Heart of the Cards by Neon
Heart of the Cards is a trading card game first person shooter. It has elements of both, though the core gameplay loop is most familiar to FPS players. In the game, you fight against waves of enemies in an arena, using magical trading cards as your weapons. Getting hit by enemies makes you drop cards, and killing enemies makes them drop cards. If you lose all of your cards, you lose the game.
Controls
- Movement: WASD
- Sprinting: Shift+WASD
- Draw a card / throw a card: Left-click
Screenshots

Ratings
| Overall | 384th | 3.326⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 417th | 3.159⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 456th | 3.136⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 462th | 3.341⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 265th | 3.455⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 379th | 2.705⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 17🗳️ | 16🗨️ |
I wish there was more to the way the card effects interacted with each other - i.e. maybe fire does nothing on a frozen enemy etc. Also wish the effects lasted a bit longer so I could think out what I was doing more instead of spamming cards.
I'll definitely be checking out the source later.
I agree about the effects lasting longer, I kind of wanted the game to be slower paced anyway. Turns out, it's hard to make an FPS feel fun while being slow. I guess that's a design challenge I'll have to overcome at some point.
A note about the source: this was my second Godot project, so I don't yet have an intuition for structuring Godot projects or using its systems the way they're supposed to be used: the code is very hardcoded and has lots of hacks. Just a warning :slight_smile:
Trying to use the doorways for cover didn't work very well for me - I'd keep ending up just flubbing my cards into the doorframe when trying to shoot through the doorway. I think it's because the cards seem to originate from the right side of the player when thrown. It turned out to not be a necessary strategy, though.
@Smiling Cat Entertainment Yeah, the cards originate from where they are (ie. next to the character). The cards are actually the same object for the card's whole lifetime: they spawn from the enemy and go to the floor, to the deck, to the hand, and finally end up in some monster or wall. :grin: Bad design, I think, but it's the way it ended up being.
E.g.
* Electric = 1 damage to enemies within a cone
* Ice = Freeze enemy in place
So by having 1 electric and 1 ice in your hand your next spell might freeze enemies in a cone.
My main gripe was how the cards threw from the right, which made predicting where they'd go really difficult, but otherwise really fun to play, great work!
Edit: Also the enemy animations were super cute :)
On the gameplay front, the only real problem is that the aiming feels a little off - I guess there is some ideal distance at which you will hit an enemy in the centre of the screen, but if they are too close you have to aim slightly left. I also think the card element is underdeveloped in favour of the FPS side of the gameplay. I think in most card based games you would be able to choose from a selection of cards each turn, and it would be really cool to see something like that introduced to this game, if you continue to develop it, along with more card types, more status effects, cards that act on the player etc.
Overall, a very nice looking game in which I can see a lot of potential, good work!
On the other hand, I think the "There's no health bar, you lose when you run out of cards and getting hit knocks cards out of your hand" thing is brilliant!
It's got a lot of potential. You could have a "real" game going here with just a little more work!
@masterkrepta I noticed the lag at the very end of the compo and didn't have time to fix it. Thanks for the heads up, I didn't even notice myself that the lag could be coming from the spawner system.
And thanks to everyone for the feedback!