FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD55 → Blood From a Tome

Blood From a Tome

By cethin and guitarbro

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall4873.6525
Fun6543.3726
Innovation9073.0026
Theme7743.4326
Graphics5103.8227
Audio4523.4326
Humor6252.9719
Mood7493.4023

Comments

greenradiation 2024-04-16 15:37

Lots of Iscription vibes :D Cool game, you've done a great job!

guitarbro 2024-04-16 22:16

@greenradiation lol thanks! Sorry you had to play this version without some of the bug fixes (new fixed build in the works), but glad you liked it!

cethin 2024-04-17 04:19

@greenradiation Yeah, I had played quite a few deck builder/RNG based roguelikes recently, and Inscryption stuck in my mind. Thanks! New build with a bunch of things fixed is up if you want to play a version that isn't as broken.

zhirui 2024-04-18 03:39

Nice game, definitely reminds me of Inscryption. Works well with the theme, good stuff!

thesmellofoxygen 2024-04-18 03:43

Love this idea. Upgrading cards over time, building your deck. Very cool. Quite punishing though.

rainbeau 2024-04-18 03:53

Love card games - this was an in depth execution for a cool idea! Wonder what this could have been given more time.

guitarbro 2024-04-18 04:00

@zhirui Thanks, glad you liked it!

@thesmellofoxygen Yeah takes a bit of figuring out at first. The AI can catch you unprepared, but hopefully it's not too much to pick up the second try if you fail your first run.

@rainbeau Thanks, yeah we really wish we could have expanded on this with more time. We had a lot of ideas that ended up getting cut simply due to us not being able to implement them fast enough. :smiley:

retrific 2024-04-18 13:54

Hey, this is very well made for a jam game and while I did need your screenshots with instructions to understand everything once I got it it was fun, just a bit too difficult. Maybe some slightly better feedback on whats happening would be good because sometimes I think I won a match when I thought I lost it. Overall it was just too difficult to complete and I felt like my deck was getting worse instead of better the further I got, lol.

But overall one of the best entries I've played so far. Played it for quite a while

aivaxela 2024-04-19 00:26

I really appreciate how much detail went into this game! especially as a huge fan of card games. Admittedly, it was pretty difficult, and the opponent didn't allow much room for error. I loved the art!

guitarbro 2024-04-19 02:26

@retrific Yeah we tried to squeeze feedback for as many things as we could in time, but uh... slightly misjudged just how many actions we'd need to communicate to the player lol. Thanks for playing either way though!

@aivaxela Thanks! Glad you liked the art!

shasaur 2024-04-19 21:51

Damn bro I am so stupid, I swear I don't know how to play half of these jam games :sob: I spent like 5 minutes figuring out you had to click on the card, then click on the slot. Thought it would automatically go when you click on the card or drag and drop. Though playing the game a bit more, I think it could do with a few small hints in places (like showing you have to pass the token to continue).

Apart from that, this seems like a very ambitious game with the amount of gameplay there is - I am impressed! This is probably one of the most sophisticated pieces of work I've seen this jam. It also has a really really great mood: the writing, the music, creature designs, and overall art style are perfectly in symphony - great work guys!

guitarbro 2024-04-19 22:41

@shasaur thanks! :smiley: Don't beat yourself up though, a lot of LD games don't focus on the new player experience cuz that's not the fun part (and takes up valuable time you could be making pretty graphics lol). Glad you were able to figure some stuff out though, and appreciate the kind words.

cethin 2024-04-19 23:28

@aivaxela @retrific Yeah, we never got enemy difficulty scaling in before time ran out, so it's somewhat hard at the start but gets much easier over time. You can lose two fights before losing the game, so you can spend that time making your deck stronger hoping to win out in the end. (You can also turn on infinite health with "\", though we didn't tell you that anywhere before.)

@shasaur For sure we could have used more feedback. We tried to get as much as we could, but that's one thing that you always need more of and don't have enough time for. For winning/losing the coin that you used to end your turn gets moved onto your stack or the top one floats away. It's a little hard to see. It could have used more fanfare or something to draw your eye to it.

Thanks @rainbeau ! This is our first card game/deck builder so we were learning on the fly.I've played enough that I had a decent idea on where to go, but we had no experience making them.

dagunov 2024-04-20 09:57

Interesting game, hard2learn hard2master:smile: Looks great. Is web version outdated? I had straight road there, was that just random?

cethin 2024-04-20 12:00

@Dagunov Yes, web should be up to date. If I recall correctly, it's a 50% for a split at any point along the path. It's unlikely that this happens for too long, but there's always a small chance for it. It sounds like you may have just hit those really low odds. Also, yes there's a lot to learn and figure out while playing. We did our best to get the information to players, but obviously it can't cover everything. If you had too hard of a time, you can turn on infinite health for a bit with "\" until you get some upgrades. I hope you had fun anyway. Thanks for playing!

puchkupyara 2024-04-22 13:09

Seems fun but it was hard for me to understand what to do like passing of token and all. I think reading tutorial section for stupid palyers like me is a must. I think, I am gonna invest more time to figure out the game otherwise I wont be able to sleep :D

creeper-nade 2024-04-22 14:08

a pretty underrated game,I enjoyed playing the game and the process of figuring out how to play :P. I'm still a little confused about how the fighting system works, every round I just kept sacrificing my opponent's card (not sure if it's a bug, I was playing on the web version btw). But all in all, I love the vibe and the gameplay

ilbini 2024-04-22 23:30

I enjoyed the game, i have to say im a big fan of inscyption and card games in general. I understand that for someone who dont usually play card games the introduction may seem a little bit hard with all the keywords and events. Overall a really good entry, awesome that you could achieve all this in a weekend so congratulations and good luck!

guitarbro 2024-04-23 01:48

@puchkupyara Sorry you had trouble with it, we kinda ran out of time to get more tutorial in game (hence the guide on this page lol). Thanks for checking our game out though!

@creeper-nade Uh... well you're not _supposed_ to be able to sacrifice opponent cards lol. Congrats, you discovered a bug! :confetti_ball: I do not know how we never tested that. :upside_down: But thanks for playing!

@ilbini Thanks, glad you liked it! :smiley:

onqdll 2024-04-23 06:08

Screenshot_83.png

Great job! Insane amount of mechanics for a 72 hour game. Map felt a little too random though, for a few runs I was forced to destroy almost all my cards. (Or is it somehow skippable?)

guitarbro 2024-04-24 04:36

@onqdll Ayy congrats on first proof of win! :smile:

And yeah, we didn't really add any safeguards, we just hoped the random chances were low enough to not have that happen much. Glad you were able to make it all the way through despite that lol. Thanks for playing!

smidgens 2024-04-26 17:45

Nice job! I'm not big on card games owing to the toll they put on my swiss cheese brain (though I admire the genre) but the mechanics in this were pretty straightforward. I found it a little hard but not unfair. It would have been nice to have a highlight effect or tooltip show up when you hover stuff you can interact with. Like when you're in between events and you have to pick a card and then click on a slot (had to read the comments to learn what I was doing wrong).

The graphics are really nice. Makes me nostalgic for the 90s and its wonderful obsession with prerendered visuals.

guitarbro 2024-04-27 00:30

@smidgens oh yeah, a highlight would be a nice touch for sure. Glad it wasn't too hard, always difficult to balance for the diverse LD audience. Thanks for the kind words regarding the graphics and thanks for playing! :smiley:

furtive-pygmy 2024-04-29 04:13

Very nice! Pretty difficult, but great fun. Loved the Inscryption vibes.

guitarbro 2024-04-29 04:14

@furtive-pygmy Thanks! Glad you liked the vibes! :wink:

digital-bacon 2024-04-29 12:23

Interesting game. Gameplay's a bit confusing, but I could sort of see where you were going with it. Nice graphics. Good work.

tpace 2024-04-29 15:15

Good job! I loved the demons and mechanics were solid. I'd just try improving UI since so much is kind of implicit, but for a game jam it's not a problem. Keep on!

guitarbro 2024-04-29 23:44

@digital-bacon Thanks, hope you were able to get the hang of the gameplay without too much trouble.

@tpace Yeah, I agree there's a lot of room for more UI feedback (ex: hovering over interactable objects) that was simply out of scope unfortunately. Glad you enjoyed the creatures and mechanics though. Thanks for playing! :smile: