Dead Frog Tell No Tales by pixelstuff

Play the game here : https://pixelstuff.itch.io/dead-frog-tell-no-tales
🐸🎶💬
You, Bardnaby the bard, had an amazing life, full of extraordinary adventures, until the day you ended up in jail for a vague story of… rosbeef! But do not be depressed, your fabulous life is worth money. Choose carefully what you'll sing with the cards you have, try to earn a max of coins to convince your audience, and exchange your stories against your life!

Credits
Development : Jesaipo - Mathias
Graphics : Juliebenhaim - Nantenai - Romainprl - Skygrope1
Additional Music :
https://samplefocus.com/samples/harp-up https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music/track/enigmatic https://samplefocus.com/samples/glistening-rise-harp
Ratings
| Given | 11🗳️ | 9🗨️ |
I could even make up stories out of those cards as I decide to walk on them... well, as if time wasn't a limited resource, but I didn't found it any hard to satisfy everybody in time. I have a feeling that if I just go fast, that would keep things going well, without me dying, whatever I step on. It would have been more of a challenge if there was more variants of stories types.
I would've been happy to play in a more polished version of it, like, on steam ;p
For LD that's an extremely gorgeous entry just like it is.
1 level with a bit of tutorial would be great!
It would've been nice if there was a bit more skill involved, because right now you're in the hands of the RnG gods, and you have little influence.
Overall a very nice entry!!!
Plaz play and rate mine. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/lifeforms-in-space
@osspial @agurcan @ryan-brenner @zhanna > Thank you for your feedback! We will definitely address the difficulty issue. It's something we are aware of and definitely want to improve post gamejam. In our original scope, we wanted to add a third ressource to collect but didn't have the time to. We also needed more time to make some gameplay adjustments, our original card/public ratio hasn't been proofed enough but our main goal was to test the gameplay first and then to improve difficulty.
At its current state I think it's good fun, while perhaps not so challenging and relatively limited in variance, but I think it could totally be refined into something really engaging!
- Loads of polish! Great line-work, lovely little animations
- Ingenious way to spin the theme
- The core gameplay loop, and the frog croaking - the consistency made it engaging
Things that could be improved:
- I felt like I didn't know how to fail - it was too easy, I think. Perhaps there should be only one or two correct combinations per tale and not spotting them in time punishes you
- Pedantic, but with so much polish and such a simple UI, things like no button states (hover, down etc.) stick out a little
Really well done!
As usual with your games the level of polish is crazy. Nice work.
The gameplay is quite simple but works like a charm. The music and the frog sounds are super moody.
The art is very good too.
The only thing I found strange is this combination of time pressure and puzzle. Also at the beginning I didn't know what makes the character star moving. Now I know it is moving 4 tiles, but it is quite arbitrary and is not explained anywhere. (if it is I didn't notice :p)
I felt that the game was a bit "slow" though, not sure if it is my machine, or if there is something in the programming that could be done to make it more responsive.
Also, it was not clear for me what was my goal at each stage. A certain amount of gold? A certain number of satisfied people? I lost at the throne room and I had no idea if it was a close loss or not.
Cheers!
Nice job on the concept, I really like the overall idea, it just falls short while trying to become a game, when it is also an amazing build your own adventure mechanic =)
Also found a tiny bug where if you run out of time in the middle of a story, the bard frog will start singing from whatever step you were, instead of starting back to the first step.