Deep Cover by Liam
After the stupid sounding Disunification War, future London has been split into east and west, a microcosm of the fractured island. You are a deep cover double agent fighting to keep from suspicion and place the spotlight on others.
The aim of the game is keep your cover intact and raise suspicions about your opponents.
Play online here, desktop window size
If you or they hit 100% suspicion then that person loses. You, as a double agent, have a suspicion percentage for each faction, red and blue.
Each turn, play cards from your hand in front of you by clicking them.
Counter Accusation!: Increases the suspicion of your opponent. The more loyal you are to a faction, the more damage your word does.
Sow Dissent!: Increases your perceived loyalty to the faction of the opponent you are facing (and decreases to the opposite faction).
Loyal Friend: Removes an Under Suspicion from your hand(& deck). Click the card first, and then an Under Suspicion to remove.
Under Suspicion: This card cannot be played & will add 2 to your suspicion at turn end.
Tell A Tale: Push your luck by drawing cards one at a time. Each card drawn adds to the cards defence value. However, increasing the cards defense will add a Under Suspicion to your deck. If you draw two of the same card or only one, then the defense is decreased by one. You must play the card to activate the defense. Max defense is 20.
It is possible with strong enough defenses to reduce your suspicion each turn.
Please refresh to play again, some game data is not getting reset correctly on game end
Your deck starts with: - 3 x Tell A Tale - 3 x Sow Dissent! - 2 x Loyal Friend - 4 x Counter Accusation!
| Play online | https://ld48-deeper-and-deeper.netlify.app/ |
| Play via Itch.io | https://podencopower.itch.io/ld48-deep-cover |
| GitHub repo | https://github.com/hawkstein/ld48-deeper-and-deeper |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-cover |
Ratings
| Overall | 583th | 3.259⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 638th | 3.019⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 267th | 3.558⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 677th | 3.167⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 676th | 3.019⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 702th | 1.6⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 319th | 2.804⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 747th | 2.654⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 30🗨️ |
At first it was a bit confusing, but once I got my head around the rules, it was really fun. Well at least at first. TBH you could crank up the difficulty. I finished with -29% suspicion on red and something around -6% on blue. Maybe the cover identities should noit give defense points when you loose the minigame? Once my identities improved to around 20, suspicion went down each turn (on average).
All in all verry fun game :)
After some time I started to always draw exactly one additional card on story telling. If I had exactly the starting deck in the draw pile this strategy would give me ~80% chance to level up. (When the deck gets bloated with suspicion this number might go down) So in 4/5 cases it would increase defense by 2 and in 1/5 cases decrease by 1. So on average it will increase by 1.4 points each time you play that card with that strategy and deck. You could bring this average down to no increase by reducing the defence by 8 on each fail (or nerfing the gain by dividing by 8). In order to find a good factor I would try come up with a way to automatically simulate that mini game for a given card deck (and hand) and use this (obviously rough and flawed) calculation as a starting point.
Enough math lessons for now. The game is fun after all :D
By reading the rules it was a bit difficult to understand how to play. But after a few seconds playing it becomes clear.
It would indeed require a bit more balancing, but achieving a good balancing in such a short time is not an easy task.
Also, I would have liked to get information on the new cards added to my deck at each encounter (maybe it is somewhere and I missed it?).
UI was simple and clean and didn't get in the way. The only suggestion there is maybe make the cards you play higher contrast. I know that the monitor I'm playing on is bright and has the colors slightly washed out, but it was very difficult to tell which cards I had already played this turn.
Nice job!
I was having a few problems with the hand draw animation, you may have seen a bug where when a"Under Suspicion" is removed, the animation plays again. My less than optimal solution for cards you'd played to change colour slightly instead, maybe a 30 degree rotate as well as more contrast. A very good point again!
Minor flaw: I normally have my browser window not maximized and the second tutorial screen has so much text that the "Let's go" button wasn't visible for me, I thought the game was broken at first, but then I discovered the button when I maximized my browser.
So sad I'm quite bad, but I'll give it a try again later to completely finish it :D
Bravo to you for doing this in 48h !
The only criticism I have is that I felt that my actions were rarely strategically impactful, apart from deciding when and how to defend, but this is not so important if the goal of the game is to focus on the narrative. I'm impressed on how you were able to "paint a picture" through gameplay. I hope you keep fleshing this game out as it has immense potential for a commercial title, great entry!
and that is something i think you recreated with this game. i cant say i fully understood everything that was happening or even the entire concequences for my actions but the idea of some bastard in the background playing both sides is the most british thing i can think of.