budark 2022-10-03 21:13
:O nice concept¡ I was thinking about something similar at the beginning
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Gladiatorius
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 546 | 3.55 | 22 | |
| Fun | 357 | 3.62 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 312 | 3.62 | 22 | |
| Theme | 824 | 3.40 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 586 | 3.62 | 22 | |
| Audio | 442 | 3.40 | 22 | |
| Humor | 638 | 2.73 | 21 | |
| Mood | 625 | 3.40 | 22 |
:O nice concept¡ I was thinking about something similar at the beginning
nice game
So is it endless? Tried few times and didn't really count how far I got but I think the enemy had around 10 hp where I failed on my better run.
I think you might have an issue with the canvas resizing as the button hitboxes get very much misplaced when going fullscreen.
There is sadly very little strategy for you to do. Enemy going always after you really just makes it a guessing game. Having the combatants take turns seeing who'd go first would be more interesting. And maybe even seeing each other's cards. I guess at that point it would need some actual AI work though, I think they were now only just throwing random cards. One way that might also be interesting was if both participants had the same cards. 🤔
Quite often when you managed to have them over extend with a big card you'd actually have some strategizing to do but sadly way too often you didn't have the appropriate cards to answer either. The very limited hand size also makes the ends of rounds quite a bore with both just skipping at least a turn or two. Not needing to fit the whole card before the end might make it better. Or the skip could pretty much be automatic too, at least if you had nothing you could play. I did skip my whole turn once which wasn't fun and there is only a very small chance of stumbling on a scenario where you could play a card but should just skip.
Nice to see some pretty elaborate 2d animations. Is it rigged and using IK or animating everything by hand? There is some annoying looking blurring going on on some piece rotations where the sprite is crisp for only fraction of the time. Didn't seem to happen (that much) on full screen but the misaligned hitboxes made it not play great like that.
I really played too slow to my liking. The cards moved mega slow and needing to wait for the slow and repetitive animations where nothing really happens (like mirror triple parries or defends) was a pain.
At first I kept confusing which action bar was for which person. Might have been a nice addition to mark them somehow. Wasn't huge fan of the color choices. Very umm, mspaintish to see pure bright colors. Well some of the card icons captured that same feel. 😅 So it was like three different art directions clashing with each other.
Screenshot 2022-10-04 at 18.54.43.png
The cards aren't balanced too well. Like for example the healing is absolutely worthless. Only for the player though as for enemy it's just annoying. Would have been nice to see more variation too but of course in its current state, having more would increase the guess work even more as now you would at least know about what the options were.
Good job! 👍 Really neat idea but kinda stumbles on lack of allowing for real strategy.
@antti-haavikko thanks for the extensive feedback! The game doesn't indicate it in any way but it is not endless. The enemy with 10 HP is actually the last one. :sweat_smile:
I agree that in the game's current form there's not that much strategy involved. Essentially it all boils down to using shorter cards to scout the enemy's actions, hoping that they play a longer card AND that you have the appropriate cards to counter them.
I think something as simple as showing the enemy hand would go a long way to help strategize more. During the weekend we also had a bunch of ideas for cards with special effects (like manipulating the "timeline"), but in the end didn't have time to implement any of them.
The character animations were made with the Unity animator. Each character consists of a bunch of static sprites which are animated with simple transforms. A poor man's rigged animation, basically. :grinning:
@juutis Oh yeah such timeline affecting cards would have been a nice addition. Would made it way more interesting and spicier.
I use Anima2D for skeletal rigs. It's discontinued and replaced with Unity's new 2d animation system but I still prefer it in many situations. I mostly use it just to build a skeleton and setup inverse kinematics for limbs so I can move the whole arm by just moving the tip etc. Then I just use those bones as wrapper objects for the sprites themselves. But if I need some actual sprite "bending" then I use the new Unity one.
I played this for you on [stream](https://www.twitch.tv/timbeaudet) and I think I gave good feedback there, if so give a heart, and if not, don't!!
I liked this turn battler and I felt like this was a good take on the "10 second" prompt. I feel like this could be a great multiplayer game too with the way you can strategize with your turns.
That was fun. I was victorious with 1 hit point to spare! It felt like there could have been more strategy to the game, though I'm not sure what the best modification would be. Maybe if you could know your opponent's move before they made it? Or if you could save cards to a deck for use later? Either way, I enjoyed playing, and was at the edge of my seat towards the end!
Nice game,i like gladiator thematic
The mood is good, music and art appropriate, and this has potential, but my biggest gripe is that it feels very slow. It's also definitely a guessing game, as you already know, so there's not much depth here. I played through about 5 rounds and it just didn't keep me occupied after that because I didn't feel like I was making a meaningful contribution to my own success, and half the time both of us were just making passive moves... which made it feel even slower. But I know these things take time and I appreciate the feel of the game you created here! Thanks for submitting!
Yey, I won! Screenshot 2022-10-12 200725.png
Great game with really interesting mechanics! Big growth potential that can be utilized in the future.
Couple of things that I've noticed: - I think the "card draw" can get too random, sometimes i won't get any cards that can deal damage, which forces me to just stay whole round in defense. Would be great if i had a couple of 'damage' and couple of 'defend' cards every round, and randomness will be in only in what card stats i get. Screenshot 2022-10-12 195438.png
- Enemies could be a little bit smarter, sometimes they miss really good opportunities, when they 'see' what my next move will be, but still don't try to defend themselves.
- Also, i didn't find how the theme of the jam utilized here, but i see the timer at the top, maybe it just broke for me, or you didn't have time to finish it
@juss thanks for the detailed feedback!
It may be a bit unclear, but the theme is incorporated into the "timeline" in the top. Each action in the cards takes 1 second to perform, so each hand/round takes 10 in-game seconds. Obviously that's not real-time seconds since the player spends some time picking cards etc. :grin:
@juutis Ohh, ok! Thanks for the explanation, I'm somehow completely missed that
Nice game! The 10 sec timeline is not very obvious, but I really liked the mechanics!
Cool concept. Liked the animations and mechanics.
Really nice! I liked the way the different icons interacted to make different moves counter each other in a sort of emergent way. The one thing I wasn't completely clear on was what the numbers in the upper right of the cards meant, although it never seemed to matter. Nice job!