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Comment by jameskilton | Hacker News Reader

This is really well done! And I particularly like the combat. Filling the field with your attacks and enemy attacks really forces you to decide if you want to risk getting more of your attacks or be forced to take a really big hit yourself. I love the strategy and risk-reward that you provide with this setup.

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But a solid strategy seems to be to pick the enemies attacks when they are just two blocks, and wait for your own to align up to more than 4. That combined with a strategy of exploring the entire level (and thereby healing) makes the game almost too easy.

That said, it was more low stress fun than I've had in a while. I find myself playing games for stress relief, and I have a tendency to play on the harder levels so it stops being "fun" after a while. I was playing metro 2033 recently, and while a nice game/story I don't really enjoy it that much because the sudden appearance of fast moving monsters that are hard to kill with limited ammo is just to much. I guess I should drop the difficulty but that seems like cheating. Games like that should have a better sliding scale for how well your playing and adjust so the player doesn't have to reload 10 times...

Thanks! I am glad that people find the combat system useful and comprehensible. Some have troubles distinguishing colors, though.

Ah yes that will be a problem for some. An easy solution there is to use different glyphs for the different colors as well.

True. Unfortunately, my font of choice (Metrickal) only covers basic ASCII. But its glyphs are very neat otherwise :)

Since the combat is in a separate playfield, you can reuse glyphs from elsewhere. What about \ / for attacks and ^ v for magic?

I had to keep rechecking which color was which. I suggest using two colors (you vs them) and two symbols (magic vs attack).

how about using #*+@ for the Game of Thorns

Is there a "wait" command (usually '.')?

No. For no particular reason. But there is generally little room for movement tactics, as you cannot flee from combat...

It seems like enemies can't open doors, at least from what I could tell. So even if you can't outrun them you can hide behind a door?

It would have been useful when that elvish knight trapped me in a corridor and all I could do was talk to him (or kiss him - ew).

That wicked elf! Hopefully you will talk him out of that sticky situation.

Oh good point. Can multiple things attack you at once?

No, only one.

Also, you can focus your enemies' attacks in their weak spots-- for instance, I try to spend my enemy magic attacks when I'm fighting a rat, or something with little-to-no mana.

At first glance, seems similar to the combat system used by Legend of Bumbo[1] (upcoming game from the Super Meat Boy dev). Have other games used this "match-three" mechanic as a combat system as well?

Also, was pleasantly surprised to see the roguelike is played in the browser. Rot.js looks awesome.

[1] http://legendofbum-bo.com

"swap sword" is a pretty neat recent ios game where the character/enemies inhabit a match-3 grid

Can someone explain how the combat is supposed to work? I suppose that if I had more experience with these kinds of games it might be obvious.

Its like bejeweled\candy crush. You select two or more adjacent colors to perform an "attack".

The "attack" will be one of four choices: You attack, you attack with magic, the enemy attacks you, the enemy attacks you with magic.

So the optimal solution is: Maximize the attacks that benefit you while also picking attacks that either lessen the damage you take OR choose damage against you that set you up for bigger patterns on the next turns.

edit: looks like is can get deeper too. For example, bats have no mana and cannot attack with magic so it is a nice way to move some blocks without taking damage if you dont have any moves.

Same here. I think the game presupposes familiarity with a particular sort of casual puzzle game that I haven't played.

I'd never seen it before but had no trouble after playing with it for a few minutes

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