffer overflow), bringing my demo to an end pretty fast. Is that on purpose or is there more to the demo?

The debugging encounter is roughly half way through the demo. We've definitely seen that taking extra bugs is too over-tuned for the tutorial level and has been frustrating to quite a few people. I'm toning down the extra bug selections quite a bit to make it more approachable in our next update.

Also, thanks for playing! There's a lot of updates coming and we've gotten lots of good feedback going into the next build :)

Same happened to me.
I may also recommend an ability to retry the level (including the choice of what bug challenge to take) upon failing, at least for the tutorial/demo.

Originally posted by roehcai:

Same happened to me.
I may also recommend an ability to retry the level (including the choice of what bug challenge to take) upon failing, at least for the tutorial/demo.

First thanks for playing as well! The feedback we've gotten has been invaluable to helping us sculpt the tutorial to be better!

The tutorial version of the first sprint is quite a bit different than the "normal" first sprint that will be in the next update. The encounters in each sprint change over time as you do additional runs. Part of what we're testing in the update is only giving card rewards in the tutorial that will result in a deck that has a solid foundation which is definitely alleviating the issue in testing so far.

We do have a card that's coming in the future that lets you restart your current match so definitely a good idea where we could co-opt that functionality for the tutorial:) Also part of the roguelite progression gives you "Performance Improvement Plans" so if you hit 0 reputation you get another shot.

Originally posted by DonUnhinged:

Originally posted by roehcai:

Same happened to me.
I may also recommend an ability to retry the level (including the choice of what bug challenge to take) upon failing, at least for the tutorial/demo.

First thanks for playing as well! The feedback we've gotten has been invaluable to helping us sculpt the tutorial to be better!

The tutorial version of the first sprint is quite a bit different than the "normal" first sprint that will be in the next update. The encounters in each sprint change over time as you do additional runs. Part of what we're testing in the update is only giving card rewards in the tutorial that will result in a deck that has a solid foundation which is definitely alleviating the issue in testing so far.

We do have a card that's coming in the future that lets you restart your current match so definitely a good idea where we could co-opt that functionality for the tutorial:) Also part of the roguelite progression gives you "Performance Improvement Plans" so if you hit 0 reputation you get another shot.

This is the most positive response I've seen from a dev during Next Fest. Good bones. I'll stick around and add it to my wishlist.

Originally posted by James Finn:

This is the most positive response I've seen from a dev during Next Fest. Good bones. I'll stick around and add it to my wishlist.

Thanks, been on steam 20 years and I have a long list of "Things I would do if I'm ever in this position"

One of the other things we're putting a lot of thought and time into is how the player moves around the office. We want to make sure that feels better and can be skippable for people that don't enjoy it and/or get motion sickness from it.

Our phase 2 update will be out sometime in the next few weeks and will have the results of all the feedback we've been receiving front nextfest. It's our goal to have several hours worth of gameplay in the demo so people can be very confident if the game is a good fit for them.