What's up, punks! 👋🏽
We're doing a playtest during Deckbuilders Fest! You can try out the game from May 4th to May 11th!
We've set up a bunch of different ways for you to give us your bug reports and feedback. We have an in-game bug reporter (Press the button or [F8] to pull it up), you can make a new post in our steam forums, chat to us in our Discord, or if you're rather just write for our eyes only, we have a short playtest form too!
It hasn't been long since we've started properly working on Lucky Punk (we talked about it in the last devlog), so it's a bit bare bones, but we're happy enough with the state of the game to test out the base mechanics. That means a lot of stuff is missing, but we want to make sure that the base is already fun without all the extra stuff and give it to folks so if there's any changes to make, we catch it early.
What's in this Playtest?
So what's actually in the playtest is:
3 characters, 2 to unlock. (Lucky Punk, Prophet and Little Witch)
39 cards (only 2 with card art), with 6 basic strategies
4 different type of card shops
4 areas, split between 2 acts
5 basic enemy types (Tank, Defensive, Normal, Offensive, Glass Cannon) that with a basic scaling that depends on area
12 bosses (3 per area)
7 events
Basic VFX/SFX
Basic run structure
Basic Quality of Life options
Basic tutorialisation
Basically, you can play the game and get to the end of act 2. That means in one run, you'll fight up to 4 bosses, you'll get to deckbuild and try out a strategy and understand the rhythm of the game and hopefully, win or fail spectacularly, having a lot of fun as you play.
What will you add or change later?
So much. Here's what we already know we want to change:
Metaprogression
We basically have none right now. All of the cards start unlocked in the playtest. All you do is just spend the supplies you have to unlock a character and they unlock way too cheaply, it's just so you can try out the different playstyles and see how different they are.
We'll be adding ways to actually slowly get more cards to your card pool, ways for you to manage the card pool for a single run, ways for you to modify your runs (so it's not always the same in the beginning, which it is now), etc.
Consumables
That's right, you'll have THREE options of what you can do in a round. Maybe even five or six?! Consumables are really important in letting you wriggle your way out of tough situations and are certainly going to be in the game but we wanted to have the pure run first, so we didn't implement it for this version.
Infinite Run Structure
So you already have a taste of the run structure during the playtest, and the randomisation is relatively simple and doesn't change between the acts yet. You just defeat two bosses and are asked, do you want to continue or not? Do you want to hedge your bets? Do you want to push your luck?
We want to make the map feel better and want to to scale the run into forever. Obviously at some point, it's just a victory lap where you see how far you go, but that's also fun.
Weirder Card Mechanics
"Block" preventing damage? Boooring. "Poison" doing damage over time? Sure, whatever.
What about playing a card that doubles the progress and effort value of your next played card? Yes, sure it means you just screwed up your odds for the next draw, but the windfall of progress could be massive.
or using a card to repeatedly mark the back of your other cards, you dirty cheater, giving you information about what the next card could be, so you can confidently discard cards off the top of your deck for extra progress?
or gaining "Debt" and Borrowing from Yourself so you gain "Underkill" equal to your debt, and then you File for Bankruptcy so you lose all your Debt and deal damage equal to the Debt lost, ending the fight and getting enough cash via Overkill that you still make sweet profit?
Yes, I am aware of how deranged I sound.
Way More Content and Polish
More cards, more enemies, more bosses, more events, more art, more visual and audio feedback... A glossary to look through all of the stuff you've unlocked, quality of life features like more tooltips so you can actually see what Cursed cards actually are before you get one. (Sorry that we couldn't fit that one in before the playtest)
As you can see, we have a lot of stuff in our minds. We're still figuring out the shape and size of Lucky Punk that we'll be releasing, but we'll constantly update you on what we're making and do regular playtests too.
We'll always tell you of big public playtests via Steam news, but we will probably do some more smaller playtests too, and if you're interested in joining those, we'll talk about them on Discord.
Have fun with the playtest, give us feedback via the form, or however you want.
Peace out, ✌🏽
Brenden