I was very impressed by story and graphics at first but I have to admit that the gameplay quickly got stale. I tried for about 20 minutes to get past the first encounter, failing every time due to my character having incredibly low HP and getting one shot while slowly whittling away at the opponent.
I think the game could have profited greatly from an introductory battle that teaches the mechanics as well as some more balancing work.
I suspect there was more of the interesting and quite well written story after the first battles but due to the RNG-heavy and difficult nature of the combat system, I didn't have the opportunity to discover those. My respect for the outer appearance though, this could be a full game well worth spending a few bucks on.

@noirox Oops. That was not meant to happen. The queen smash was bugged and has now been *fixed* within the confines of the rules :) I hope you give it another go! :smile: We really appreciate the positive feedback <3

Amazing voice acting! The writing (very thematic) and pixel art are well done, too, and the understated sound effects fit well. I lost against the queen and was pleasantly surprised to get a little cutscene that let me jump right back into the battle. I enjoyed playing this one all the way through because the card game was engaging. I would have been happy to play a version that was twice as long.

Extremely high production values that would rival games with a larger time budget. The voice acting was a standout from other submissions I've seen so far. The gameplay itself seems like it may need a few tweaks as the game state can easily revert right back to the initial starting condition. For example, even after 5 minutes of combat, both myself and the bishop have full health and full stamina. Perhaps max health could drop by 1 for every 10 points of damage received? Or perhaps one/both of us have some kind of third currency that is slowly built up to power some kind of battle-resolving action?

Great game! The quality of voice acting is amazing, the art style is beautiful, and the game play is addictive. I had a lot of fun, so I just fish the game was longer. Nice job!

P.S. I fun luck and defeated the Bishop on my first turn :)

the quality of voice is juste awesome not the level of a jam !

Brilliant work. The first jam game in which I heard such a good voice acting.

That was really enjoyable. A bit frustrating when your opponent get a load of heals in a row after you've got them down to almost zero HP, but that's the nature of the game :)

Absolutely wonderful voice acting and art direction! This was a joy to play, and if it were expanded more, I could certainly see this being worth a long playthrough. The only issue that I ended up having was that the combat felt a bit imbalanced at times. Definitely something that, if tuned up, would improve the game greatly. Other than those minor complaints, everything else was very solidly polished! Overall great work to all of you!

Great game, really loved the voices someting we did not have time to do in our game, fight system is interesting but it lacks a control over it from player, like sometimes i barely did some damage. Overall great game!)

i liked the story and the presentation , obviously great voice acting, good enough writing.

The battle system seems intresting but i got really bored on the second fight

the soundtrack was good ( the constant bird chirping ruined it tho :( )


still, one of the best games i've played this jam. Good job

Wow, I certainly wasn't expecting this level of artistic quality from a one-weekend game jam! The sounds especially were great, not just the superb voice acting and awesome music, but the sound effects too. I have to agree with some of the other commenters that gameplay felt a bit slow and frustrating at times. However, balancing problems like this are more than understandable for a jam game. Keep it up, nice work!

Wow! That is fantastic! Not very often you see a well written story with great voice over work in a game jam! I'm not even talking about the fantastic visuals, and sound design. I don't know what you could add to make it better... Perhaps a roguelike mode with light deck building mechanics?

PS: I'm tweeting about the games I play from this jam. Here is yours: https://twitter.com/TheAntonSem/status/1512124214299484169

As others have previously stated, this is an awesome entry!

The pixel art really set the mood.
The voice acting is stellar, and the music chilling.

Kudos for the sound effects, they really brothe life into the game.
And let's not forget the wordsmithing :wink:

My only gripe is with the RNG honestly. The first fight felt kinda tedious and slow, but maybe it was due to me still trying to understand the game. The next fights went by much faster, but still the RNG made the gameplay a teensy bit infuriating at times :laughing:

All in all, one of my favourite entries thus far.

Toodleoo!

P.S. There is a bug in the Rook's fight, where if you perish the music doesn't play when you fight the Rook again.

@wilhelmstein Thanks for the kind words! About the music "bug". We baked in the silence at the start of the track so it would trigger after the initial dialogue with rook. We didn't have time to put it in properly. It's a jam, after all :sweat_smile:

Fantastic, I loved it!

Music, voices and sound effects were on point. There is a bug where music doesn't play for a bit after you die and come back to fight.

It would be nice to have the cards colored differently according to the character. For example, black and red for the player, white and gold for the priest and red and gold for the queen, etc. I don't think it would be a major change but I think it would improve the readability of the game flow and cards a bit.

Not sure if this is a bug, but the attack that has 50% chance to deal 40 damage still removes shield when it misses. It felt a bit off when it happened, but in the end I think it works better the way it is now.

Health and stamina are displayed as bars, but the cards show dots. This was a bit inconsistent and until the end hard to read how much I really had without moving cards around. I think replacing the bars with red hearts & blue squares would work better.

The only thing I disliked about it are the cards that miss 50% of the time. It felt really annoying. I think it would be best to avoid anything that deals no damage unless it's really rare. The ending was a bit abrupt as well, straight to the credits with no transition. Other than that, I loved everything about it!

I liked the voices and the music, they contributed a lot to the mood. I managed to beat the game on the first try, but there were some risky moments. I could imagine a bigger game based on this concept.

Excellent entry. Lovely pixel art, and great voice acting, the whole with a pretty good gameplay. There was some problems (no "end current round" option to gain some time, and the fact that ennemies behavior was sometime strange, like taking a potion when full life or trying to regain stamina at full stamina), but those aren't such an issue, and the rest is simply great. Well done to you all!

One of my favourite Ludum Dare entries so far. Excellent work!

A solid entry! It was nice to have some depth to the game alongside the usual stellar art and audio. I liked the card game mechanic, its hard to make card game AI in a jam duration that feels realistic, though I think a small amount of detail (like stopping them using a heal on full health) would have been enough to feign more intelligent AI. Good work to the team!

Excellent game! I really liked the story behind it and the acting of voices and music, it was the best without a doubt xD. The fights by turn and with cards also seemed very well incorporated and well thought out, without a doubt the gameplay is very well worked out. If you keep working and polishing it I would like to see more work on that beautiful pixel art you already have, very well done!!

I'm very impressed with the presentation of the story. I was invested in it and wanted to see where it went. The combat was quite enjoyable too. I think the chances of some cards could use some tweaking. Specifically, there is an attack that is successful 50% of the time. Using it, I sometimes one-shot encounters. Other times, I die over and over. The cards made the difficulty inconsistent but didn't ruin the game for me. Overall, amazing job guys!

Thanks for submitting your game for me to play on my stream!

If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1450162412?t=03h12m38s

Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D

💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady

https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin

This is great all round! Loved the mood, doesn't even seem a jam game

I enjoyed the story. Having actual voice acting in an LD jam game is surprisingly high effort! The mechanics were appropriate for the scope of the game, though a tiny bit more variety could've made it really stand out.

The bishop was a pain, but the last guy went down in 2 turns. Pretty cool game.

The RNG is too random here. One fight took me almost 10 minutes while I beat the last one in my first round.
I love RPGS but some kind of connection as to why we as a player are using cards for attacks would have been nice, considering the game already is strongly story based.

I liked the music, although I forgot how it went already

There's a lot of RNG in the combat, but I can definitely see how a system like that could be used in a longer game with something to replace the RNG, like a buildable set of skills. As a concept, I really like it, and I think you executed it well given this was made for a jam.

Minor niggles aside, though, I *really* liked the animations. The sprites were reminiscent of games by Baroque Decay--really simple, but with surprisingly fluid and expressive animations. The way you got across so much characterisation with so few pixels was very impressive! :smile:

The mood created by the sound design and voice acting was compelling--a bit campy, as a lot of these tales of knights and chivalry tend to be--but the characterful animations were what really sold it to me as something sincere.

Really well done! :grin:

Ok wow, let me pick my jaw off the floor before I write this.. That was SO GOOD! I was drawn in right away and the voice acting holy crap are you kidding me with that!! I've never heard voice acting like that in a Game Jam. Congrats on having the talent connections! I also thought the story was very good, and well written, and the art matched the mood, although the art could be polished up in a few places, first scene was great, the others looked like you were hurrying for time, which is understandable. I thought the card system was fun and was able to finally beat the game, after dying once. I'm thankful that I wasn't sent all the way back to the beginning after dying. Oh the one minor bug I noticed was when I died fighting the knight at the end and was sent back, the epic music stopped, and there was no music for a while, then it started again. Anyway my favorite entry so far nice job!!!

Good game! I'm not normally a fan of card games but I found this one quite enjoyable as the story line added substantially to it. Sounds and voice acting really helped to set the mood.

first things first say hi to arthas! loved the voice acting very professional. good pixelart! i think the game was pretty polished especially for a jam game. had 2 playthroughs to see the different endings since when i won the first one it did hint to a hidden ending with loss condition. all in all pretty solid game well done!

Incredible work. The first thing that caught my eye was the game's look, but the writing and voice acting take it even further. The overall quality is astounding. Mechanically it's deep enough to keep things interesting for the game's duration. Really solid for a jam game!