By the Sword by wilsk
By the Sword was an overly ambitious attempt at making a multiplayer card game in ~~48~~ 72 hours. It mostly works, but I probably wouldn't consider it a "proper game" as yet.
To play, open up one normal browser window and get a friend to open another (or open a second browser window in private mode to play two-handed). Open the link and click the "vs People" button. Then create a lobby. Once two players have joined (you may need to refresh the lobby page to see updates) then you can both click start and away you go. There is a rules page accessible from the home page.
In By The Sword, you and up to ~~3~~ ~~2~~ 1 of your friends enter the arena in Ancient Rome, ready to fight to gain popularity and earn your life, and your freedom. Will you work together to defeat the enemies in the arena, or will you turn on each other and be the last surviving Gladiator, winning all the fame and glory for yourself?
Known issues
- Many (most?!) card special effects are not implemented
- There is almost no visual feedback on actions :)
- creatures don't fight back yet.
Example cards
Mini post mortem
Life and parenthood during lock down made this an overly ambitious project for a 72 hour game jam and in the end I just ran out of steam. I think the game design is interesting, but the implementation is only about 70% usable with limited help text, animations etc. So it may be a little hard to follow as you try to play it.I may develop it further, but will probably do it on paper first.
Ratings
| Overall | 2430th | 2.714⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 2291th | 2.658⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1873th | 2.947⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 2486th | 2.425⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 2175th | 2.632⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 2214th | 2.65⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 16🗳️ | 17🗨️ |
Good work :)! - And I think you should develop it further.
@bulle yes, I think one of the issues with the current framework I've been building is that any changes to the game state are updated immediately in the GUI, so its a bit hard to give feedback, which makes it harder to play!
@matt2728 most of the heavy lifting is done by boardgame.io, although I had developed a fair bit of "framework" around it.
it takes a lot of courage, and we as game jammers should incentivize more people to do the same
Sadly we couldn't make it to work as intended. We tried reading the rules but I don't know if we misunderstood or if the game is broken...
For example after the phase where we are supposed to discarded card it says that we'll get back to 5 and this didn't happened. I also ended up with zero gladiator for an unknown reason...
Also I feel like the game lacks visual feedback clarifying what action does what.
I'll be eager to test an updated and fixed version if you continue working on it though :)
@adinimys yep, great point about feedback, its a bit of a limitation with the framework I've been using so I'm thinking if I progress further with digital of trying a different way. I definitely bit off more than I could chew with this project, at least for 72 hours :)
I'm thinking I'll have another go at this at some point, but I'll likely do a paper copy first to play test before I jump back into digital.