Fall Faybound Festival by juxipolo

The Fall Harvest Festival is in just a few hours, and you haven't prepared for the annual Faybound tournament at all! You need to get out and put together a team if you want to compete!
Fall Faybound Festival is an RPG, where your team of Faybound creatures fight in card-based RPG combat. Catch new Faybound, level them up, and take on increasingly difficult battles with other Faybound trainers.
Battles consist of a series of turns. Both trainers select a set of cards to play, and then all the cards are played in order. Faster cards will resolve first, which may prevent slower cards from even resolving at all.
| Itch.io | https://mercurywave.itch.io/faybound |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/fall-faybound-festival |
Ratings
| Overall | 237th | 3.737⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 90th | 3.947⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 155th | 3.706⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 775th | 2.639⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 458th | 3.5⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 487th | 2.412⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 311th | 3.156⭐ | 18🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 581th | 3.118⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 4🗨️ |

Despite the confusion, however, I was still able to keep at it until I actually won a round, which ended up feeling pretty satisfying. I appreciated the XP that you could collect to upgrade so it felt like progress was being made even after each loss. I also really liked that you could easily see a preview of how your attacks affect the other enemies, but it seemed weird that they didn't stack, like the preview only showed you how much damage that particular card would do to that enemy even when you're attacking that enemy with other cards. It would be nice if, when playing the attack card, you could see where that card was being played (although now that I think of it, I'm not sure if this is a thing that's just outside of the game window).
I also thought that the art style did have a palette that felt like it suited this whimsical farm sort of setting. The sound effects used were pretty weird - a mishmash of recorded voice and what I assume are sound effects generated with BFXR. The latter is much too loud and punchier compared to the voices and the combination of these two types of sounds don't feel like they complement the graphics that much. Honestly I feel like the voices worked better with the art style, so I think going with the more acoustic/recorded sound effects for everything would have made it click more, at least with me.
Overall, this was an interesting experience that I felt like I understood the gist of in a short amount of time. Nice work!
Thanks for the heads up!
One thing I would have added is a way of knowing how many battles you must still win to win the game, for instance showing a tournament bracket between fights. Some sound effects were a bit loud, and some music would have been nice, but for a jam game, this is awesome. Also, I found little incentive to switch off my initial faybound creatures as the ones you get after you win are often under-leveled but besides that, I only have praise. Great job! I'd gladly play a more fleshed out version of this :D
(Also I don't know if this is intended, but my creatures didn't gain any more hp 50% of the time from level 9 onward.)

This was a really impressive scope for a 72-hour game. You managed to create an interesting combat system, a bunch of creatures (didn't count, felt like at least ten), upgrades, items, an intuitive UI, and a barebones story.
Speaking of the combat system, it was a really interesting take on the Pokemon formula. The fact that most status effects only lasted a turn meant that the priority of the moves mattered a lot (and improved as you upgraded your cards). The "mana" system was also a neat way to make games start slow and swing more near the end.
I do think certain cards were a lot stronger than others. Sonic Boom, for instance, was by far the best card I saw, with 150 damage in a turn for only four "mana." I also had a lot of success with getting global poison and burn in early and playing disruption/defense after that. It would be really interesting to see what dominant strategies/mons would be dominant if this were PVP! My team at the end was Chachomp, Cauldrn, and Crabbat.
The art was very charming, and I loved the creative character designs.
Great work for 72 hours! Had a lot of fun with it.