Very unusual game with surprisingly engaging atmosphere. Good work!

The story was compelling. I wanted it to continue.

@binarylynx Thanks — I spent way too much time tweaking the lightning and look of the cards. Glad it was worth something!

@gnarly-narwhal Wow, I didn't expect to hear that... obviously I hoped people would like the story, but I had so little time to write it that I didn't even proofread 90% of what I wrote. Maybe I'll continue it after all!

Ok. You win. Your game is amazing. I was enthralled from start to finish.

Firstly, the writing was a treat. All the images and UI elements were sharp and colorful. The sound effects were pleasant to hear.

Gameplay wise, the choices of which item to sacrifice created a powerful motivation for multiple playthroughs. If this were a full game I could EASILY see myself running through it multiple times just to experiment with the exchange system.

The Exchanger magic users put a twist on the Sacrifice theme that I hadn't seen yet, and I loved it.

The only thing I could pick out to complain about was that the text appearing at the bottom of the text area made it difficult to read sometimes. Let me see if I can put the issue into words adequately...

My eyes were locked onto the bottom of the text box. New text appears. I don't know at this moment how many lines of text are now above here that I haven't read. So my eyes scan to the next line up. Have I read this? Nope. Next line? Nope. Next? Still nope. This one? Not this one either. What about this next line, now 5 lines about where my eyes started? Okay, I've read this line. Go back down one, start reading from here to the bottom.

Every time you click, that reading experience repeats. It wasn't gamebreaking, but sometimes when text came a lot of lines at a time, it became unpleasant.

Overall, I had a wonderful time with your game. It's beautiful.

@erasmus-crowley
Re: the criticism... totally agree. A funny thing about playtesting a narrative game that you wrote, I just realized, is that you don't actually end up reading through the story, you kinda just click through it. I don't have a good sense of what it's like to read the text for the first time, trying to comprehend it. Definitely should have thought through that a little more.

Re: the rest... thank you very much. :)

EDIT: I suspect scrolling down to the new text instead of having it suddenly appear would let the eye see more naturally where it begins... will be overhauling the UI if I end up continuing this. Thanks for the thoughtful critique!

It was a nice game to play. I enjoyed this game thanks.

One of the best and unique games I've played at the compo for sure! I really loved the narrative and the card system which accompanies the story well. Even if you say you didn't have enough time I had a satisfying ending, just enough to get a taste of game that this might be. Well done!

Constructive criticism:
- Colored text so you easily know who speaks what (not that I was confused, just polishing detail)
- Some gentle ambient music (maybe crowd murmuring when you perform before villages?)

You've nailed it :wink:

Really good game. I like the designs of the cards, they were gorgeous. I really wanted to continue !

WOW it is really great and unique. i wish there was more of it.

Great start on this, nice story, interesting incorporation of the theme. Cards were beautiful!

@blodyavenger Good ideas. I could go even further than your colored text idea and use a more "gamey" dialogue-box system. I think I overconstrained myself by only using paragraphs of prose. And yeah, I should work on my audio skills more so I can get proper sound in next time.

@mrwillowb @akuirako @tolga @vernon Thanks!

Interesting concept. Love the card art and mechanic. You nailed the mechanic well. Well done! Oh yeah, engaging story.

@caeonosphere Great implementation of cool idea.

The card art, mechanical gameplay and story was really great and intuitive, this is the best part of your game. As someone pointed out, when new lines of text appeared, I was confused where the last text ended. Some background music would make the game even better, I kind of missed that. The overall idea and world you created was so awesome and I enjoyed playing. Keep going! :)

The writing is great! Concept is neat too and I like the idea of cards representing items. Would be interesting to see where this could go.

The card art is *amazing*. I'm mesmerized!! and you implemented a card system *and* a scripting language. I didn't miss the audio, I didn't miss more of a story, the story you have is top notch already. Also the core gameplay is impressive enough for me. Kudos and top marks, seriously. Such an elegant submission <3

Extremely good! At first I was fearing that the game might go for something too Cultist Simulator -like, but this turned into a whole thing of its own. The writing was very good and the choices were presented well, although definitely more in the form of "I wonder what this does" than "I can figure out the 'correct' solution here". The art was also very nice. Excited to see where this goes!

@christina-antoinette-neofotistou Thank you, thank you! I feel like LD is really helping with my rapid prototyping skills -- no way would I have had time for the scripting language a year ago. I would have hardcoded everything and it would have been a total mess. Now I actually feel like I could keep working on this.

@hempuli Funny you mention Cultist Simulator: I've only ever seen screenshots of it, never played it or watched gameplay, though I feel like I kind of know how it works... and the whole time I was working on this, I was paranoid that I was somehow copying it! Glad to hear my game didn't end up as an inadvertent clone. I'll say that I was inspired by my uninformed conception of Cultist Simulator.

@bumdag @nearpit @esosek @silkworm-sweatshop Thanks! I was so disappointed at the end of the 48 hours because I hadn't gotten the story to a good stopping point, and I considered not even submitting it! The kind words are making me really glad I did.

@caeonosphere We are glad you did too. To be honest, I was the same...I had little time on the last day and I too am glad I submitted it. Try mine out if you haven't yet ;)

Really interesting idea, nice presentation and mood, and great graphics for the cards.

This was pretty neat! I do think that, as you yourself have said, the story kind of gets cut off before it really gets a chance to begin, but what's there was pretty solid writing-wise and managed to show off the central mechanics. Even if, unfortunately, we never really saw something resembling a more major sacrifice.

For 48-hours, I am, for putting it all together -- especially writing-wise -- it's good work!

At first I had no idea where this was going... and then I was hooked. I would love to play more... the idea is very compelling!
I think some of the cards were difficult to get a grasp on in terms of their weight, but by the last exchange it was more of a pro than a con as it left me with a desire to experiment.
The text box itself could probably be iterated on, and music and fluff could be added, but at its core this is really fun and really smooth looking.

Did you actually write some text for every item with every exchange? That must have taken ages. It was cool though, and the attention to detail thus presented was impressive.

The whole tarot aesthetic with the cards was really awesome as well, definitely contributed to the overall magical theme.

I'd love to see a more extended version with a complete story, though I think you'd want to find a system other than writing a response for every item with every sacrifice.

@selkkie My plan, if I pick this up again, is to add a limited rewind feature to facilitate more experimentation. I was also thinking of maybe writing super short blurbs for each item to display when you're deciding which to sacrifice, which would give some idea of what the character plans to do with it. Would that have made you experiment less, do you think?

@chao I did! It took 6-7 of my 48 hours, and was about 7,000 words in all. You can see them in the script files [here.](https://github.com/thquinn/Exchange/tree/master/Assets/Resources/Pages) I agree that, especially as the game goes on, it would become super onerous to have unique text for each possible item... but that's part of the appeal! I could employ some tricks to guarantee that certain items can't stick around for too long, maybe. I'd have to lay out the final outline and do a count before I'd know how bad it would be.

@fishbrain @dwam Thanks for playing!

What a stellar compo entry! We enjoyed so many aspect of this game – the fantastic, humorous writing, the pretty font, the visual and sound effects! This might be one of my favorite games I've seen at Ludum Dare ever! Thank you so much for making this!

Please definitely ping us when you release more content for this game.

@blinry What an honor! You guys do really great work. If I continue, I'll make sure you hear about it.

Nice work! The writing is great and captivating and certainly manages to set up the kind of narrative that one can easily get lost in. It may have been more of a marginally interactive book than a "game" (whatever that means), but it was a good one—it's too bad you weren't able to finish it!

I can really respect all the work that must've gone into writing different text for all the possible choices of sacrificed items in any of the situations throughout the story.

There's no music, but it was certainly nice to have a few sound effects to accentuate things.

Really appreciate that it was possible to scroll back up and to look at cards and read their description again in case I got distracted or accidentally clicked a card away before I was finished reading the first time.

Good job! c: