Awesome concept and juicy execution! I love it =D
The cards you draw feel a bit too random at the moment, but maybe I am not using my brain enough.

It's really slick and well made, but doing matrix multiplication in your head is hard!

Wow, probably the most original - and most polished, too - game I have seen in this Ludum Dare!

**Thank yous!** :hugging:

@tschery Yeah, it's completely random. So sometimes you can go for dozens of turns without getting anywhere and sometimes you have only winning cards in your starting hand. Sure, maybe having some kind of smart draw system would have been cool but those are hard to do and balance. :sweat_smile:

@wibblymat I know! Well it's not that hard really but takes a lot of time and memory. While developing I did find some patterns to look out for that result in success. The easiest being having a triple zero in any row or column.

@jani-nykanen Was it the first game you saw? Either way, high praise indeed, thanks!

Good visuals and effects give this game a polished feel.It has a Nintendo look to it, and I have a soft spot for math games and puzzles. Congratulations on a nicely done educational game.

Gotta love Matrices, also the Graphics :thumbsup:

Superb graphics and audio. My only suggestion is preventing cards from having rows or columns of all zeros.

So cute. ^_^

@stevenjmiller Thanks! Why do you think there shouldn't be such cards? Because they don't do anything on addition/subtraction or because they are a too easy of a win with multiplication? :thinking:

@antii-haavikko They make the multiplication too easy.

@stevenjmiller Haha, I bet you'll be the only person to comment about them being too easy :dizzy_face:

Holly molly, are we facing the new Sudoku? We might be. The game is slow and chilled, the music and the graphics make sure you take it calmly, which makes a lot of sense since it's a puzzle game. it's perfectly polished and super easy to understand (I'm not saying it's easy to win). Please make an app out of it, invest in marketing, make some moneyz and remember me when you have your own company lol.

I dont have to tell you, since you definetly know it already but Im going to anyways the polish is amazing! The game looks great and it feels good. It doesnt seem like a gamejam game but like an actual finished game. Good Job on that.
I think the gameplay is lacking though. I didnt feel like I made a meaningful choice, unless I could win in the same round that I made the decision. I cant know what the enemies next move can be (there will be a new card which I cant see in my turn) so I didnt feel like I could outplay him (make it impossible for him to win, since I know what he can do). Also I dont know what he will do, so trying to plan ahead wont work at all. So every turn my possibilities where "I can win so I do that" and "I cant win so lets just play something"

Maybe the enemy and the player have their own sets of cards and interact in some meaningful way, so that you can actually plan ahead, but at the same time that is a lot of calc in the head you would have to do for that as a player. So maybe in that case, the player can see the results when he goes over the card idk But atm there is no meaningful choice to make and no learning to do.

Thanks for making the game it was really innovativ :)

@bluemirror Thanks for playing and the insightful feedback! You are quite correct on the gameplay. I did notice it myself that it's pretty much the same loop every single turn, look for the winning move and if it isn't there, just pick something and hope for the best. And now that I think about it, even adding a visible que of upcoming cards would let you plan ahead a bit more and it wouldn't be so much RNG based. But as you said, that might be a bit too much calculations for mere mortals. One other way to go around it could be removing the whole AI opponent completely and make it more like a puzzle with preset cards where you need to find the correct set operations that would net you the win.

I did toy around with the idea of adding a preview functionality but then didn't do it because I thought it would destroy the whole idea and you could easily just try all the options and see what sticks. So in the end I just decided to leave it as it is currently and focus more on the polish. Adding hats and stuff to desperately try to keep players interested.

@xarras Thanks! Not quite up there with the sudoku though. Could work if I went more in that puzzle direction as I explained in the first paragraph. But it was too big of a change to do in the mid point of the compo so I just decided to go with the route of polishing a turd. :wink:

This is really cool, I've not seen anything like it. The gameplay was a little lost on me but I can see something like this working very well in a teaching environment. Graphics and animations were charming.

As others have said, the game may have possibly benefited more if you weren't just combating the AI -- a solo experience where you simply try to solve the puzzles using what tools are given to you would've perhaps worked a bit better, although I could imagine this being a fun lil' two-player experience! The entire game has such a weird concept and I love it. Definitely something I wouldn't think of, and it helped me sharpen up my matrix skills after so many years, haha. Overall, this was a small little time-killer that I could see myself trying out again. Nice work!

@cruise-elroy Thanks! Yes the game has some flaws but if I can get people like you to refresh their knowledge of matrix maths or manage to introduce them to completely new people (while not being horribly bored), I feel like it does the job it is intended to.

Very criative game and nice artwork!

This was a really solid entry! I enjoyed the amount of polish that went into the art and the collecting of clothing was a nice touch. It was good to see that you were able to make a functional polished tutorial. I would say that the gameplay itself is the weak point of the entry as in many ways it seems mostly chance based but it was an interesting play none-the-less!

Definitely one of the most overall polished games I have seen so far the audio and visual feedback were very nice, good job and good luck!

I love the concept!

This was actually really fun! Cool idea, and very nicely executed with the animations, sound effects, tutorial. The music is my favorite of all LD games I've tried so far! :D

@vottivott Wow thanks, so glad to hear someone liked the music! I'm a complete musical newbie. I've been a programmer for over 20 years so obviously that is my forté and doing art stuff is simple especially when working with a simple style such as this. But music creation on the other hand is something I have no grasp on and I've only dabbled on few times on jams only.

Gonna echo previous statements here, but fighting the AI feels a bit unfair given the random nature of cards you get and wild swings in board's state. Still, this is a very solid entry that had me thinking hard about my next move. Good job.

I uploaded my gameplay of this game on youtube, you can find it here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-_w0YS0Z1I

Thanks for being part of the stream :)

This entry shows some serious promise. The level of polish is amazing, more so for a compo entry, and the core mechanic sounds fun and very original in theory.

When I played, however, I got the impression that making matches in the end mostly came down to luck with the RNG giving you some good matrices. As you've already mentioned on the comments, perhaps some smart dealing would help this. Also, I'm afraid that the amount of arithmetics involved (especially when matrix multiplication an option) can be overwhelming and break the flow of the game, as most players will resort to pen and paper or a 3x3 matrix calculator to precompute the possible results (that only for their turn. If they also wanted to make a pass at anticipating the rival that would be insane)

In any case, I really dig what the game sets out to do. I'm sure that these things I've pointed can be improved (changing to 2x2 matrices, and reworking the objective, maybe? I'm not sure) somehow, so congratulations!! :grinning:

A good serious game, simple but could be used in math teaching. Congratulations.

Um bom serious game, simples mas poderia ser utilizado no ensino de matemática. Parabéns. :flag_br:

Really interesting idea! It feels slow to win though, maybe it would help if you had some wildcards and other ways to manipulate the numbers. I really like the graphics and sounds.

This is a very original game! Good work on the art and animation. Top notch sound as well. I majored in math so this was right up my alley. I'll be revisiting this one.

This was a real brain twister, sweet concept! Definitely looks and sounds fantastic for only 48 hours, I wasn't really able to actually calculate the matrices in my head but hats off to anyone who can :sweat_smile: I also didn't realize after the introduction that I was supposed to face off against the guy on the right, so I was trying to get a correct solution for a few minutes before just choosing a random card. But really awesome job!

Definitely the most innovative entry!

Amazing content made in 48 hrs!

Very well done but a little hard for me hahaha:)

@cliff-lee-cl Thanks! Yeah, it's too hard and too easy at the same time. You can just throw in random cards and eventually win.

@arly Thanks! Yeah, seen/heard quite a few people do the same thing. It's kinda weird as soon how as I introduce matrices, people seem to forget how tic-tac-toe works or what your goal is (even though it's the first thing I tell them). Maybe matrix math is just too scary and people straight up forget everything they previously knew when introduced to matrices :flushed:. But yeah, of course stuff like that could quite easily be solved and made better but it's nearly impossible to get right in a weekend without any proper playtesting.

@gruhh Exactly what I was going for. Kinda. Making an serious educational game and trying to make it seem not so serious. I bet people will end up learning how matrix operations work (unless they knew it already) even if they don't really try to run all the calculations.

@ithildin You're right, at least starting with 2x2 matrix would have probably made it better. Maybe also adding in like matrix cards of 0-2 after the 0-1 ones etc before going for the full blown 0-9 ones.

Hehe I ended up quitting trying to do the math after multiplication... completed the game on the first try by just clicking through random buttons. Cool game, I wish I could give some valuable feedback but I really can't ._. I guess you could give some more examples in the multiplication matrix calculations so that scrubs like me can understand it x)

GG

@oliverlevay Haha yeah, you're quite right about doing it completely randomly. Even the opponent does its picks randomly and only in the last level start running the calculation all the time. I was quite sure that people wouldn't be bothered to do the numbers for more than few times on multiplication so I didn't want to make it too punishing. Yup, the "tutorial" for multiplication could have been better. Couldn't fit the whole operation in one speech bubble area I had and didn't want to split it to too many either so it ended up probably being too non-informative for people completely new to matrix multiplication. Especially so since you couldn't go back to previous messages. Maybe adding a help button which would recap the previous taught operation again would have been nice.

Good to hear that you beat it. Even if it was by just throwing in random cards. I was very afraid of everyone getting put off by the complexity of the multiplication and would instantly rage quit. And I still think that the majority of players will do so and miss out on all those pretty hats...

It's really tough! I like the look and feel of it, and the idea of the game feels clever, but then that's a whole lot of arithmetic to go beyond random guessing. I wonder if it would be more fun without an opponent. Maybe a limited number of cards that run out, so the challenge is figuring out how to use the cards in the right order so you can solve it without running out of cards?

What a ridiculously polished piece of work! I'm really impressed. I think the escalation of difficulty is pretty unfair, though; it would have been nicer if one could choose the difficulty level, as well as adding a local multiplayer setting in the game. Still, I enjoyed the experiment.

I really enjoyed the polish on the visuals and the audio in this game! Top notch-writing, and an innovative game mechanic, well done! I don't think I really *enjoyed* doing the calculations in my head, and sometimes just clicked around randomly, but I was certainly entertained by the whole thing, thanks! :)