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Summoning Salesman
Summoning Salesman
By merb1000
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 417 | 3.71 | 53 | |
| Fun | 258 | 3.80 | 53 | |
| Innovation | 350 | 3.62 | 53 | |
| Theme | 308 | 4.01 | 53 | |
| Humor | 440 | 3.28 | 51 | |
| Mood | 409 | 3.76 | 52 | |
Comments
Holy moly this is quite good. At first I tried combining creatures at random, then I figured out how to get quests. Once I realized I had to actually read the text on my cards to learn what each animal was good at, it made a lot more sense. I loved making my deck more powerful, making money to buy more powerful cards to earn even more money. I wish the matchup of the contract with the animals I drew was less random - perhaps show me all the contracts at the beginning of the day but keep the small hand size of cards at a time? Also, it would be nice if I could summon and do contracts on the same screen - it took me a while to figure out I could arrow to the other screen. This was really fun - I didn't finish it, probably because of the lack of variety, but I mean what do you expect in 72 hours? Really innovative, thanks for sharing!
ultrarat
2024-04-16 03:45
Very nice game. I can see all the systemy design that came with it and it has a nice zen tone. It's a bit hard to get a sense of "progress" without some sort of UI letting me remember all the combos. I like that the cards have an immediate sense of rarity, very clear. I'm not sure I felt rewarded enough when I combined 3 cards instead of 2.
omitsu
2024-04-16 03:53
Pretty cool mechanic, loved to try new combinations of cards and see what comes out!
jesslur
2024-04-16 03:59
Neat game! I didn't think I'd spend much time playing it but I ended up getting sucked in and playing for longer than I thought I would so you're def on to something here.
Truly nicely done. Amazing idea, the cards are cool and design wise funny and cute. As soon as you can enter in to the mechanics sistem it all goes downhill there, the money making is balanced. Making thedeck stronger is well done. the contracts and summon on one screen would be a nice quality of life upgrade.
Really nicely done. It strikes a fun balance of buying new cards while also trying to save money in the final days to get to the goal. It would be awesome to see more request types and card types. It definitely felt like combining 2 cards and then another card was more powerful than combining three cards at once, so there was some strategy in how you combined. Love it - great job!
alldee
2024-04-16 20:50
I'm a big fan of card games, so this game intrigued me at first, and I really really liked the originality of the gameplay! :D
sariiger
2024-04-16 20:53
I'm loving the idea and the decisions you need to make. You can play it greedy and try to combine into a more powerful beast, but it may backfire as it may perform worse when it comes to the quests.
yabin
2024-04-17 02:14
This game is really intriguing! I love it so much! Our team also developed a card game for this jam. I must say, your concept of integrating cards and using them as currency is quite innovative and enjoyable!
beanboi
2024-04-17 03:28
Great job on the game! The aesthetic was similar to inscryption which I loved, The game was intuitive and easy to figure out. Thanks for making it!
This is a quite fun game! The system of fusing cards into stronger cards is very unique, and intuitive, and I had a lot of fun seeing what different fusions would create. I love how adjectives keep getting added to the really strong ones, it was very funny! Overall, very much enjoyed my time with this one. Good job!
apoly
2024-04-17 04:00
Cool game, especially with all those combinations and possible variations of cards. Would love to see some feedback why some cards worked and others - not. Some outcomes were obvious, while some are not and I would love to see what game expects of me.
Really fun learning new combinations! I did encounter a glitch where everything I combined would turn into a legendary flying rat but other than that everything was pretty stable
Excellent. I wouldn't change anything, except that on the last day you shouldn't be able to buy anything. I got to the end with just over 1000 gold, but seeing the shop I thought I had another day to go for a better score. So I bought a few cheap cards, clicked "0 Days Left" button, then lost. Otherwise, things like the way the requests come in during the day, and the lack of any aid for the summon tree, are great.
This is really good, I do think that is one of those LD games that you can develop a commercial game out of it. Just give the player a little bit more feedback on what he/she needs to accomplish. Well done.
nicolekg
2024-04-17 06:42
I enjoyed the various combinations, and really liked the cute critter cards as well. It wasn't super clear to me on how to complete the quests for the biggest reward. Some of them I tried to match the keywords in the creature name with what the quest giver would want. Got to ~1400 gold for day 0, was a good run!
Surprisingly interesting! The music fits with the vibe of the game perfectly too. With some more card art + descriptions for the various combinations this could really be made into something special and even marketable.
That was SUPER fun and SUPER impressive. I would 100% play a more complete version of this, the theme and music is amazing, I would definitely change the cropping on some of the cards. The longer combined names push the flavor text too low.
Interesting for sure, I never knew what I was actually doing though. Randomly throwing all cards down and returning to haphazardly exchange them for a unknown reward. The mechanic is fine but more care needs to be given to educating people on what choices they have that benefit them and why.
A really interesting and well-done game! It was a fun loop, upcycling cards and reading all of the adjectives to figure out which would best fit the missions... awesome aesthetics for the room and summoning fire effects were really cool!
I loved the mechanic, it was genuinely fun, very good!
shugor
2024-04-17 07:39
Love the variety of fusions and contracts, and how you've combined that with deckbuilding mechanics. Very cool idea. I didn't make quota unfortunately but I wanted to try out all the different combos for myself haha
minjutin
2024-04-17 09:03
This is so interesting and different, I'm just amazed. Combining cards and trying to figure out what to do really makes me feel creative, and the game really gets a lot from the variety of cards and tasks you can do. 10/10 design.
substain
2024-04-17 10:47
wow thats a lot of summons you've put in there ;) it would be cool to have more variety of cards in the beginning, and sometimes I didn't get the contracts right although i thought it was correct. But overall, good job!
derllie
2024-04-17 11:14
good concept!
Hi! loved summoning higher rank cards, trying to reach what is the most expensive card, cool game! Thanks
merb1000
2024-04-17 12:13
@jason-shapiro one of my play-testers recommended the same thing for making all contracts available. I didn't include the feature for sake of time but in retrospect I think it would have been good to do that or separate card draw from contracts in some way
@ultrarat I'm glad it hit that zen mode for you! I agree about the 3 card reward, its something that I'll have to play with in later versions
@omitsu Glad you enjoyed it!
@jesslur Thanks for the comment, its good to hear the gameplay loop was in working order for you!
@raimondosenpai Good idea about consolidating the UI. I was originally intending to include items that could be used for summoning in addition to cards, hence a lot of empty space on the summoning screen. I think in the future I'll try to combine the UIs or make it easier to swap between them with keybinds
@bittripbrit Yeah, I would have liked to include more requests and cards, unfortunately was too brain dead by the end of this to do so. If I continue this project there will definitely be more to come!
@alldee I'm glad this caught you eye and you found it original!
@sariiger I feel like that's what I enjoy most too. It's maybe a bit too random feeling at times, but I enjoy risk/reward tradeoffs.
@yabin I'm glad you enjoyed it!
@beanboi I'm not surprised you can see the Inscryption resemblance lol. It took everything I had to withhold the temptation to put a grainy filter over everything.
@thomas-gelman I'm glad you found it to be unique!
@apoly That's a good feature idea! I'll consider adding it if I continue this project
@just-a-cat Not sure that was a glitch lol, flying rat is a pretty common card and likes to promote into itself. All the combos are algorithmic so it was hard to balance things well. Thanks for playing!
@googlefrog Ahh man, sorry that happened. Definitely something I'll fix in the future
@givit-game-studios Thanks for the compliment, I'm definitely considering trying to go down the commercial route (with another round of design focus). More feedback seems to be highly requested, so I'll definitely consider adding that
@nicolekg Yep, matching keywords is key! Some keywords are better than others (ie fiery->engulfing) which denote the different reward tiers.
@julian-france Yeah, I wish I had the artistic ability to draw and write music for myself. In case you didn't catch the credits the music is AlchemyLab by Ivan Duch (https://ivanduch.com). Art is just sourced from the first royalty free images I could find. If turning this into something bigger I'd definitely want to redo these with custom assets
@yeouseong I'm glad you liked it! I'm still not sure whether I'll be pursuing this project further or not, or how I'll get the word out about it if I do, but I'll probably update this page at least. I noticed the card text issue too, but it was too late in the jam for me to care and I thought it was kinda funny.
@bruce-dellinger Yeah it does feel random at times and a lot of combos don't make clear sense. I think I'd like to add a mechanic where the outcome of a summon is shown if you've done that combo before, maybe that would help?
@breadstick I'm glad you liked the effects, stuff like that is why I use UE5 :)
@pabloabraham Glad you enjoyed it!
@shugor I think in the future I'd like to add some kind of log to keep track of cards you've found so that trying to find all the combos is more rewarding. Thanks for playing!
@minjutin Thank you for the compliment, glad you enjoyed it!
@substain I think some of the wording in the contracts was a bit confusing and I should've added a feedback system. Thanks for playing!
@sirjupitron Yeah, trying to get a card with a lot of adjectives is fun!
yanato
2024-04-17 17:19
Thought that one of the monsters should ran at me from the dark tunnel (0w0)
merb1000
2024-04-17 17:58
@yanato I would have LOVED to add that for those who failed to reach 1000 gold. Unfortunately I don’t have access to good 3D models and have not learned to make my own yet. I’ll have something like that for sure if I continue development
ruslana
2024-04-17 18:53
Nice idea!
Enjoyable game. I feel you've set a nice atmosphere of mystic. I think the RNG was slightly against me when getting contracts but that's nothing new on my side.
Well done!
Nice concept! Would be cool to play a full version with more mechanics
human
2024-04-20 15:41
Environment looks good. Less text may be. Little bit of work needed on the typography. I could not figure out the gameplay. There "Cards left in Deck 5 " written but nothing is happening when I am clicking on it. On esc button it directly quits the game is this intentional ?
merb1000
2024-04-21 12:23
@human Apologies for the UI confusion. There is an arrow on the left of the screen you should be able to click to change position. ESC quits intentionally. Cards left in deck is just an indicator of how many cards of left in the deck. I believe the arrow can be hard to see due to screen brightness settings, which I didn't consider before. Hope this helps!
Brilliant concept - I sat around for ages messing around with different combos and creatures to summon. The contracts were a bit samey sometimes so it was sometimes hard to know what exactly the right creature was but either way really loved it, nice work!