It's quite effective. Mechanics are simple to understand but also have depth, and you get many options to choose from

Really fun! Took me a minute to figure out what was going on but once I got into it, things made more sense. Only real complaint is the text on the cards is pretty small - maybe using icons that had more text on hover would be good? Say, an icon for the attacking ships to indicate range, icons for shield, etc. Regardless, fun game! Saved 1588 refugees

You got a nice concept going. Perhaps make the cards a bit more easy to read without having to read all the text. Maybe add a sheild icon and show the number in it, etc.

@denatus and @sciman101 . Definitely an issue that we noted during development. I can fix the small text by making a hover feature. Just added it in the final jam build. 100% going for the additional icons after!

Plans are to work on the game for another week or two (definitely at less intensity than during the jam) for polish and reposting on itch.io. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated and will help with the more polished version!

- it appears that the shields don't actually shield your station (I had 40+ shields and only had around that much damage on the field, yet still exploded with 60+ HP on my station)
- could really use some sounds
- mechanics are rather varied, having some ability to focus the deck would have been useful

@adroitconceptions Shields dissipate after the enemy turn so you can't continuously stack increasing amounts of shields. The turn order after the starting round is over goes: any new enemies (cannot attack) that enter, all NON-NEW enemies attack and do their effects. finally residual shield dissipates after the enemy damage phase. You earn a small amount of passive points, then your turn begins.

We were having trouble with enemies pausing between attacks, so everything happens immediately.

~~This is something we hope to fix as it creates confusing player experiences like these if NEW ships enter and do this damage in a single frame.~~ **fixed**

Unfortunately we didn't have any sound team members to make original sounds. This was also part of a college-based ludum-dare-50-synced (48 hour only) jam where we had to make everything from scratch or not at all.

We are a team of two programmers and a designer so we agreed on no sound for now.

Finally, we included all possible cards in the demo to demonstrate all the implemented effects. In the fuller (multi-level) outside-of-jam game the plan is to build the deck over time, so you wouldn't start with 10 different weapons, shields, etc.

I hope this helps to add context! Liking your comment and thank you for the feedback! Please report more QoL and even preferences, every little bit helps!

@kyra-sanchez I ended my turn with shields up and only around 40 points of damage listed from enemy ships. I had 40 points of shields up and died..

I think this game is great, but a few things stand out to me. The resolution didn't work for my computer, so, if possible, I suggest making the resolution scale with screen size, or have the itch.io page resolution set to your games resolution. Overall, this was great! The hand drawn images look cool. I would also like to ask how this fits the theme? Unless you didn't want to have it fit the theme.

@adroitconceptions, yes, at the end of your turn, enemies spawn in. Then all (fixed: read 'non-new') enemies do damage. Because of this happening instantaneously, you do not see the new spawning ships before they all do damage. ~~So you only see the old ships.~~

In the polished version when we slow everything down, we are to choreograph the order of enemy attacks, and include more information in the polished version. (For example: Incoming Damage) displayed during your current turn. This is a rush-to-playable-state prototype made between courses and we weren't able to do it all in 48 hours. ~~A big feature we wanted to add before our time was up was a "new" tag to new-spawned enemies to prevent this in the meantime!~~

@crazykittens-892-yt unfortunately, the game as it was made and on itch.io requires a minimum 1920x1080. Adding more dynamic sizing to the polished version (mostly UI settings we overlooked). Thank you for your feedback! Feel free to check in next week, I'll post a follow up link with the more polished non-jam version. Now that we're allowed to add external assets we hope it'll play better!

@kyra-sanchez so you take unknown amounts of damage each turn something spawns in because you don't know what is about to spawn in... -1 gameplay for me. every deck builder I have seen (especially with the shields going away at the start of your turn) let you see what damage your going to take that turn before you take it.

@crazykittens-892-yt The way this game fits the theme is to 'delay the inevitable'. You will lose, you cannot stop the destruction of your station. Your goal is to hold out while saving as many refugees as possible. Delaying your destruction will allow for more lives to be saved, but it will happen eventually.

Hope this clears everything up.

Check in *after the jam voting is complete* and we'll have a link (in description ONLY) to the more polished version. Hopefully in the further future this game can be a complete deck-builder!

@adroitconceptions it seems our last member got home from study just in time to push the last change. Issue fixed.

Wonderful game, love the theming and framing! It feels really well balanced while still giving a feeling of desperation. Well made!

I really enjoy playing your game

The core of the game is solid but it need some better turn resolution like showing the effects of each enemy ship on the shields and base

@kromeboy thank you! Yes as mentioned we hope to be able to get that done for the 'Extra' submission version of the game! Glad you thought so.

Wasn't expecting to see any rogue-like deckbuilders. Cool stuff!

Some good stuff you've got here, I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing but I was having fun whilst doing it

took me a second to figure out the ships were the enemies but great concept. felt like with a bit of luck and some strategy i could stay alive a good long while. the art is great but i see you opted out. still a great choice for the aesthetic. some sound would be great but i ran out of time with my submission and could not put in everything i wanted so you cant be faulted for the missing sound. great effort.

The core game idea is interesting and there's definitely a lot of potential here. I think as it stands it needs a bit more "juice" to the interactions, so you get a sense of feedback. Also I think there's more that could be done with UI clarity.

For me the biggest criticism I could make is the sound, didn't have any :/ with a moody theme and sfx the game feel could improve exponentially. Also some cards had descriptions too small to read comfortably.

Overall I think is an interesting idea, a simple but well executed balance with all the cards.

Though simple, the graphics look pretty cool to me. Nice work.

@perrin @re-lo thank you! Unfortunately we couldn't get sound in the jam (See description above, it was also a submission for a semi-casual college jam, our team agreed to use original assets only) as we wanted to make sure the basic and core mechanics were all working and it wasn't broken before putting it up for the jam.

Proud to announce we're already working on a more polished version of the game, now that we have time (and ability) to add what we were missing from this jam. Glad you liked the graphics! I'm surprised, I was a little scared to put up any ratings for it after seeing some amazing assets in some games here.

We've already started visual design on and are figuring out a system to explain what cards do with fewer words so we can save text-space for actions that need more than a number.

We're reworking enemy attacks as we didn't have time to implement attack animations or slow actions (we used a real-time wait subroutine that didn't seem to work) In the original concept enemies were not supposed to be still-cards in the same way, but we ended up going with to focus more on core functions.

We're currently debating over many options, including getting rid of the cards for enemies, or keeping them and going with a simple but user-feedback-y Thea the Awakening style of animated card actions for enemies and played cards.

Took a while to figure it all out but i like it

Interesting concept and I really like the card playing / hand building aspects. It took a bit for me to catch on to what exactly was happening... only played two games but bookmarking to play more.

Was not sure I would like it a first but it is quite intriguing and I quickly wanted to explore how the ship stats worked how things were affected and how to develop a good strategy to last longer.
I'm looking forward to seeing this game developed further post game jam.

woo 3101 saved!

this was pretty fun after a few runs and figuring out what the deck contained and what combos I could do.

if the enemies had a red tinge vs. the gray background i would of immediately been able to distinguish the two sides. it took a bit of reading after a positive information overload. this is totally my style of game!

I was really excited to try this as I love roguelike deckbuilers, traditional roguelikes, and first-time LD entries. But my screen is not big enough to play. Sorry! (I didn't rate since I couldn't play)

@pkenney I'll give you an @ when we finish the non jam version. The UI scaling was something we overlooked in the madness and it was too late to change things. A top priority as it directly affects who can play.

Cool - please do! Thanks :)

I would love to see some animation on the health or shield decrease, but overall I got the hang of the game pretty quickly.

I love your take on the theme, there is something so inspiring about defenders holding on as long as possible. I also really did the green on black color scheme. Good work!

4205 high score here. I probably could've done a lot better but I started to play a lot more loose later on and also experimenting with the wilder sounding cards.

Since you're eyeing a full version, I speak more about that angle. I think you have *very* good potential in this game. One of the problems with Slay the Spire-likes is that they're mostly all the same. You change up the conditions of the game here with the inclusion of a 3rd party, the refugees. So now instead of figuring out how to simply dump damage on the enemies while keeping your HP from attritioning too much, you have to figure out how to efficiently corral those people to safety alongside that.

This creates a risk reward mechanism where you try to save as much refugees as possible, even risking some extra damage in doing so (in the theoretical full version that is. In this version you prioritize your hull). I think this creates an effect that other deckbuilders lack since they have the singular goal of taking as little damage as possible - and thus always having a best answer in every round of play.

I think this will be a key point for your team to hammer on. Now you can allow for more styles of play (among other benefits). I for one, usually like to take extreme risks. If I could be rewarded for saving a ton of refugees that grants me some awesome upgrade, I'll gladly take critical hull damage :)

Overall this was a very clever twist on a tired genre. You did well for this complex of a genre in such a short time, and you also seem to have a good plan forward for a future version. Great work and keep it up!

On the previous user's comment, with which I completely agree, I'd like to add that I really liked the relentless coming on of new enemies, and the sense of urgency and ineluctablity it brought.

Even reading your previous comments, however, I was unable to understand how the shield worked. It seemed to me new ships did attack in full. Maybe I played an older version somehow.

I had a lot of fun anyway. Kudos !

Great game! I like the idea of trying to save as many people as possible while trying to keep the station alive.

I liked the game, it's nice how you managed to get so much variety in the cards and tactic in such a short amount of time!

@anhievus it seems like there is a bug with exact-change (every time I've seen it occur as I've run the game about 20 times now to try to get it to happen on purpose) or shield damage where there shouldn't be overflow, but the exact change then all goes to health. It doesn't happen consistently but it seems to only occur on exact change, although I'm not going to assume it only does.

It shouldn't work that way in the code but there might be something I'm missing, I'm going through all enemy effect methods and "running" them on paper.

We had a (not in any build we put out) Schrödinger's card that would absolutely break the game until we tried to debug it (in which case it wouldn't break the game, but also wouldn't do it's effect). We decided it was cursed and left it out of the final demo deck.

Great game! I really like games with depth like this, being presented with options each turn allows for different playstyles. Balance is pretty good considering the time frame, great job!

I like visual style there. It's so deep and dangerous space atmosphere

really nice game! love the strategy, could do with some music and SFX though, also nice would be if shields stayed over the turn. Otherwise, amazing game (my score was 2943)

@redsti Thanks! We had shields be permanent originally but it made the game very easy. You would end up just playing shields only and you would be unkillable.

Fantastic use of theme and absolutely agree with @peachtreeoath about its potential and innovative take on the genre. Awesome entry!

Very neat game, interesting to play for sure, but one issue is the cards say certain damage would happen but it was different than what actually happened. Ended up killing self when it said it would do 3 damage to station but actually took 15. Generally though very good, just needs polish.

@kirypto Sorry! That's the only card which says the incorrect station damage, it's change happened in the final minutes of balance tweaking and I it fell through when we posted to Ludum Dare.

Remember the space Alamo!

I enjoyed this so much and I hope you deside to polish it up graphically! I particularly thought the idea of multiple enemy distance tiers was really interesting

Very nice work considering that it was done in 48 hours, the mechanics were interesting and the balance was acceptable. Some love in the graphics and sound departements could go a long way, great job!

@sanjuro Thank you! We are working on UI/UX and getting an artist and sound for the next iteration of the game as well as expanding content to allow more diversity in playing.

Great concept for a turn based tower defense game !

Simple yet effective gameplay which i really like, got a pretty good score imo aswell.