Challenging. Had to constantly keep changing cards. Was engaged.

Game is initially confusing, but once you get the hang of it it's pretty interesting! I enjoy the card-based gameplay and the idea of upgrading the individual parts of the queen. I'd like the game to move a bit slower so that I could see Anita fighting, I feel like I'm in such a rush to heal parts I don't really get to watch her fight! Additionally, on one playthrough I seemed to have a part and a gene in the infuse slots but could not bless them together, so I was stuck with basic parts until I died. I never got to see what upgraded parts are like!

This gets really frantic in a hurry! Things seem to ramp up really fast, and trying to manage your hand is a real challenge!

Would have loved to have had some sounds or somethin, the text status is nice to have, but in practice I never once looked at it, in trying to madly cycle through the cards. Well executed, I love seeing concepts like this!

@marcio-miranda Thanks! Yeah, the difficulty bounced back and forth between "brain-dead easy" and "frantic" near the end of development, and I think it's still towards the "frantic" side. You can't infuse items of the same level (so a basic Part and a tier 1 Gene won't do anything), but I should have just allowed it anyway to avoid confusion. You can always right-click to discard a card, even if it's put down on the board. There was a tutorial planned which would have gone over all of these issues one at a time, but alas.

@ava-rae Thanks! I'm pretty pleased with the mechanics themselves, even if the polish left something to be desired. I recorded a bunch of audio to use when I wasn't at my desk, but sadly didn't have the time to import it. It would have definitely improved things.

Very engaging! Great job and thank you for this experience! It is also quite hard (good kind of hard) and there is no time to observe our little Anita (which is a bit of a shame).

When I opened up the game, I was very sceptical as to how this complicated card system would work. I'm certainly no stranger to making convoluted systems in Jams that aren't properly balanced or engaging. So imagine my surprise when 20 minutes later I'm rapidly switching between body parts, learning how to speed discard cards and get new ones and everytime I get a blessing I literally shout out with joy. This is a tonne of fun and you should definitely develop this further. The UI could do with some fine-tuning as well as some keyboard controls and I'm not sure how well you're conveying what's going on on the top screen, but a really really solid entry.

@madalaski :D Your comment fills me with joy. I definitely think that audio cues for the different actions would have made it much easier to track even if one wasn't paying close attention. I also found myself wanting the ability to 'lock' cards in the hand and add a "discard all unlocked" button to reduce the carpal tunnel, and keyboard shortcuts would have fallen under the same QoL improvements.

I don't know if I could come up with a game based just around this concept, but there *is* a more complicated RTS-lite that I've been considering that uses many of the same concepts...maybe I'll take a closer look.

Thanks again!

This game is REALLY innovative, I love it and am still playing. In terms of a full version, I don't know if this could translate directly, but I absolutely think you have some interesting components in here that could be taken further. This game is basically a real time deckbuilder of sorts, mixed with.....merge mechanics I suppose. It's hard to find just 1 analogy for the gameplay cuz there's so much to it.

I love the concept of building up your deck WHILE you're in a battle, using a tableau of different upgrade options. Compare this to Slay the Spire where you're only upgrading your deck outside of combat. I think it's really brilliant and you get the sense of claustrophobia that a lot of merge games have when your slots are piling up and you're trying to make the best of what hand you were dealt. How far can you get in this? I can't actually get past alpha but maybe I'm missing something about the strategy.

FYI I was thoroughly confused in the beginning, mostly because the game looked strange on my widescreen monitor so I couldn't tell if it was bugged or not. The main thing I missed was that right-click is discard, and the whole game unlocked after that. So to anyone reading this comment who also has that issue, just make sure to right-click. This game is worth your time if you're looking for innovation. This game is a 6-star in terms of innovation, I think this is basically a new genre of deckbuilders, so great job!

I think nice idea but the graphics can be improved

This is a really neat idea and I think it could go somewhere interesting! I think with a bit more development this would be a really cool concept. It might be worth experimenting a bit more just to see where you can take it.

My ant was probably on some sort of high-functioning stimulus.

that was pretty confusing at first...
but after a moment it turned out great ! would love to play an updated version

I have carpal tunnel now, but it's a price worth paying to create the ultimate killing machine. Long live the queen.

Quite a fun game overall! As others have said, it does get frantic very quickly, but I know balance can be tough in a jam situation. Otherwise, it's really hard for me to point to things I would change, which is pretty uncommon so fantastic job.

The game is fairly unique but the tutorial is all over the place. Try to reduce text where you can and teach the player through gameplay. There's a lot of technical work that has gone into this for such a short space of time which is commendable, so good job!

I noticed your entry was a few votes short, so I played it on Twitch and gave some live feedback. VOD is up on Youtube, if you'd like to see it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi6oja9yekY

Oh my goodness though... where do I start? Between the quirky cool narrative, the clean ant art, the steep-but-fair difficulty, the elegant way this does deck-building, and the rich but simple card mechanics... this is easily one of my favorite games of this Jam! Definitely one of the most mechanically original and well-designed! I struggled a bit to recognize that cards cycled back through the deck when discarded, and stumbled a bit with the Infuse mechanic (I tried to combine parts with Tier-1 genes first, and it confused me when I couldn't do anything with it). A bit more feedback on what the different ant parts did would also be great; I could intuit some stuff, but it was hard for me to shift focus and read the text, when I was frantically futzing with cards, managing health bars, and trying to plan. That said, this easily kept me busy for an hour, and I plan to go back and play more now that I'm off stream! I'm real impressed by what you accomplished in a jam, let alone as a solo entry. Thank you so much for making and sharing this! I loved this.

@mark-a-pressler @adam-clayden thank you for the late reviews! Yeah, I definitely struggled to get things balanced just-so, meaning the tutorial (as always) was left in the dust. One of these jams I'll have enough time to spend a day polishing/tutorial-writing...

@solifuge wow, I think you pushed me over the edge into rankability! Thank you and everyone else who thought to donate their time to play games right at the end! I'm actually quite touched; things have been busy and I forgot to keep up, but you saved the day nonetheless.

I left a more in-depth response on your YouTube page, but it bears repeating that I'm impressed that you managed to intuit about 90% of my intent just from the gameplay, in particular noticing how you were left cognitively busy to the point that you couldn't track Anita so well (which was intentional, separate from how good the execution was).

Thank you everyone for your lovely feedback!