Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD29 → Beyond The Surface The Chaos Rises
By kibertoad
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coolness | 3 | 71 | ||
| Audio | 234 | 3.37 | ||
| Graphics | 238 | 3.71 | ||
| Mood | 256 | 3.31 | ||
| Innovation | 326 | 3.10 | ||
| Overall | 513 | 2.97 | ||
| Humor | 523 | 2.18 | ||
| Fun | 564 | 2.61 | ||
| Theme | 675 | 2.32 |
The music, drawings and overall mood of this was awesome. I didn't really understand the rules, though. I couldn't figure out what the different options I had meant, I could see when I made progress and when I failed, but was never sure why. I'd definitely play a more complete game in this style! :)
150MB unzipped?! Dayumn, thats a lot of content! Took me quite a long time to figure out what I was doing, but after that the game was simple enough. Even more so after my junk robot turned into a killerbot :D.
The card texts were all over the place and full of typos, and I got so many cards that I couldn't even read my cards' texts anymore. The game also crashed when I tried to use "Feed" on Mother of roach.
The game was also way too easy, because getting killer bots with four combat rolls and psychics with 3 stealth rolls let you just steamroll everything (exept for hackers).
Looks good, but isn't much fun to play.
Anssi@MooseflyGames
Card games aren't really my cup of tea, but this was fun, and with a little more polish, I could see my self getting in to this. Can't wait for the post jam version!
I finished the game. As far as I could tell, the general strategy was just to select the card with the highest number of rolls to increase your chances of winning. Since I didn't appear to be rolling against anything but myself, there seemed to be no depth to my decision making, but I could be misunderstanding the mechanics. Also, when you get too many cards they start to go offscreen, obscuring the description of any special abilities.
Wow, really cool that you decided to make a card-and-dice game in the jam :) For a 2-day game it's really good, while obviously the design is a bit wonky still it was fun to play. Congrats
I LOOVE the atmosphere; graphics and music are awesome. Really. I also totally liked the gameplay. The only little problem I found is that whoever the selected member of your team, only the last one will show on screen.
A great entry, would love to play it with more cards and on a mobile device.
Awesome music and a pretty unique art style. It took some time to figure out how to play but once I got the hang of it, the game was pretty fun. The progression works really well with your card collection carrying over each match. Finding the right cards to play in a fight worked well and the game has good balance for a 72 hour jam.
I didn't quite understand the rules, but I managed to stumble through. The cards were well drawn, and the music was nice. Card games are tough to make interesting, and this was interesting to me. Good job!
Cool setting and art. I feel like there's a neat concept here that I'm not really getting. The gameplay felt unexplained to me so I didn't really know what was going on. With some development I feel like this could be really neat, though.
The music and artwork set the mood very well. I especially liked the background art. Too bad there weren't any sound effects though. And I didn't really notice anything thematic that I'd identify as "beneath the surface".
As for the game play, seemed rather easy, and I never felt like the decisions were that tough or interesting to make. I essentially just always used the unit with the highest "best of N rolls" stat for the type of roll that was weakest for my opponent. For example, if an opponent required +6 Stealth or +5 Combat to defeat, I'd use whatever unit had the highest number of combat rolls. Seemed to be a reliable strategy.
There were also very few opponents that did anything other than gain/lose random unit. It would have been interesting if, for an example opponent, choosing a stealth roll would have one risk/reward pair, while choosing a combat roll would have a different risk/reward pair. Especially if some of the risk/rewards were small, while others were large.
Overall, it seemed like too much randomness, and not enough relevant decision making. And the special skills mostly felt inferior to the standard rolls, because "best of N rolls" is statistically very favorable.
The UI was at first confusing, just because I didn't know if I was playing or looking at a tutorial, and I didn't know what clicking on a card actually *did*. Through experimentation I realized that the first gameplay screen was basically choosing which area of the city to fight in, and the second screen had the opponent on the left and my available units on the right. But none of that was obvious at first.
There was also some issues with the available unit list. Selecting any unit other that the bottom one failed to show the unit's portrait or special abilities. All actions were still available, but I didn't always remember what the special abilities did. Also, once I had a lot of available units, the stack began to overflow off the screen, and I couldn't even read the full text for the unit on the bottom.
Finally, a possible bug: In the Matrix, I ran across a Net Queen, used a hacker matrix roll, and it said "Success! You get:" But it didn't list what I got, and I got nothing, while I was expecting to "get encountered unit". I had six units at the time.
It was very confusing at first, but I got it after a few games. There's been some very good comments made about your game above me.
In short, too much randomness and a lack of choice that matters. I would suggest losing the unit that you are using instead of a random one, because there's hardly any uses to some of the units.
However, for a 2 day game, this is really surprising (and fun!). I really liked the art, and there was a lot of it. Great job on your game !
I liked the character art style. The rules of the game were a bit hard to understand what was going on. It seems 'killer bot' is really over-powered though. Seems to win all the time.
It took a bit of random guessing to work out my aims, but it became a decent game of planning the best cards to use. It could be an even better game if the results of winning and losing weren't random - there's a lot of strategy in planning what cards you can afford to sacrifice.
Hey... Fun game.
I'm and old Magic The Gathering player so this was real nice.
Good job.