Trap-o-mancy by karreg
Try to get a good omen for your visitors, as a fortune-teller. Promise them richness and health for the future. But be carefull, it's a double edged sword. Cards are powerfull and can kill your visitors !


How to play
To do your omen, draw the tarot cards one by one and drop them in the order that you want to determine their interpretation. When you draw a card, you can insert it before, between, or after the previous cards.
Each card has it's own effect. Use them to presage the best fortune to your visitor (the "coins"), without omen them future injuries which can kill them (the "hearts").
When you think your omen is ready to render, click on "Validate the omen" to adress it to your visitor. You can also touch the cristal ball to preview the result.
Credits
Pierre Terakopiantz (Karreg) : Game Design, Developpement (Unity), Graphics. Thomas Fernandez : Music and SFX
Patch v 1.2 - Bug on The World card corrected - Cristal ball estimation corrected - Descriptions of the cards corrected and more detailed - 3rd personne objectives corrected
Patch v 1.3 - Dialogue corrected after the third visitor - Hand coordinates on embedded screen corrected
Patch v 1.4 - Level goals corrected - First levels more easier - 4 new levels - Goals and visitor caracteristics clearly shown
Patch v 1.5 - Retry dialog bug now corrected (bug introduced in v1.4)
| Youtube | https://karreg.itch.io/patched-trap-o-mancy |
| Youtube | https://karreg.itch.io/trap-o-mancy |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/trap-o-mancy |
Ratings
| Overall | 83th | 4.172⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 106th | 4.069⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 14th | 4.431⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 2192th | 3.034⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 561th | 4.069⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 153th | 4.052⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 403th | 3.607⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 374th | 3.879⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 56🗳️ | 19🗨️ |
The game is super original, appealing, and the game is super greatly executed. You've pointed an excellent concept for a future release !!
It is confusing at first but if you take a minute to really look at the cards it's really interesting what you can come up with.
I loved the gameplay mechanics, it would be nice to have a bit more feedback on what cards are
actually doing some of theme are a bit confusing (death).
Also being able to reorder the card you just played if you did not preview the result would be nice.
Nevertheless a VERY fun game on witch i had a great time.
@evgeniya-zapolnova : yeah the game is actually pretty hard, I should fix that in a future patch. But no, you can't move the cards already placed : once you interpreted a card, you couldn't turn it back. The only solution is to insert a favorable card before or after to influence his effect.
@freakoftheyear : yes, I will ! I think these mechanics could do a great game if the cards are equilibrated, and adding more content to the game :) But first, I will continue to patch the game to ease the challenge, as you said.
@michael-horst : yeah I added the objectives feature quickly at the end of the jam ^^' I will do a patch with more content and less frustrating challenges. Maybe some card modifications too.
Considering the limited space on the board, some cards are really not helpful like the one that cancel another. Effectively you'll be lacking one card. Death is also quite hard to benefit from (I guess it's fitting if that was the intent ^^)
If I'm not mistaken there is an issue with the card that "puts to the power of to" as it says in the description that it's the number of card plus one to the power of 2 and with two cards it should be 9 (3 x 3) while I'm pretty sure I got 8 which is 2 to the power of the number of card + 1 (2 x 2 x 2). I'm not 100% sure but might be good to check :smile:
When the last visitor came back (I think I played her 3 times, it was really fun), she comes back with the message of thanks that she has when she leaves. Minor bug here but it felt weird.
As a last bit of criticism I find the text displaying way too slowly making the player wait to read the card description.
Overall, a really good game. Congratulations !
For the second visitor, it's a bug actually ^^' I hadn't the time to implement a minimum card played mandatory of 3 to validate the omen. It will be implemented for the next patch.
Concerning the "bad cards", yep, I agry. I'll probably change many effects for the future of the game.
The original idea here was to reproduce the "black jack" tension, when you know you take a risk at draw a new card. I think a good way to conserve that is to change the objectives of an omen : the game should not judge the absolute result, but the score the player obtained relatively with his given cards. It could give a more resilient game, and more permessive to powerfull positive and negative effects.
For the power, 8 is the good result : 2 ^ (nb played cards + 1). But maybe the description of the card is not correct ? I'm not very fluent in English, maybe the problem comes from here.
And yes, after the third visitor, the game bugs ^^ It will be patched soon :p
I noted your remark about the text. I will increase the speed :)
For the power situation, I just checked and you were right. There is no error, I read it wrongly the first time I got it ^^
The best cards were the ones that interact with other cards, like (x2 all values of previous card). Adding more like that, would improve the game a lot I think. Maybe have cards always have at least some value, so that if you get only utility cards, that you can still do something with your omen.
It's now corrected in the 1.5 patched version.
I hope nobody saw that ^^'
It took me a try or two to do so because the layout of the expected outcome was a bit off. Perhaps it would be clearer to place the objective outcome above the customer and to move the stats below, or something like that that kept both bits of data closer.
I liked the music, too. Good job!
The music and sounds were well made and really added to the mood, the gameplay was sooo fun! :)
This can very well be made into a mobile game I think! :) Real fun! :)
The characters looked funny hehe, although it would polish the whole graphics a bit if you want to continue to work on that :)
I was esepcialy proud of this situation ^^

A bit of input if you further work on it:
Make a tutorial stage and do levels and gradually introduce more cards, in the beginning it can be sort of overwhelming and you don't want to scare new players away now would you :)
It was sometimes frustrating that you couldn't change the laid down cards afterwards, however I see why you would do that (make the player remember the cards etc) May I suggest a different approach?
In the first levels/tutorial I'd make it so the player can still swap all cards to get a feeling for the game and not immediately having to remember cards already :)
Since death, that little fucker can screw everything up, I would let the player (if the Death card turns up) either choose one card he can swap, or make the swaps cost something (coins, health or ingame purchases if you wanna be a jerk lol - seriously though please don't do that gameplay ruining EA crap D:)
I know death is meant to be a shitty card, but wouldn't it feel super awesome if you can come up with a solution to get out of this situation instead of "well it's fucked now anyway, whatever I do doesn't matter" which will have a higher chance of doing so if the player gets to swap a card and he still has to think what to do, so it's a challenge :)
Also, I can be a real dummy at first so I didn't understand the values at all - I thought the HP and coins on the side were MY HP and coins - still your game fascinated me long enough to keep going until I got it, lol.
I know, I know, you wrote "goal" over it and everything, but players can be idiots xD So maybe make a little tutorial text explaining that you start with zero and have to earn those in one round for your customer :)
Again, great game, good job and congrats on finishing your game :)