The Card Crafter by Grhyll
What's this game
It's a card game.
Fight creatures, gather resources, craft cards.
Yup, as simple as that.
Important tuto
There's an ingame tuto, but some elements are still quite confusing.
During the fight, you gather bonuses that will appear on the right side of the screen. Those bonuses can't be used during the fight!
Once out of fight, the left side is your cards collection. If you click on an empty square, it will open a menu to craft a new card and that's where those bonuses come in handy.
Once crafted, a card can be used in fight, and that's it /o/
Craft card
Improve cards
And fight!
Big Takeways
It was hard.
Like, very hard.
It's very, very much a system game, with a lot of intricate elements. It's absolutely what I wanted to do though, because I usually do more narrative games, or simple puzzle games, so I underestimated the difficulty. As a result, there's a lot I couldn't do, since I just got to the point of a kinda playable state 30mn before the deadline.
Content
The content is... poor. It's very frustrating, because building the system was obviously the hardest part, by far, and now that it's built, adding content is a lot easier. (Not adding bugs in the process would probably be a bit more challenging, but I hope the system is overall pretty safe.)
In a card crafting game, you'd expect to... be able to craft a lot of things, right? Well, too bad, there are only 3 different bonuses available. Would I have had two more hours, I may have been able to add maybe 1 or 2, and just that would have exponentially raised the amount of possibilities.
But well, it's 48h, no more, that's the fun /o/
I still managed to multiply the variety of enemies by 9 during the last half-hour. (Ok, there are only 9 enemies, and 3 different sprites in total. DON'T BE MEAN.)
Polish
It's... dry. I love polishing, doing small feedback and FX everywhere.
I couldn't. I hope there still is some fun in there.
Sound
Uh, that one hurts a lot as well. I love composing music, and doing small sounds.
There is... no sound in the game x_x
Visuals
It's exceptionally poor as well, but at least there's nothing surprising about that for me. I'm a programmer. It's programmer art.
UI
Damn, thinking the UI for such a game was quite a challenge. I lost a lot of time just trying to figure out how to present the elements in a readable way that could be understood. I think the result is ok-ish?
| Youtube | https://grhyll.itch.io/the-card-crafter |
| Youtube | https://github.com/Grhyll/LD45 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/the-card-crafter |
Ratings
| Overall | 102th | 3.75⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 55th | 3.821⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 95th | 3.75⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 220th | 3.476⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 420th | 2.679⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 228th | 2.583⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 316th | 2.987⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 39🗳️ | 47🗨️ |
The gameplay is really good and satisfying, even if there are only 3 cards components for now.
If you plan to make more of this game please tell me, I'd really look forward to see more of it.
@los Damn, I'll admit my tuto is a bit short! To craft cards, you have to click on an empty square of the left side once there's "Cards collection" displayed on the top. It opens the crafting menu, and you can use the bonuses you got when you killed the enemies during the fight part :)
@shared Ooh thank you ^__^ I'd really love to make a real game from this, with tons of combinations! It would require such a big budget to have acceptable art and everything though (not even mentioning the three projects I'm currently working on....) :/ It's definitely something I'll keep thinking about though!
really like your design intentions here, would love to see more abilities and content :)
@slovnoslomo Ooh cool, thanks! Glad you could see the intention because, yeah, that's pretty much all there is to it ^^' And yeah I haven't tried your game yet, but I see Audio isn't among the categories to vote for x)
@shared I'm blushing ^_^ About to try yours btw!
@los Oh cool! (Or... not cool? ^^' I didn't have a lot of time to playtest so there must be a ton of bugs...)
@kekkodude Thanks :D Yeah the balancing is totally random, to be honest I added the waves progressions in the last half hour and couldn't even test it, so... that kinda shows ^^'
Sometimes it seems to auto attack enemies in range and sometimes I have to initiate it, not sure if intentional or not :)
I'd really like to play a game like this WITH SOUND and some more polished graphics!
Great work :)
@rayne Thanks, I guess we all did around here ^^
@locomule Wow super glad you found it intuitive, I was pretty scared it would be impossible to understand ^^'
@lesinvisible Uuh thanks I guess? ^^' I didn't really have a clear set of things to do in mind, I mainly wanted to have the base system and as many cards as possible :D (Which turned out to be exactly 3 :'D)
Boy was I wrong. This might be one of the most fun games I've played this LD.
The mechanics are very simple once you understood them. The more I played, the more I learned what card modifications were beneficial. I kept my deck at 4 cards and just buffed them as far as I could every round.
Then I discovered I could modify myself. I AM A GOD NOW.
I loved it. I loved the tactical placement of my pieces on the board. And using buffed up fireballs to snipe the nasty looking ones from afar.
The missing sound doesn't hurt the game. And the graphics are nice and simple, they get the mechanics across and fit this type of game very well.
Minor critic point? After you understand the mechanics and have a buffed out deck, it becomes almost too easy :wink:
I think you are too harsh on yourself. This is wonderful for 48h and I enjoyed it a lot!
:hugging:
Congratulation it's pretty neat!
@romes Thank you!
@netmute Wow this is so wholesome ^_^ Thank you very much! You may want to check out Into the Breach if you've never tried it, I felt the same way you describe at the beginning of your comment toward it, I only tried it because I had it for free, and damn was it so cool! But yeah the progression of my game is totally broken, I only added the different enemies right at the end and couldn't even test them, I supposed players would never be able to go this far, since I had no time to really test the balancing ^^'
@savvy-community Thank you so much ^^
(too bad there's no save button, I'll stop here...)
But... well, it was a friend of mine! I didn't expect to see that kind of stuff from strangers ^^' Thank you very much, it makes me super proud ^^ I definitely want a lot to make a real game out of that, I have so many ideas, and I hope I'll make it happen someday!
@d4rkweasel Thank you :D I'd like that a lot, gonna have to figure out how I could make some time for that without sacrificing my other current projects ^^'
The only think I'd change to make it a bit less easy is to remove **one** of:
- Mana regenerate per turn
- Can use each minion once per turn (change to once per fight instead)
- Minions death is not permanent (change to permadeath, but that makes the game much more difficult probably)
- Player and minions do not attack at full attack level all adjacent cases, but instead for example lose in attack for the turn the defense of the enemy they kill, so that a 30 attack can kill 3 enemies with 10 def, but not 4 enemies with 8 (after the third enemy, the player only has (30-3*8)=6 attack left for the turn).
Each has advantages and drawbacks, makes the game a little or a lot harder. :grinning: