I think this is a really solid concept, would have loved more card variety and 'juiciness'

I like the idea ! This could be a really fun game with randomized and complexe runs !

I love the concept of this game! The concept is one I never would have thought of, but which makes total sense. If you added some more unique cards, a way to scrap cards from your deck, an easier way to select your cards (you could press the numbers 1-5 to add cards to the queue more quickly than with keyboard and mouse), and some better graphics, I think this game could be amazing!

Wonderful work! The mechanics of deck building seem incompatible with limited time, because I want to think more about the strategy. Maybe you can expand the game in later version not limited to "Every 10 seconds", it has a amazing potential.

The idea definitely has potential, I think separating movement and attacking cards would've added some more tactical decision making to the game. I love the intuitive feel of the game, a game like this basically needs no tutorial as the players figure out the controls and pace of the game themselves through experimentation. One quality of life feature that I would love to see is to not randomise the card order in your hand, that kind of ruins the ability to quickly select and digest the information in the 10 seconds and feels kind of bad for the player. Once again though the idea was stellar, albeit perhaps a bit ambitious!

lovely game!!! very clever idea that actually turned out p fun! not much incentive to get strategic w the deck layout, which is a bit of a bummer cuz theres def something there i think. overall grea t job!@!

It would definitely be a excellent game if there was more content. The 7 minutes i was playing this game brought me a lot of fun.

I really like the core machanics of this game. I find it very unique and interresting. However I think moving with cards makes sense when there are enemies on the screen, but when there are non it just feels like an unneccesary obstacle, which makes everything you wanna do slow - but anyways I really like this mechanic. Feels a bit incomplete as I only found arrows and potions in the questionmarks. 10 seconds is just perfect to make it a bit hasty turn based game. Anyways very nice, would be nice to see where this could go!

I think it is a nice game, it is fun, 10 seconds is a good time to make a choice. A nice entry into the gamejam. My strategy was sticking to corners though - in the corner only 2 orcs can attack you, and they will deal 4 damage per round, so as long as I had the potion, I was invincible in corners! If the damage\health would be rescaled to kill off campy tactics like that, and in general if you add more cards(say damage in a square, damage along a line, "powered" move cards that allow you to move more squares, etc...) it could become a very cool rougelike.

Another point of note - The game feels really rythmic, perhaps add a rythem element, where you choose your cards along a beat or something? I think it could be cool. Overall cool idea, and a working solid execution. Well done!

Nice game. I liked the approach of a deck being used for movement. I would have hoped to collect cards worth taking though. It didn't felt worth it, cause I already had all 4 arrows and 1 potion, this way I knew that I would always get the same cards, so I didn't saw the need to collect new cards (maybe I simply didn't spot any new cards).
I'm not sure if your levels are random generated, if so, good work!
Sometimes there's an invisible wall dealing damage to you.
The game has potential :)

This reminded me of those old ASCII adventures!
Really love this concept with the commands you feed to the hero.
The art style also really suit the kind of era these kind of games comes from.

Thanks for the feedback Everyone!

@james-joubert Thank you! Those games were definitely an inspiration for the design choices made here. I've always enjoyed that genre of game and wanted to try my hand at it! Much Appreciated!

@ggross Thats something I thought about for future versions of the game! Not sure how much that would change the feel of the game, but its definitely a mode that could be implemented and turned on/off at player discretion!

@brovovar @rubinshki Thanks, I appreciate it! Im glad you liked it! Thanks for checking it out and giving it a try!

@cosmonautical @john-wuller @bytinggames @elros @muzakefron Having a larger variety of cards was initially the plan (and remains the plan for future versions), but had ran into implementation issues and a close deadline so I had to drop them last minute so I could have something functional to present on time. But I agree, there is something currently lacking with just the basic movement cards.

@borgi The issues with having movement as a card type was definitely something I considered. I agree that it is a bit tedious outside of "combat" situations when you just want to get to a specific tile or the next room. (Admittedly, I had a "WASD" movement mechanics during development because it was much easier to get around and test with"). Initially, I had planned have having cards that allowed moving multiple spaces to help make up for this but could not finish those mechanics in time. In the end, I added the "End Turn" button as a way to hopefully mitigate some of the tediousness so that players could cycle through cards faster hopefully making movement a little easier.

@fastandblast I had considered having separate cards for attack early on, but then I got worried about deck bloating. if you have 4 movement types and 4 attack types (one for each direction) that could result in going a couple of turns without drawing the specific direction needed which would feel frustrating. Then, if/when other cards are added, it makes it less likely that you draw the specific attack or movement card that you need in a situation which could incentivize players not to pick up new cards (not that there is much incentive with the current card variety, but in future patches). But, maybe it would just take some testing and fine tuning to make work, definitely something to be considered in the future!

Neat game concept! I like the idea of pre-building your rpg character's actions and having to plan based on what you think/know an enemy is going to do. Unfortunately, the deck building and jam theme kind of detract from the overall game's experience instead of add to it. As a player, it's optimal to never pick up any cards as it stands, as then you can reliably predict and plan every turn, and you have everything you will ever need. This could be possibly fixed by removing the heal option at first or by removing one item from the deck to incentivize players to try to stack their deck with more of a particular card, but even then, unless the level design provides a reason for the player to favor a particular direction, they would probably be better off keeping their deck as even as possible. It's a great idea, it just needs more time to flesh out and smooth out all the kinks.

Nice game! I made a game with the similar idea so I really like it! I made it with GMS2 too! Nice work!

Love the concept, and as others have said, it has a lot of potential if a bit more time was spent with it. I actually got pretty engrossed in the fast-paced decision making for awhile (until, I think the game got annoyed at me for trying to strategically go back and forth between rooms to smack some orcs, that it phased me into a wall for 3 turns and then errored-out. I probably deserved that for trying to be sneaky, ha ha).

If you were to develop this further, I actually really liked having randomized cards for movement and having to plan my next maneuver quickly, so I don't think you should remove it or even deemphasize that part of it too much. It was exciting and suspenseful, there were times that I wanted to go down, but did not get a "down" movement card, so I had to strategize super quick for the second best solution.

I agree with what davidtheginger said about not having an incentive to pick up/drop movement cards. When FastAndBlast mentioned separating movement and attack into different cards, I agree with your response to them in that regard, but it gave me an idea of how else this could be approached. Perhaps movement and all other card types could be separated into two different decks, sort of? Maybe with each draw, four of the cards are from a "movement deck" (or just randomly generated), and one or two cards are from a special deck, which would contain potions or other buffs. Additionally or alternatively, you could have a feature like Slay the Spire's relics, which are separate from cards and act passively, so you can focus on playing movement cards from turn to turn.

Everything I just wrote was just random garbage I thought up here at nearly midnight, they might not really work, but my point is, I had a lot of fun playing this and I think you have some options, were you to tinker with it further! Huge congrats for getting all of this done on your own in such a time restraint, cheers!

Here is the fun error, in case you are interested:


Pretty interesting take on movement. I like how you build the deck over time, so taking too much of one card can screw you over later on. Nice job!

Very good concept! A bit of a shame that the game has no sound, but it really deserves to be dug on a full version!

This was super fun! My team also went with a roguelike deckbuilder, so it's nice to see someone else going down that route!
I love the blocked movement mechanic, it's a really fun and intuitive input system. I immediately knew what the cards were and what they did, and the whole thing really clicked into place. I love the idea of a roguelike dungeon crawler real-time-ishness crossed with deckbuilding. Gives me vibes of Crypt of the Necrodancer, maybe crossed with the combat from the Mega Man Battle Network series (which has a combination of real-time combat with turn based card play). I think the visuals were very satisfying for a jam and conveyed everything really clearly, but if you were to build out the level generation/art/polish stuff, I think you have a really strong foundation for a publishable game!

Some notes I think would help:
* Having more than 1 of each tile in the starting deck. As is, you guarantee that your band is always the same until you add cards. For me, I felt that was incentive not to add any cards to my hand, because no cards were better than the cards I was already using and adding cards meant less access to potions or the exact direction I need. Sure, moving left twice was strong, but not worth it if I couldn't access my potion in time to survive an enemy.
* Having more variation in cards. I know easier said than done, but having the cards you pick up be better than base cards is what makes me want to risk diluting the deck. A double-move in one direction, for example, might make me willing to add enough rope to my deck to hang myself with.
* Either a nerfed heal or ways to add to max health. The +5 health potion was a great get-out-of-jail free card, but assuming I never added more than 4 cards to my deck (so that I'd get the potion roughly every other round), I could survive any fight. This might also be a good opportunity for easy card variation, where your base heal is 2 or 3 and a heal that you can find is 4 or 5.
* I walked onto some spikes for fun and found that it let me discover a card before disappearing. I'm not against this as a mechanic, it reminds me of the Binding of Isaac rooms that let you trade health for items, but it wasn't clear if this was intentional. If you want to keep this feature, I'd make it clearer that it's supposed to happen.
* A goal/something to work towards would be nice. My game is missing that too, but I do feel like it's good motivation to come back when you lose.

All in all, I really enjoyed it. That sort of rhythm and fast acting thinking is hard to capture and you did a great job!

Nice interpretation of the theme and solid gameplay. Congratulations

Great concept! I loved traditional rogue-likes growing up, and I think this is a great way to put the concept into a deck builder. Integrating it with the "every 10 seconds" theme also gives it a nice rhythm that I can vibe with, though I imagine you might want to give the player as much time as they want to arrange their cards if the game situations get more complex.

A dynamic I didn't really like was how segmented the rooms were - it's impossible to see into adjacent rooms without moving into them, and orcs aren't active when you're not in their rooms. Because of this, when I cleared rooms, I would end up just playing the cards I wanted and slowly inch in exactly the directions I wanted to go. When I was fighting orcs, I would play additional cards in an attempt to dance around them, but when I was alone, moving felt a bit tedious.

It would be cool to see more card variety. I think that move=melee attack works perfectly, since that's how traditional roguelikes and Crypt of the Necrodancer work, but you could probably include other interesting movement and attack options, such as diagonal movement and ranged spells. As for having cards that are more powerful than what's in your starting deck, I could see cards getting dropped by monsters when you kill them, and have a "Pay Day"-like card that increases the loot rarity if you kill an enemy with your next attack.

There's a neat idea here that I think you could fashion into something fairly entertaining. I think there are a couple of areas that could use some further development:

* Some more severe card options, like something that moves you several in a direction, or something that can't move but deals extra damage in a direction. This lets your players make more interesting and meaningful choices.
* Some more guard rails on the randomness, you probably want the player's initial experience to be somewhat predictable so that they can learn what their options are quickly and then you can provide them with something with greater risks. Also I ran into a couple of no-win scenarios, once when there were 2 enemies guarding the entrance to a level and another time when I started in a dead end linked to 1 other level that immediately dead-ended.
* It could be worth spending a second or two to tie in some sound effects to actions. If that's not something you'd be comfortable making yourself you can probably find some online you can legally include in your game, possibly under the CC0 license.

Amazing game. Really catchy graphics. Some work can be done from the gameplay side and can be a made a bit more complex. I think the 10 second rule did redistricted a lot of possibilities. Please do check out my submission as well.

Great game with nice graphics. I managed to break it a little bit - when you change location and enemy is on field when you should spawn, then game spawns you on the opposite side of the screen, even if it is a wall :P Anyway I had a lot of fun playing it :)

I think the idea is great. It needs some new features and it would be very interesting. Right now, when you understand the rules, nothing will be new after that. But when there is multiples ennemies, play with th walls (To be in front of only 1 enemy) is cool.

You need new cards like other movements (Or double, like a card which has Left AND right, diagonal, draw more cards, etc.). Maybe with enemies' cards displayed (And so replace the 10s chrono). But it would be a good idea for a more ambitious project.

However, I think I discoverd all the dungeon and there is no ending. If I am right, a message would be welcome. And if like me, you don't find potion card before a moment, you have to play with room changing, and it's not very interesting.

About the graphics, it's basic, but readable. It's good. The rest works well, I think you did good time management (But I would like an ending anyway).

For the bugs, I just had one time when after my turn, nothing happened during... 30s I think (During enemy turn).

But sincerely, good concept.

Really nice concept, intuitive and fun. it's solid base for a full game. It could have more cards than just basic ones (or I just managed to get duplicates). I would definitely check out full game if you decide to develop it further.