Flatformer by Nick Rafalski
A deck-building platformer
Use cards to navigate the procedurally generated level
Even blow up terrain!
Improve your deck as you beat more levels
Click to play in browser!
Game Background
Flatformer combines the strategy of deck-building with the fun of a platformer!
The action is turn-based, so take your time. On your turn, you may play 1 card, or discard your hand for a new one.
As you explore, you can collect Build Points which can be spent to modify your deck before the next level.
Improve your deck and beat as many levels as possible!
About Me:
This was my third LD game and I definitely bit off more than I could chew. I’m a programmer by trade, so I know the game is not much to look at, but I’m proud of finishing something that has a decent amount of complexity.
Tools:
- Unity
- Inkscape
- Audacity
Change Log:
1.0.2:
- Fixed decks being offset from their spot after dealing
1.0.1:
- Fixed infinite falling bug
| HTML5 (web) | https://nostyleguy.itch.io/flatformer |
| 1.0.2 | http://nostyleguy.com/ld/41/flatformer-1.0.2.zip |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/flatformer |
Ratings
| Overall | 118th | 3.793⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 53th | 3.902⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 62th | 3.976⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 17th | 4.39⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 403th | 3.122⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 77th | 3.667⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 202th | 3.113⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 337th | 3.051⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 45🗳️ | 41🗨️ |
The card system and the mechanics were pretty funny!
The graphic and music are meh, but is ok for a compo game. Polish it!
And, I tried to let an enemy fall away by destroying the ground under him, but I got stomped by his anti-gravity feature XD

Really the only complaint I have is that it's pretty slow between turns (a bias I made my game around i wonder) overall though really nice work! 4/5 overall
@good-enough Thanks! I'm not familiar with that game, and a quick google search turns up a bunch of different results, what are you talking about specifically? Regardless, thanks for the kind words :)
@fantum I think you summed up most of the problems with the game haha! It was definitely a bit too big a scope for my abilities. Glad you see the promise though!
@Pixelhurricane The slowness is definitely a major drag, I know. Enemies that are 'very far' away already instantly teleport to their new position, but waiting for 3 or 4 enemies that aren't far enough away can be feel awkward. Wish I'd come up with a better solution, but c'est la vie. Thanks for the kind words!
@swen Thanks! That beam was my favorite thing to develop for the whole game. The first time I added the particle effects and saw it kill a bunch of stuff, I was grinning from ear-to-ear. Glad you liked it!
@bcvery1 Definitely slow, and I wish I found a way to speed it up. Thanks for the kind words about the audio! It's definitely not my strong-suit but I always have fun making up sfx/music for jams!
@agentendercake Agreed on the pace, wish I had found a better solution than waiting for every enemy. Thanks for the kind words!
..and the one I mentioned was here: https://gamejolt.com/games/chateaux-en-guerre/8661
edit:
Okay, after coming back and playing your game again I liked it even better. The deck builder is great, and the laser destruction beam of terror is sweet, and the enemies are real cute.
The thing that bugs me is when there are cards that don't actually work. Like move x spaces when x spaces ahead there is a block, and you end up just pushing against the block and wasting the card. In a card game, what is on the card happens, so I think that there should be some check to make sure the card will work.
Even better, instead of having the card "apply force in some direction for some amount of time" like it kind of seems to do, it could first determine the space you're going to move to, and then work out the flight trajectory using a parabola.
@John-Darrington Thanks for the kind words! I hope you don't judge the source code too harshly, it's some of the worst spaghetti code I've ever written. This game definitely pushed me to my limits as far as what I can produce in 48 hours. Thanks for playing!
I did find myself wanting to use cards mid jump a lot, but I'm not really sure how you would do that and still have the active gravity!
@gamesplusjames Thanks for the kind words! I totally get what you mean about waiting. I make you wait for every enemy to take his turn in serial. In reality, I could make them all go at once, and it would speed it up a ton. Thanks for your feedback!
Personally, my two favorite things are the big freakin' "blow everything to hell" laser and, the surprisingly amusing sound effects, as basic as they are. Other's have already commented on my biggest complaint which is all the waiting I have to do after I play a card. Removing that downtime would make the game much more player-friendly.
Overall, great job!
The flow of the game was, however, interrupted by a long pause between playing two cards. I'm not the first person to comment on this though, so I won't add to that long list of repetitive comments on it. There was some polish and a certain degree of challenge I missed though, and I don't know if that can be really excused by the amount of content in the game.
@FussenKuh Thank you for the feedback and compliments!
@Snowy Wow 'spoke to me' is such a great compliment to hear. Even more so when it's a genre of game you aren't fond of. Beyond the slow pace, you're also right about the difficulty. I failed to allocate enough time to make truly challenging levels, and that is one of my biggest regrets. Live and learn! Thanks for playing!
Also, the audio is super fun, there is something about mouth sounds that really gets me everytime.
My only critique is regarding the jumps, since it took me some time to figure out which jumps would be able to reach specifics platforms. Overall your scope seems very good and the gameplay has lots of potential.
Congratulations!
@Richard-n-silva Wow I'm flattered! I have seen quite a few card-game/platformers so far, though I'll admit mine is one of the few turn-based ones. FYI, there is a blue 'preview' arc when you click the 'P' button on the jump cards that'll show where you'll go. For some inexplicable reason, I didn't mention this anywhere in the game, or on the this page, so I don't blame you for not noticing it. Thanks again for the feedback :)
I dont' know if anyone point it out in the comment already but I'm not sure if the proceduraly generated level is the best idea, you can probably do great level by hand with such a concept ! In my opinion levels were very fun but a bit simple, handmade level could have make things a bit more tricky =) (but level design is very time consuming also, soooo idk...)
Good joob anyway, I really enjoyed playing your game !
(and sorry for my english, i'm french ^^')
After that it was quite easy to figure out how to play, after trying a few cards to see what they would do. Even knowing a card, though, it's sometimes hard to tell exactly what it will do in some cases. Will the jump parabola be able to reach this ledge? Or this card hanging in mid-air? Having some visualisation in the world of the card's effect might make this more intuitive.
The game mechanic is pretty fun, considering I don't typically like card games. Sometimes you have to wait a long time for the enemies to perform their turns which is extremely annoying and breaks the flow. The camera is a bit lazy and has some problems falling behind following the player, and it's so zoomed in that sometimes you can't see the floor on the layer underneath you.
On the second level the Deck Builder screen popped up telling you about a buy/sell cards mechanic. After writing this I realised that that screen _is_ the buy/sell cards screen. I'm not entirely sure what purpose the deck builder serves -- again, I'm not a card player -- except give you more of a certain card, but it's all shuffled and the cards get re-used anyway. Some cards are smaller size than others. I'm not sure if that's a bug or some feature I missed?
Overall a cool game and I'm always a fan of mouth-made sound effects! It'd be addicting with better pacing and intuitive UI!
Having to "program" a sequence of cards that the spaceship has to execute all in one go would be an interesting twist too.
@helpcomputer Thank you so much! I'm always humbled by the positive feedback on my silly sfx and music. Thanks for playing!
@RaccoonLudos That makes my day to hear you'd click the discard button just to hear my silly sfx! Thanks for the feedback!
@tsjost You managed to find an accidentally left-in feature! Hitting the 'D' key automatically brings up the deck-builder, even though it's only supposed to show up before a new level. Whoops! You're right about the deck-builder not being very useful. I give you 7 pretty useful cards right away, and there isn't much need to customize your deck. I was hoping to have more card types, and require the user to customize his deck to have hopes of beating harder levels, but I ran out of time. The small cards are a bug. They're no different than the regular sized ones, but for some reason their scale changes when I move them around the various UI states (deck, hand, discard). Never figured it out in time! Overall, thanks for the great feedback! I really like your sequence/queue idea too!
@Schu Thanks so much for the feedback! You're definitely right about the slow pace, and that 'destroy the ground in front of you' is definitely a failing on my part as a level designer. A few people have commented on that. Thanks for playing and for the compliments!
The only issue I ran into was that I sometimes fell back down from a ledge after a high jump, that felt like janky physics.
The levels are not complicated, even though they don't get more difficult. The deck building aspect was exciting. I started to add cards at first, and then realized that a deck of 5 cards (->, ->->, ->->->, Jump1, Jump2) allows you to have consistency and to solve all levels without issues. From this point and on, I drawing card was just an animation that put back the card I used in my end, and the deck building aspect was unused. It would have been better to raise the minimum limit to 10 cards, or add a concept that makes having few cards a bad thing. :smiley:
Overall the game is a lot of fun, and can be trully mastered in a few steps! Well done! :smile:
Also, the SFX were perfect. 5/5
@Goutye Wow thanks for the compliment! You are spot-on about the deck building. I originally wanted to only give the players very few boring cards (dash-1, jump-1) at the start, and slowly increase the level complexity, while allowing them to buy more cards. Harder levels would also require more specific cards, like 2 dash-3s in a row, etc. But I ran out of time to make a good level progression and went with the procedural route, which meant I had to make sure the player had all the cards necessary to overcome any obstacle from the start. Anyway, thanks for the great feedback and for playing!
I enjoyed it a lot and I hope to to see more from you. Cheers!
@Chaseplays I definitely agree about it being too easy. Thanks for the kind words!