Mages and Essay Pages by Haastregt
You have an Essay deadline at midnight, but you want to play Mage Hunter! Convince yourself in a card game battle with dopamine, psychology and excuses that you will find while slaying mages. But remember, the deadline is inevitable...

This was my first game jam ever and I had tonnes of fun making this game, and I also learned a lot (I started with game Dev about a month ago). I really like the concept however I think that the game is very unbalanced at the moment (sometimes RNG just destroys you, sometimes there is no challenge). I might work on this some more and make an actual small game out of it!
Any feedback is appreciated!
All coding and art by me Sound effects generated by jsfxr - 8 bit sound maker and online sfx generator.
Sound tracks used: RED Productions https://pixabay.com/music/synthwave-synthwave-vintage-future-synth-80s-retro-game-futuristic-music-16535/ VitalSource - Beyond the Mind https://tunetank.com/track/3850-beyond-the-mind
| HTML5 | https://haastregt.itch.io/mages-and-essay-pages |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/mages-and-essay-pages |
Ratings
| Overall | 873th | 3.4⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 906th | 3.183⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 227th | 3.767⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 270th | 4.017⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 743th | 3.583⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 365th | 3.552⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 37🗨️ |
Overall it could use some more balance, the extreme rng feels quite bad if you just start playing and luck is against you.
Good job and nice idea about combining different types of gameplay, transition between them feels very natural and this take on the theme by itself is very unusual and innovative!
@brachistosauro Thanks for letting me know! I just realised at the end of the jam that I hadn't considered different resolutions, so I just hoped it scaled good enough, but it seems that all UI elements are evaluated in the amount of pixels, so unfortunately it only works on 1920x1080, I am sorry that it is unplayable for you! But it is definitely a good learning outcome for my future projects to take this into account.
@midblue Also thank you for letting me know about this! Could you let me know what resolution your screen is? Then I know if it is a resolution problem or that it is platform related.
@agent-p I was thinking about the healing as well, I decided to add cards that have a healing bonus with the idea to add an extra layer of strategy, but obviously it is quite RNG dependent now (it happens quite often that there are no healing cards dropped at all). Other ideas I had were to either have another enemy type that dropped health instead of cards, or to have the option to trade in cards for health. This way there is still some strategy involved but then it is hopefully more of a gameplay decision than an RNG outcome. I would love to hear your thoughts on this!
nice entry ^^
The concept and theme interpretation was SUPER cool, I really enjoyed it, but you didn't let the player use it to its fullest extent!
The mage part of the game was super hard, and whenever you die as a mage it completely ends the game. That sucks! It locks one of the funnest aspects, the cards, behind the difficult mage combat. Being able to respawn after death would instantly add enhance the gameplay. Instead, try having the game end whenever you run out of excuses to play.
Phenomenal concept though, I'm excited to see where you take this in the future
Really sweet take on the theme!
(I have 720p screen)
Let me know if you make another version of it without this bug!
Well, balancing is something yes. Maybe some deckbuilding on a later stage too but that's a lot of work. Instead you could go for unlocking new cards and make it more of a roguelike game. Also that area attack from the mages is very annoying, maybe make it a bit smaller or slower.
Interesting informative discussion. Thanks for the discussion.