The skill now fires on its own: why we removed the button

In the first builds, the weapon’s skill was a big button in the middle of the screen. It charged as you hit, lit up, and you tapped to release it. It sounded good on paper, but there was a problem: it was not a decision.

What the simulator said

Prismloot has a simulator that plays thousands of runs with an automatic player. When we set it to release the skill as soon as it was charged, that turned out to be almost always the best move:

• The bot did it on 90% of floors, roughly one tap every four seconds.
• It was worth a lot: without the skill, the simulator reached floor 44 after three hours; with it, floor 80.

So it was a mandatory chore with no real choice, and it took up a quarter of the screen. That is exactly what one of the game’s pillars, “one minute, one hand”, rules out: no buttons to press without deciding anything. And two of the similar games we looked at have nothing manual in combat either.

What we did

The skill now fires on its own, using the same rule the simulator already used (the game’s numbers do not change). There are deliberate exceptions: with two mythics, the Echo Blade and the Eye of the Waiting One, the skill holds for the boss instead of being spent on the first monster.

In the space the button left there is now a combat log: small coloured text you can scroll, telling you what happens on each floor, what the skill does, which statuses each effect applies and what loot drops. One of the most common complaints across games in this genre is that effects are hard to understand; the log is there for that.

What stays in your hands is what matters: which door you pick every three floors and which gear you wear.

This screenshot is from an internal build with placeholder art. The captions in the image are in Spanish for now.