As a fan of cultist simulator this was quite nice, though i would have liked to to see more different cards.

I had no idea what i was doing, but it was quite relaxing and i did enjoy the gameplay even though i felt kind of lost how to win or lose!

I feel like it lacks a sense of progression, I just felt like it was always the same but never really felt like I was going forward except for the negativity cards that kept coming and made me move windows around all the time. At some point the game bugged (I think?) and I was not getting any new window anymore. Good effort though, up until that point it worked quite well even though a lot of things could have gone wrong with all the window superposition etc ! Great job overall in any case, I did spend around 15 minutes playing it ahah



Maybe I just got fired ??? ahaha


Thanks for your feedback ! @wunarg @hotpaw @fdk ! After seing a streamer play the game, I discovered that there were some bugs that must have made you skip some parts of the game, and made the black cards not as effective as they were supposed to, which really had an impact on the experience. I have solved them now, you may want to try it :)

I felt like this was a real day in my life, sometimes I got money, sometimes I was stressed, but I always have fun. The game "felt" good to play which was nice.

Thank you very much for your entry - I hope you had great fun making it :smile:

Nice mellow feel to it and something out of the ordinary :smile: I liked the idea, but a little more tutorial would have been good (at least to me :smile: ).

I hope you'll drop by mine and give it a spin :wink:

:purple_heart: :dart: :frog:

I really like your interpretation of the theme. The gameplay was fun, but one improvement I think that would really help is if you labeled what type of card each slot required. I know you can hover over the slot to find out, but eventually it is impossible to read it before the black dots reach the slot.

I have never played the Cultist Simulator, but I really enjoyed the concept of managing your player's mood by using different cards. I would enjoy a more flushed out version of this game.

My deep isn't too mind for this kind of excellence of this game click.

I really like your spin on the "deeper and deeper" theme. Also Cultist Simulator is a game that I really like, so you already won my heart. Good work!

Really enjoyed cultist simulator, and this game hit the same spot. The text is very small, not very accessible and the artwork isn't inspiring (which you opted out for anyway). But it's all about the gameplay loop and that's great.

Wow, that's pretty fun! Clean, simple aesthetic, and the music was repetitive but in a chill rather than irritating way. Most fun I've had losing my job and having nightmares every night!

Good to see another card game here (my entry is a card game too - shameless plug!)

Piles of cash, but still miserable. Capitalism simulator 2021 :D Nice work

Very interesting idea, but the cards disappear too quickly while i was reading the text

Graphics and audio are amazing. Now, gameplay wise.. It was fun even tho I had no idea what I was doing. It's a bit confusing, but also easy at the same time.. I get the point of cards, but sometimes I feel like I'm not sure what to do with them. Either way, a nice little game : )

Interesting game, though it would have been nice if there was some sort of goal. Like collecting a certain amount of money for example.

I really liked this game. Although I suck at card games, I was having a lot of fun with this one. The music was very good and enthralling. Funny that I kept getting fired so soon. Story of my life! :D Well done and thanks for sharing! :clap: :bird: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1003785681?t=5h25m21s

This was such a cool entry! The idea of cards decaying and turning into different things was a novel idea, and I liked the optional quests.

I do wish there was a zoom function - the UI was pretty small on my screen, and it would have been nice to see the text a bit bigger.

Good job!

It is hilarious! At first I even thought that this game was made by team not one developer. But font is very tiny and thats bad for my eyes and I would set font size a little bigger. But despite this that game is fun and interesting.

I really like the way this looks, but unfortunately I don't think it was executed too well. Maybe the cars disappearing should be at least a little slower, or maybe have them decay a bit every time you do some action, because they kept disappearing while I was reading. And it was.. Just kind of a reading simulator. It's just 90% reading what's happening, reading what card should go there, and then it's just a matter of... Putting the card there. However, it still has potential, and with some tweaks could be really fun. I really like the simple artstyle too. Gj on finishing the jam!

Cool concept, I see a lot of potential. I liked how the "deeper" you go, the harder it is to get out. The music really added to that sense of dread.

It gets stale pretty quickly tho. I think with a bit more time this could have been something very interesting. Also, I went to work after getting fired and got fired again (probably a bug).

Very original entry, good job!

This was very interesting, but I think the design would work better as a turn based game instead of real time. At the very least the empty boxes should be color coded so I don't have to speed many seconds figuring out what needs to go into the box, causing things to backup rather quickly. Over all, a very clever concept that I think illustrated the point quite well.

Very unique in it's gameplay and setting. I like the idea of simulating life by actions that cost you something but give you something in return and that can be good or bad depending on how you perform these actions.
I would have liked to read more, but the timers on the cards pushed me to act quickly. At first I thought the masks were annoying but I guess you introduced them so one would also have to quickly fill the "action" cards without letting those stay around for too long. I enjoyed playing something different that kinda reflects the grind we sometimes live in :thinking:

Oh and a small issue: you can pull the masks out of your screen on your second screen, at least I think thats what happened. Probably not intented.

My thoughts after getting fired:

Pros:

- Unique concept,
- Enough complexity
- Variety of cards
- Good / Bad / Normal decision making tree


Cons:

- I just used cards when they popped out in yellow instead of even reading the tasks
- Because of that, I never really felt connected to the story
- The concept is cool, but there seems to be more negative than positive output. Makes me less motivated
- The ??? Cards are a tight too fast with debufs
- After certain amount of time, there's too much going on on the screen
- To my taste, too much dramatic music. It's not a dungeon crawler.

Overall, a good concept that needs polishing and balancing to make it more playable. Decent job!

Thank you for your feedback everyone ! I'm happy you liked the game !
@lokt02 @andrewkennedy sorry for the font size, it is fine for big screens but it does not scale well at all for laptop or smaller ones... And I did not have time to add a zooming system...
@bytinggames The mask cards are supposed to be stressful, but I originally wanted them to appear once the player had already seen most of the game. But I ended putting them way before, because people tended to stop playing before finding them.

@CrispyBun It is true that cards disappear too fast for new players, but they also don't disappear fast enough to have an impact once the player masters the mechanics. As @Danial suggested, I think I should have got rid of the real time system to make the time to elapse whenever the player does an action. That would give time to read everything without stressing the player.

@Sheepolution @MikoziQ I think I took a lot of risk with this concept, as the fact that there is no end is part of the idea. Everything is supposed to have negative output, because the real theme of the game is about falling into depression. Black cards are dark thoughts, that make your otherwise simple routine harder and harder to keep. They become more and more incapacitating as they stack, preventing you to make even the simplest action. You fall deeper and deeper in depression, until there is nothing else to do than quit the game (which in itself is a metaphor). So a part of the frustration is here on purpose. It would have needed a lot more content to make it more clear to the player, so I understand many people missed it. But i'm really happy of how it turned out :)

@jrevel I got the point with overworking or depression in terms of black cards. Hence my very subjective opinion about me not liking the gameplay, hence it reminded me times where I was on a brink of depression (fully recovered though). No offense of course! 😊

This is so stressful, and I think that was your intention. So well played :joy: The nightmare cards were hard to dodge! The big problem is to read really fast the blocks to understand which choices I could make, and I'm french... So, near the end, I just drag'n'dropped card fastly without reading x)

Great job here :thumbsup:

@curtis-pelissier Ah tiens un français ^^
Effectivement le jeu est un peu stressant, même un peu plus que prévu au début du jeu, à cause des cartes qui disparaissent trop vite pour que le joueur puisse lire tranquillement les textes. Peut-être qu'utiliser le temps n'était pas un bon choix au final, j'aurais dû mettre la possibilité de mettre en pause ou même faire avancer le temps uniquement quand le joueur fait une action. Mais bon, en compo, pas trop le temps de faire de playtests, je suis déjà content du résultat 😊

Interesting UI- and time-based mechanics, this is something innovative! Pleasant graphics and music. Fun to explore!

Some remarks:
1. UI is very small on 4K display, hard to read and this might affect the balance, e.g. avoiding black blockers. Expectation: UI scales relatively to display resolution.
2. Sometimes card remains next to the slot without connecting it when cursor is outside of slot. Expectation: connection happens when at least center of the card is inside the slot.

Cool entry!

Lots of atmosphere! I felt the stress too real looking those shadows expropiating my chances. Extremely original use of a card game. The tune is stuck in my head right now. Excellent work!

It's a really cool and unique concept! My only complaint will be that since many cards have timer, I catch myself not reading what the cards say, just checking if it is the right card. So it may be a good idea to add a little more time or add some mechanics to allow the player to read the text on the card without worrying about time. For example, when you hover your mouse over a card, the timers for all cards could stop so you can read freely. Anyway, good job on the game!

Very interesting idea. I never played a game in this genre. Visually, it's good. The icons on the cards represent their "emotion" or "function" very well, but there's some inconsistency. Some are very well drawn, but the money and contentment cards look like MS Paint doodles. I wouldn't mind that look of the less polished cards if they all looked that way.

I eventually got fired from work, but kept getting money. A lot of money, I had more than enough money to pay all the bills and hang with friends, I thought that was odd. I hoped the shift in employment would change the game a bit, but it actually made it more stagnant.

The black cards are an interesting mechanic. They're not fun to deal with, I guess that's the point though. It may be cool to have get an occasional "ace" card, that can unlock the tasks. Is there a way to get rid of the sad cards? OR is it just a slide deeper and deeper into darkness and depression? I'd like some kind of goal, win condition, or finality, rather than this ambiguity, but maybe that's just me.

Maybe I missed it, or I'm bad at it, but everything feels random. It would be nice to feel like I have a little more control over what tasks I get, or how they pay out.

There's a lot of potential here. I like it! Good job!

@ismael-rodriguez Thank you for your comment ! Yes the money that keeps coming is a bug, it's a copy of the event you get when you go back from work, but I forgot to remove the money gain...
And yes everything is random, there is a pool of events for work, another for when you are at home, and a few that trigger in specific conditions, like when you get fired. I wanted to add so much more, but fell short on time, the config of those events is quite complex and I spent a lot of time chasing bugs at the end of the compo...
About the lack of control, it is also something that was possible to improve, but I did not have time to do it well : I wanted most event to yield a differect result depending on the type of card you give it. Going to work with motivation gives you contentment and some more work actions to do, because you start working earlier.
For the absence of goal, and the sad card that can't be discarded, that is part of the point, I wanted a game where you get in a vicious circle of depression that does not end... Until you quit the game... But I agree this is too subtle for a jam game that has not enough content to really get the player into the story.

It's a very cool game that inspires ideas! Jam games are jam games! 😅 Well done!

That was pretty intense! It captures the feeling of desperation and sinking deeper and deeper very well, so very good job!

Very solid gameplay and art with audio fits perfectly to it.

The game talks about serious issues in life of an every IT person, so that quite touching for me gave some room for reflection

I have nightmares now, but at least I swim in bags of money :) This game is quite something! I like the concept. The window interface is well done. It gets a bit monotonous after a while, but I guess, that's the life of a game developer, hehe. Good job!

I've never seen this before. But its got me thinking you could make a visual novel/adventure card game, sort of.... Really interesting and kept me intrigued. I like how you matched stress in the experience to literal stress cards! I think the only critique I would make is that it being card based I expected a little more strategy/choices. But that's hard to balance with the kind of game you're making here I guess, it seems like a new genre after all. Great job!

I liked your interpretation of the Game Jam's theme. The music fitted with the theme of the game, to get depper in mind. However, I probably didn' t understand the mechanics of the game, perhaps because I'm not familiar with Cultist Simulator.

Reminds me of Notch's LD29 "Drowning In Problems". Also reminds me of "Papers Please". Great mood, but very IRL stressful.

For some reason I got money after I lost the job

Interesting idea!
Recorded my first play experience:
https://youtu.be/PjzQOV6kMx0
Hope, this will be helpful :)

Playing this was crazy! I've never seen anything like it. Really fun watching the bad cards inevitably pile up and also trying to drag away the boxes from the void. Super cool take on the jam's theme.