Keyboard Army by PeachTreeOath

Instructions
Typing of the Dead meets Dominion in this typer deck-builder! Take down the evil champions using your deck army and be the keyboard king!
- Recruit minions to your deck army in real time by typing their names
- Command your army of monsters (and later, spells!) using just your keyboard
- Face three bosses with their own unique set of cards. Take them down and gain them as a card for your own deck!
- Sick electroswing OST




Credits

- Zetafactor: Code
- DoubleDragonBimmy: Code
- Segfault: Code
- PeachTreeOath: Code
- evedoll: Art
- Watashi: Art
- Chro: Design
- emiko: Design
- wchaney: Music
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| HTML5 (web) | https://peachtreeoath.itch.io/keyboard-army |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/keyboard-army |
Ratings
| Overall | 317th | 3.706⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 403th | 3.476⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 147th | 3.897⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 150th | 4.159⭐ | 65🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 434th | 3.718⭐ | 64🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 295th | 3.541⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 466th | 3.418⭐ | 63🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 89🗳️ | 116🗨️ |
I don't think i quite grasped what switching active lanes does - the cards seemed to always go to the next available lane. maybe I was goofing up.
I lost on level 3 just the same, the creature names got deceptively long and I got a little overwhelmed. It definitely got easier when I was able to memorize the card pictures and associate them with the names though. I liked the music and art, and overall the idea hit the theme better than anything i've played yet.
I was all smiles the whole way through. Great job!
P.S. Please nerf Pot of Greed
It takes me a minut to understand the mechanics but then I realized that it was explained, it is a card game!
Thank you.
Awesome originality and use of the theme.
The first few moments flat-out bamboozled me. My immediate reaction was OMG that text is so small! I was lounging on the sofa being casual, and I had to get physically closer to the screen and set the keyboard properly on the table. But later I saw that the text names are quite long in some cases, so a larger font is not easy, tough design tradeoff.
The second aspect I struggled with was eye positioning. I needed to watch the battle to learn the rules (I'm glad you didn't tutorialize overmuch) but I also needed to intently squint at card text to type it.
So there was an initial hurdle, but once past that I started getting better and tabbing around to lanes and trying to get some folks into position for battle with some thought to strategy, rather than just furiously typing everything that came up.
And once I settled in I started digging it! I was cool how I could type text that applied to multiple cards, or access cards from multiple zones at the same time, that was a nice touch.
I eventually beat the whole thing and congratulated myself. Honest by then I was sort of in the groove and probably would have gone on a bit further.
This is a cool concept, executed nicely with great art and a grooving OST that set a nice foot-tapping pace that matched the gameplay. Well done!!
Also very impressed with how you guys pulled it off with so many people LOL. Good stuff!
After some time all the typing got quite annoying, but I guess it just proves that it is incompatible. But as I said, a very interesting twist.
But the idea is really cool and it is quite enyojable.
Some sound effects wore typing a wrong letter might have been helpful. Also the TAB button to change lanes was kind of awkward.
But otherwise pretty well done.
Good job.
I left my rating of your game, if you can leave your feedback in our game, Witch's Escape.
I hope you continue with the project.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/witchs-escape
Suggestions/nitpick:
* uneven difficulty curve - I had no problem getting thru lvls 1 and 2 on my first try, but I can't get thru lvl 3 for the life of me, which is a shame, 'cause I'd like to see what's next, but I have been trying for the past 20 minutes at least
* It would be nice if I could select what goes into the initial recruit deck
Even though I was terrible at it, I enjoyed it a lot, so I might give it another bash tomorrow.
Some feedback.
- There should be at least a brief tutorial screen for what the cards do. I never did figure out what a few of them did, Pot of greed for example.
- There should be some indication of how to place cards, preferably a representation of a number key above or below each card.
- It would be nice to be able to move the target location left and right, maybe via arrow keys instead of just tab. Several times I tabbed past my spot and had to go all the way around again.
Still, all in all it was a fun experience and could make for a decent edutainment game for typing classes.
I'll be honest, I'm not exactly sure how i'm supposed to play. Should I just add in cards to the pool from the left? Or should I focus on the cards already in the middle? Either way, typing forces me to focus on a part of the screen and made me, most of the time, unaware of my life and the state of the battle.
I like how it uses creativity to make it harder with super fancy and humourous names!
The reason I didn't push further than my limits was the music; I'm not sure it fits the game and it became more distracting than anything else. I mean, it's probably just me, but it seemed to be "out of place". I kinda had troubles to stay focused on the typing. (probably cause I suck at it though?)
PS: Did... did you opt out the humour? :< why? It was probably what I would have rated the highest
- The player would choose between recruiting more units to their army/hand, vs deploying them
- More variance in the card names. The core idea was that since this is a real-time typing game, we replaced the Hearthstone mana concept with character count. So the length of a strong card should be a lot longer than a weak card and naturally take longer to type
Thanks for the inputs!
It's easy to tell a lot of work went into this one; great job folks!
I love that the length of a cards name is its cost, and how much that absolutely works. There definitely wasn't quite enough time to read everything about the board state. And while I understand that like, typing time is a primary factor in determining player skill, it seems like maybe coupling that with reading the board state might be a bit too much. Perhaps separating the game into phases, where one is reading the board and another is typing. But I guess that might ruin some of the momentum.
My favorite mechanic is probably that if card names share letters in order, then you can type part of more than one card at once. I could see decks being build around cards names. Really, really cool.