asalidonat 2026-10-19 10:51 ♥ 0
I dont get it
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD60 → Abaclash
By kaliuresis
| Percentile | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | LD60 | Ever | |
| Overall | 6 | |||||
| Fun | 6 | |||||
| Innovation | 6 | |||||
| Theme | 6 | |||||
| Graphics | 6 | |||||
| Audio | 6 | |||||
| Humor | 6 | |||||
| Mood | 6 | |||||
I dont get it
@asalidonat smh kids these days don't know how to read an abacus (joking). In all seriousness what did you find confusing? I am maybe assuming too much base knowledge but I figured it would be easy enough to figure out as long as you know the state of an abacus = a number. Would it be helpful if wrote a guide of how to read these types of abaci? Or was it the controls of the shop that were unclear?
@kaliuresis i open the game and i just right in the shop and should do things. I lost. WHould be nice to have a small in game guide
@asalidonat Thanks for the feedback. I didn't have time during the jam to make a proper in-game tutorial, but I've added a text explanation to the description for now
Well well even lower tech than Balatro, congratz :-) Very fun concept. Much too hard for me, my round 3 opponent with four 5-damage beads is way beyond my abacus skill-level :-)
im just trying to wrap my head around how you managed to make a html5 game in plain C! thats impressive :D
Interesting game! I feel I am now much better, but still not good, at reading an abacus. The guide helped, although it says "Going to the right each column is ten times the previous" but it's actually "going to the left", I think?
My final match (was 6/9, I think), I got text that popped up that said "victory" and then a split second later "defeat", maybe I defeated them on the same turn they defeated me? I had a _lot_ of trouble following the combat though, and it seemed to get faster and faster each match despite (what I think is) the speed setting set to minimum... and it kept animating for quite a while after the "defeat" message came up, so I guess maybe I was seeing the last few turns play out. I tried to use the Frog effectively, but it seemed to not do anything particularly useful - never let me activate the same bead twice or skip anything important, as far as I could tell. I didn't end up finding any strategy better than just stacking 5 damage beads on the main abacus and some hourglasses on my health, but I was probably missing something =).
Abacus definitely is a very solid "old tech" theme.
@jimbly oops, yeah it should say "going to the left", fixed it now
I think I forgot to prevent death after you defeat the enemy, so you might have died from a status effect or queued damage after winning. It getting faster is probably due to more effects happening that trigger each other. I should have allowed for it to go to slower than the base speed. I didn't at the time since animations are tied to the gameplay code so it would reduce the effective framerate but it's 120 ticks per second base speed so it probably would have been fine. I think the game has some inherent problem that there are too many things happening at once, but there are readability improvements that would help for sure.
The leap frog has two main uses, which is to move the poison frogs, and to move dual blades which deal damage when they are moved in any way (as opposed to the 5 damage beads that only damage when they are incremented by the abacus advancing). The design intent with poison is that the damage from one poisoned bead can cascade to other poisoned beads, but the poison frog only targets a single location by default. There are a few "op" strategies I had in mind when designing for different archetypes, but the readability issues probably make it difficult to understand the mechanics and discover them.
Ah, I never saw the dual blades (maybe I should have re-rolled more often)! And, yeah, I didn't quite think about how they worked with the poison (and burn, right?), that makes sense.