Oraxum Trials

Fun idea marred by lack of proper execution. There so many useless functions without the fun parts that makes you want to spend hours playing. Maybe free, but feels broken and insanely early access.

☀️

Unbalanced. Too many clicks.

it's essentially a puzzle game, try to find a board which maximizes energy per second, not so much an idle game. It kind of explains its mechanics all at once, and I'm pretty sure half of them aren't all that useful unless you get upgrades (moving corruption to your board and back in order to get bonuses for corruption on your board and to get the % drain), and I couldn't figure out how to use them well because the game punishes experimentation extremely harshly. The path of least resistance for progression just becomes placing down as many crystals as you can with enough dispelling sigils to keep your corruption at 0 rather than doing elaborate setups which channels corruption in and out of your board and keeps your corruption above 0. What I would do is the following. you might have to change some late game mechanics if you do this, idk: 1) For each percentage of corruption over your max corruption capacity, you get a percentage debuff to energy income, which can go negative and start draining energy. This will not drain your actual money though, and if your energy income is less than 0, your money income is 0. This makes it so that you can experiment without losing all of your money and having to start back at the lowest level crystals 2) Overloaded tiles will start dumping corruption onto your board, and the amount it dumps is some factor ( say, 1.25x) more than the amount of corruption they are absorbing, so having overloaded components is worse than not having them at all 3) in the tutorial, restrict the player to using certain crystal and certain other kinds of tiles, limit the number of upgrades the player can buy, so that you know there are strict limits to how much energy is possible to create with what they are given. Then give the player a goal to achieve a certain energy per second threshold that can't be achieved by crystals and dispellers, or crystals dispellers and the buff crystals alone. Do this with balancers, and then input and output devices separately. What this means is that the player will be forced to find a configuration using balancers that is better than any configuration with only crystals and dispellers, and a configuration with input and output which is better than using any configuration with only crystals and dispellers. 4) Make corruption drain from stocking it up legible, so that players can see exactly how much of a boost they are getting from balancing corruption, perhaps by making the buff to energy gain upgrade default and give the current buff it gives a prominent UI element. Consider more legible or more immediately impactful rewards for doing this. These together will allow for experimentation, and force the player to use the mechanics that they would otherwise be able to get away with not using by staying with the most basic mechanics. This is also a bit less relevant to the core gameplay problems and solutions I outlined above but for the love of god please fix your spells UI. Cooldown represented by the grey button on almost identical grey background filling in from bottom to top? A bar that you can't interact with if you don't have the energy to do a spell at the second energy level?? A checklist for spell selection??? (??????) 5) Use buttons with images, not a checklist 6) Make selecting the amount of energy used on a spell arrows that you click with a max and a min button. Or at least have two energy levels on the bar. Or maybe something else. 7) display cooldown on the button with numbers, and also give some indication of cooldowns being up outside of the spells menu 8) consider lowering the cooldowns on spells. 5, 10, and 15 minutes isn't very fun