michael-macha 2024-04-16 00:24
'Tis a potion of Awesomesauce.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Demon Cards
By stratcat66
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 5.00 | 3 | ||
| Fun | 5.00 | 3 | ||
| Innovation | 5.00 | 3 | ||
| Theme | 5.00 | 3 | ||
| Graphics | 2.00 | 3 | ||
| Audio | 4.00 | 3 | ||
| Humor | 1.00 | 3 | ||
| Mood | 5.00 | 3 |
'Tis a potion of Awesomesauce.
Nice jam in the background!
The difficulty starts pretty high and I was just frantically trying to combine cards together as fast as possible before the enemies got too far. You have a lot of information that gets frontloaded into a long tutorial screen. I think it explains the concepts well, but it's a lot of information at once and it would have been better to let the player unlock new mechanics over the course of the game.
I couldn't play for very long because I would very often become softlocked when the game would not let me place the building I had just created. If you fix this bug, I'll gladly come back and give the game another try.
Hello @zungryware, thank you for your feedback!
Yeah, the tutorial screens were sadly a last minute attempt to explain the mechanics. In the best case scenario it should be interactive.
I also noticed, that it is possible to get softlocked, although it should be rather hard to get into these situations. There is one thing that is not explained properly (because I forgot it :( ): Earth buildings can only be placed next to stones.
Alright, attempt number two:
You die very quickly once you let an enemy get through. It's to the point where having a health bar really doesn't seem to matter. I let a single enemy of the weakest type get through one time and I wasn't able to assemble monsters fast enough to kill it before I died.
The AI gets confused a lot. Both my monsters and the enemy monsters would sometimes get stuck running back and forth or stop moving entirely.
A lot of the buildings didn't seem worth it. I never had the purple towers do anything useful for me. The fireball spell did negligible damage. And the monsters rarely seemed worth it compared to just building more towers. The earth building might have helped me since it cleared out my level 1 cards. But I only had to build one near the back side of the map to get all the mana I needed.
I settled on a strategy of building level 3 fire towers as quickly as possible and putting the occasional level 3 fire monster in the back side of the path to catch any stragglers that got through my nest of towers.
Then just when I felt I had figured the game out and was ready for the real game to begin, it ended. I won, but it didn't feel like I really earned the victory.
Overall, I think there are some fun mechanics here. It like the idea of compiling cards together to create an effect. But it's not very well balanced. With some more effort put on polish and playtesting, this could be a pretty neat game!