Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD43 → Price of Power
By hilvon
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 770 | 3.11 | 43 | |
| Fun | 796 | 2.88 | 44 | |
| Innovation | 415 | 3.27 | 44 | |
| Theme | 489 | 3.50 | 44 | |
| Graphics | 823 | 2.85 | 43 | |
| Audio | 657 | 1.71 | 30 | |
| Humor | 771 | 2.29 | 34 | |
| Mood | 947 | 2.44 | 37 |
That was unique :) I was a bit confused with the turns. Were they just happening super fast? All i know was that my HP was dropping like crazy lol. Instructions were a little hard to follow. I loved the little illustrations on the cards! Good job!
Actually pretty fun once you figure out what's going on. Unfortunately, it looks really really confusing, would probably be a lot better once it's fleshed out a bit and the cards look more distinguishable.
Maybe you should make a compilation of IQ test games, where you don't let players see any sort of how to play instructions, and the main challenge of these games would be to figure out what is going on, what the rules are and how to win. I believe that would keep me more amused than trying to figure out written instructions and feeling stupid, and then failing to use the little of what I understood ingame and feeling stupid again. Either that or start simplifying your ideas. Some rules must be sacrificed. Nice take on the theme. The game is actually good once the rules are understood.
Like others said, it was a bit tough to figure out what was going on at first, but once I got it, it was better. It is kindof like a real board game in which you have a set of rules and you have to figure out how the pieces go together to make up the actual game. That said, this game is a bit in the vein of Slay the Spire, where you have a deck of things you can do, and you're trying to defeat the big monster with that deck as your resource. I like the sacrifice mechanic, though I didn't realize that was happening for a bit. That's actually the same kind of mechanic that I prefer to see in trading card games (and the one that Duel Masters uses, among others) and it's a good mechanic.
@meenners @amethystproductions @kr4ft3r @incobalt
A huge thank you for playing! Yes, indeed the tutorial would brobably have bee realy useful in this game, but I garely could fit current mechanics within 72 hours... (Though admittedly a huge part of this time were the highlighting of selected objects (which I am still not happy about...)
@incobalt Thanks for liking the sacrific mechanic... though I suspect you might have misinterpreted it. Basically what is happening is if you sacrifice a card or it gets killed it goes to a scrap pile. If the player needs to draw a card and draw pile is empty - the scrap pile gets shuffled back in. The thing is the matches turn out to usually be too short for this to happent, so you don't see sacrificed cards again, but they are not gone for good.
Well done on making a digital card game in such a short time. I like card games and could see you must have worked hard to create a game that works. I didn't have much success playing but could see were you were going with the idea. Well done.
Was quite interesting, I was able to learn it easily without your intro ..
By the way, it's hard to win
Great job
the idea is solid, however it is indeed rather confusing on what i need to do. Maybe a better tutorial in-game would help i guess. Overall i see there was a lot of work to do so well done on that xd
As said above, really hard to understand at first but really good once you understand the game. Really good work on the balance of the game and the mechanics but I would have prefer a limited amount of cards (no shuffle: once a card is used, you cant have it again) to up the challenge (maybe make two differents modes: one with a shuffle, one without but with more card to begin with) Congrats overall
After going through the hard part, I just want to say this game is incredibly awesome.
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Actually the core is simple enough and easy to understand: Cards consume colored mana to be played; Cards provide colored manas when sacrificed aside; Summoning, attacking and healing need matched colors. After having figured these out, the gameplay ran fluent.
The biggest problem is not about the game mechanics. It is the lack of instructions and the poor information interface. The color thing (of the mana cost mecahanic) is well designed from the perspective of game rules, but very hard for players to master without a guide, and easy to confuse players since the color information doesn not come along with a concrete representation other than some simple numbers. It is actually acceptable because the tokens really help players aware of the mana they are arranging, but what makes it a mess is that colors are used to classify the attack targets as well, in which case there is also an HP number paired with the color. These two mechanics are distinct from each other so should not share a same method of representation. You may want to redesign them, for example use natural elements(water, fire, etc.) for the mana colors, and the positions in the battlefield(front, middle, back) for the target classes.
Ignoring these flaws, the rest parts of this game are gold. I don't think this game is as hard as the description suggests. Winning this game requires only simple maths and careful thoughts in my opinion. The card "Glass Cannon" is a bit overpowered because it is much defensive and the cost is low, but this doesn't affect the game balance too much. All of these cards are well designed and succeed to make this game enjoyable. Well done!
@hawkie @hadesfury @codekoto @vivien-fargette
Thank you for playing the game and for your feedback. It is MUCH appreciated. :smile:
Yes, the game would definitely could do with a tutorial. Or more cards (and better balance among them). Or with more challenge variety. Unfortunately for the later two when I came to a point where this became a thing I realised that I have no idea how to balance them except do something semi-random play test and then go from there seeing what works and what doesn't... and there wasn't enough time left for the iterative process. Probably this is why I should have started with core gameplay rather than with visuals (I sank a lot of time into the system that outlines the cards as you select them, and valid targets when you use ability).
Anyway thank you for honest feedback! Maybe I will actually polish the balance and challenges post jam...
@ikigaiseitetsu, Wow... This is quite a piece of feedback. Thank you VERY much! :smiley:
Yes, the card design is a thing that I ended up least happy about. Though I used the traditional conventions of putting Cost at the top-right, and Health in Top-Right, there still ended up being 3 sections with all mana-colours being present and no hint to what means what.
I made the mana color and Health/Damage types different to try and make them apart, but the health type ended up a little hard to tell in the end. And Defender / Normal cards difference was harder to tell still. Maybe using health color as a card outline, and Defender cards having a different outline shape or pattern would help the issue, but this is all hindsights.
Representing different mana colours and attack types with different icons is also a good idea.
Regarding winning the game - it really depends on how lucky you are with what colours you get for sacrificing cards. If you need at least one red to activate your abilities and you don't have red mana-yielding cards in your hand, you can't just cycle them as this will mana-burn you severely... But barring this scenario, the game might end up trivial if you get a glass cannon with a lot of cards to feed into it. This might let you win the game before enemy can make a shot.
The glass cannon was supposed to be ballanced by its fragility (2HP) and being a defender, meaning it is a prioirity target for enemy. But this kind of didn't work out as planned given that enemy doesn't attack every turn.
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Wonder how this would play in PvP...
A Cardgame is also a good idea for Sacrifices. Good Choice! The Gameplay is easy and good to handle. The Graphics are bit to paint, but its really good at all. Good Work!
At first all the explanations and numbers are quite intimidating, but once you get it, it's actually quite a fun and strategic game! I love the way you made the animations do everything, and the way you actually get the tokens to move across the board, that all felt really polished for a gamejam, nice job! I'm not really into boardgames, but reading the comments I can see that you are quite loved by those who do. Nice work!
The cardgame seems really complex by the lack of tutorial, it took my about 15 minutes to figure out that I had to sacrifce cards and that those tokens could be used to actually play the cards. Maybe that says more about me though :P It wasn't helpfull that the controls where a bit weird. I sometimes had issues to move cards to the sacrifice stack, maybe bind a double click on actions instead of actually moving the cards to the sacrifice stack.
An innovative and intuitive deck building card competition (without the deck building), apart from the lack of a proper tutorial. It doesn't help that you didn't format the description at all! Still, the rules and the interface are not too complicated even for someone who has only played Magic once and never touched Hearthstone.
The sacrifice mechanic works well, especially due to the health loss on excess mana. I'm also glad to see that the sacrifice is actually *a sacrifice*, i.e. a choice where something is lost in order to gain something else with a little bit of risk involved when it comes to the unknown future cards. Not everyone (including me!) got this one right in retrospect.
The theme would be even stronger, if the opponent was tougher. The AI attacks so rarely that it is very easy to build a well defended group of cards. With symmetrical rules this would be quite interesting, I reckon. That would require proper AI or other players of course.
The graphics are weak. Player boxes, stretched textures, a mishmash of colors, and the hand-drawn font (it is ok to use a third party custom font, btw) don't look great individually or together. The particle effects are the best part, but even they are hindered by the usage of the default particle texture.
Good job in all. With polished graphics, tweaked user interface and a tutorial this could be quite something.
Overall: *Above average (3.5)* Fun: *Good (4.0)* Innovation: *Good (4.0)* Theme: *Great (4.5)* Graphics: *Bad (2.0)* Audio: *N/A* Humor: *N/A* Mood: *N/A*
@alleskapaul, Thanks for playing. Yes, the UI and UX of the game are... not really polished. They are probably the most polished of all of my games but they are still far from good.
Having double clicks... not sure if this would work well if you have card that you can both play and sacrifice... Though maibe if you click a card in hand, a pair of buttons appear in the middle to play or sacrifice it (or only one if you can't play it)... And then also have a "click card - click target" control on activating abilities...
@huvaakoodia Thank you for playing anf for detailed feedback!
Yes, the opponent is kind of weak. And definitely having symmetric play would make the game more interesting (and would probably require additional resrictions like only activate card once per turn...) but making a multiplayer game in JAM format is probably above me.
Also the font was actually a third party from the internet downloaded for free. :smile:
And the graphics are... well... For most of the Jam I only had access to Blender for all my assets - including 2D images. And blender is... not the most robust 2D editor as you might imagine. The texture stretched on the player box is actually same for cards. The colorful mishmash on the left is actually card backside. My initial idea was to make player draw 6 cards, but initially show them face down with only sacrifice values visible, and let player choose which cards they want to keep, limiting them to no more that 6 in hand. But this mechanic got crapped because of "not enough time!" and was replaced by filling the player hand with 6 cards instead.
The clever one, huh! You managed to do the exact thing I wanted to: implement the sacrifice as the game mechanic. Well, in the card games it's just a right thing to do! =) Great match for the theme.
This game would benefit a lot from some more work on balance. Now it's just super simple to beat: play a "Glass Cannon", take down the corresponding guardian, shoot all the HPs out of the opponent's face (cube in this case). AI opponent who doesn't play any cards makes it even easier.
UI is pretty, I found it even more pleasant then in some WOtC's card game simulators. This "right click to zoom in" feature is essential and you did it just great. Also, cards' design is pretty self-explainatory and clean, so it didn't confuse me at all.
Sfx and music would be nice, but I know how hard it is to implement. On the other side, the absence of them allows players to enjoy their own music while playing, which can be considered positive since the game doesn't try to create the mood.
Overall the game is great! =)
I love this, big change of pace from most of the jam games. Really impressed by the complete (and easy-to-understand) interface, though it's a little finicky at times. As you're already aware the biggest issue is just the readability of the cards and discoverability of the mechanics. I think I lost 2 or 3 times before I figured out I completely overlooked *attacking*. D'oh. Just adding section names to the cards would help a lot, and some sort of quick explanation about attacking.
Other than that, I'm not sure what to add. Would like to see more depth and customization but it's a jam game, what's there is great work for a weekend. All in all a really respectable showing.
P.S. You should add some screenshots to your game description. It really stands out among the rest of the entries, but it's hard to tell that from a wall of text.
@rumor Thanks for playing! Glad you found the game interesting!
Yes, the tutorial level could definitely help a lot, but I didn't have time to design and implement it, so I opted for the "Wall of text"manual in game description.
As for screenshots, the game mostly looks the same, especially if you don't know it well enough to evaluate tactical situation.
I love card games, really wanted to play this more! But I just... I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I read the tutorial, I read the reviews, but really struggled with understanding what was what. As others said, better-labeling the cards and the play area would help a lot I think. I look forward to giving this another try when it's a bit clearer to understand. :)
I'm sure that there's a lot of strategic depth here, but as others have mentioned already, it's not easy to grasp the rules/mechanics. Personally I felt that the main problem was that I has no idea what the numbers on cards meant, maybe having something like a sword icon for attack, blood drop icon for costs etc. would've helped.
Interesting card game~It's easy to play, but it lacks guidance in the game.
Very solid bones to this one. After getting the hang of the rules it becomes very engaging. Sure, it is easy to win if you carefully plan out every move, but it has so much potential if you tweak the balance. For example limited turn timer that makes you do the quick math, or an opponent that has to follow the same rules, or dare I say multiplayer? Sure UI could use a little polish, cards could be easier to understand, but that is to be expected from a jam game. I am seriously impressed with the core mechanic. You should definitely try to bring this to another level post jam. Great job.
It took a few games for me to really understand what was going on, a simple tutorial or having games of increasing difficult to scale the complexity over time would have been nice. It also wasn't super clear exactly what all the different costs are for, you could try using different geometric shapes as well as colour to help identify different things. The game it's self was actually quite fun once I got into it, although I didn't manage to win in the end.
@kristinamay @zanagi @srx @hi-im-greg
Thanks for playing!
Yes, the game is confusing even despite some of the TCG conventions used in card design, but the UI size of the cards was cluttered, and lacked some simple touches... Like having some differently coloured zones to help tell which of the numbers are together and which stand for different purpose.
I am not sure I will be working on postJam version. I usually don't because of other commitments, though.
"Solid bones" is the best way to put it in my mind. If you polished this and made it a little more approachable, you have a real deal indie title on your hands.
Tough to jump into but it was very impressive for a jam game!
I love the graphics, but if you added models for the characters that would be so much more interesting.
I would have killed for a tutorial or a better explanation on the fly on how to play. I figured out how the sacrificing to play cards part of it all worked out but I never seemed to damage the opposing player and I couldn't figure out how to activate abilities even though I could afford them. Good job on the finishing the game though. Some sort of difficulty ramp up would have been nice as well.
It took a second to figure out, but once I got it, it was pretty fun, if not a little easy. I think this could actually be a really good game if you could print it out and play in person pvp. Since the cards seem to represent characters, it would be nice if they had character art on them, but I can understand why that wasn't in the scope of a jam game.
Nice smooth animations! However, I didn't really understand how to play.