Cosmic Collection

Feelings on this game remain mixed. On one hand, the dev's a slop peddler with a website full of similar games, which they glaze in this game. Would be funnier if you'd done more of the work yourself. Everything other than the actual numerical balancing (which I'm taking their word on) should probably be presumed to be AI generated. AI has a time and a place, especially in creation of placeholder assets, but these ain't placeholders, they look like garbage most of the time, and to me, the generated images and text just don't really add anything to the game. Acting like you can't bash out a couple sentences for each merchant's dialogue yourself is just selling yourself short, anyone can do that. Even the description's fresh off a LLM. This is gonna sound unbelievably pretentious for a moment, but the use of AI does not enhance the artistic merit of the game. It could've been infinitely more charming if the guy'd just taken some time to put together some programmer art or snagged stock pictures. Aesthetically, the game's just kind of gross and uninspired. It hurts because every time I look at it, I can see how much better it could obviously be. This would be a 4.5 without issue if a majority of the user-facing creative aspects of it weren't AI generated. Some bits of generated text I would honestly rather see deleted, particularly the merchant dialogue, because they just suck to read and actively make the game worse by their inclusion.

On the other hand, man I love gambling.

Can you change the black hole cooldown being affected by the max offline time? I went on vacation and did a big click that gave me a 5 day cooldown, and now after my break there are still 90 hours left. I understand offline time limiting the passive resource income, but that shouldn't limit black hole cooldown in my opinion.

My strategy now that I've hit battles is to sacrifice near everything while still leaving enough of a scaffolding to rebuild, then setting up a poke to banish myself from the game for as close to 24 hours as I can hit without going over. Not sure how I feel about this.

Not sure if any of the things I'll comment were addressed in the latest update since I'm at the Bosses already, so apologies if they were, but figured I'd leave an opinion just in case now that I'm further into the game. Until now the pacing did feel like it could benefit from some adjustments here and there.

The game started off kind of slow, which is fine (although I agree with a previous commentor about how for the early game it felt like no matter what you bought/collected you'd never really gain the expected momentum, the speed/difficulty would sort of remain constant, despite expectations of it speeding up), but after unlocking weapons the pacing improved dramatically. I was suddenly making a crazy amount of currency compared to just before, and it felt like I made a week's worth of progress in a single day. It felt good to finally feel like I 'leveled up'. But then came the battles and it was a stark contrast, things got painfully slow again, so it was like a roller coaster of being excited about the game again and having this sudden drop in progression pace.

That said, unlocking the auto poker was a blessing. I was so thrilled when I noticed the skill, it really made the game a lot more pleasant.

I had previously suggested a way to pause the interceptor, but later realized that a skill actually exists for it, unlockable at 100B spirit. I feel like the best timing for it would have been long *before * the auto poke skill was introduced though. Since it was when I was having to poke for 5 minutes straight that I was suffering; longing for a way to pause it so I could give my wrists a break; but having the autopoke, I didn't really feel the need to pause any longer.

Similarly, I feel like the timing for the initial stone/coral deselect skill was a little punishing, and would have worked best a little sooner (the pacing for the other realms' deselect cooldown felt fine though). The penalty for battles is a little harsh for my tastes, which I find unmotivating when coupled with the enourmous cooldowns, but I imagine it's exactly the spice other people may want to keep interested, so I chug it as just a personal thing.

Overall, the game has been interesting, it's definitely meant to be enjoyed across a longer period of time, which can be nice in the sense that it will keep you busy for longer. I usually prefer shorter games, but somehow this one managed to keep my attention for a few weeks now I think, which is probably a good sign.
I appreciate that the dev seems to be actively working on the game to improve the user experience.

I was really enjoying the game even though it has few automations but the battles are too much for me, waiting 24 hours after sacrifices seems excessive. I don't know if I will continue but up to this point I thought it was very good.

please please PLEASE don't get discouraged by these guys PLEASE

Progression is really slow, I didn't found this one appealing. Junk for day, even after unlocking a new zone, no rush. 0 strategy, just click black hole, flip cards, upgrade.

Honestly the game gets way too repetitive for me to be able to make it to battles. This game is an absolute slog, which isn't itself a bad thing, but when every level is pretty much the exact same as the last one, with the only true difference being the pictures on the card, it just becomes a boring and taxing grind. And having 11 levels of this absolute slog before even getting to any truly new content is what makes it the worst. It would make for a much better game if battles were unlocked right away, with each card set unlocking a new set of battles. In order for this game to be worth me continuing to play, it will need to be massively overhauled.

I kinda like it, although it is very slow and active. Earlier on (first 3-4 card packs), rarer cards should be more common, because I feel like progression has to be boosted with rarer cards every once in a while, and they are just tough to get. I also think that more automation should be given earlier, maybe auto card flip (toggleable, with something like x1.25 black hole cooldown when active, idk if this exists already since I'm at bugdom so far)

I think people are misunderstanding that AI UI does NOT equate to AI game logic. The UI is most likely AI (has all the hallmarks of Websim), but there's no way of knowing if the gameplay is, too. Besides, he could have designed it and asked Websim to implement it. Full AI and AI assisted are not the same thing.