Holo Friends by ColeSlaughter

A limited set of Holo Friends Trading Cards just dropped exclusively at your local game store! You won't want to miss out on these exciting promotional double holo foils! Think of that thrill; pulling an ultra-rare limited release card - think of how much that card might be worth! You start craving it so bad you might forget about other priorities... but that flood of dopamine is worth a little sacrifice. Try not to let your life completely fall apart, though, so that you can keep collecting and selling more cards! You need this.
Holo Friends is a game where you open card packs as a way to survive! Put the value of cards towards your happiness by placing them in your personal collection, use them to pay off bills and other expenses or just save them as cash to buy more cards. Every day is a little harder, but at least you have packs to open... for now.

Lose yourself in this epic card collecting gacha survival challenge and collect as many ultra rares as you can!
Credits
Jared Slawski - Engineer
Stephen Rudd - 3D Artist
Andrew Rudd - 2D Artist
Bora GenelBrainoid - Audio
| Web (For Convenience) | https://jared-slawski.itch.io/holo-friends |
| Windows Also Available | https://jared-slawski.itch.io/holo-friends |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/holo-friends |
Ratings
| Overall | 85th | 4⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 225th | 3.622⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 120th | 3.75⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 33th | 4.351⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 24th | 4.595⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 57th | 4.097⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 52th | 4.083⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 155th | 3.956⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 29🗨️ |


The only downside is some balance issues — you always end up in profit when drawing cards, and it’s actually easier to avoid paying taxes since happiness is easier to farm.
Awesome art, I really liked the sink one. Great work!
It eventually became easy once money stopped being a major problem.
I really wish there were more packs to open/cards to get
Absolutely loved the presentation, let it be audio or visual. The art was beautiful all around, let it be the cards or other things like the bills, happiness bag etc. If I did have to nitpick, I kinda wished the bag you put your cards into stood out a little more from the environment more. At first I didn't notice it was a bag since it kinda blended into the environment. ( Probably just a me-thing )
I also couldn't really tell at first that you could put cards into your bank account ( again, probably just a me-thing ). Still, once I really understood the core loop of the game, it got really interesting. I also like the whole meta-story underneath everything of needing to balance life with a crippling gacha addiction lmao.
All in all, I'd say this was a damn good entry. Kudos to all of y'all
Note : May want to add the link for the LD page to your itch page, if you haven't already
If there’s an post jam update coming, I’d love to see even more variety in cards or maybe some late-game twists to keep the tension going that I need to make active decision, or I can keep some cards in my gallery because they are well made and I wanna COLLECT THEM! Either way, it’s very polished and addictive experience!
Here's my bugged game btw ;)

Super strong work on incorporating the theme so well into a really fun game idea.
Could I ask how you guys managed to do the pre and post jam update screen on your itch page? Really cool you can do that, i didn't know you could.
We were clued into it a few days ago, and we agree it's awesome (and also super easy to use)!
If you'd like to use it yourself, you can check it out here! https://badcop.games/jampack/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUqFpPj7jOs

Hey, great game! Graphics, sound and gameplay flow are on point for a good mood. It's very addictive but the most boring part is opening the booster packs. I am definitely not a person who feels the joy of opening booster packs, unlike my fellow coworkers with that POKéMON TCG mobile game. So making a button for skipping that part would be a QoL improvement. What I did really enjoy was doing the math to be financially responsible. Uhh, what else? Oh, yeah! I have an ultrawide screen and playing fullscreen crops the UI, so fixing that would be cool as well. I played the Jam version btw, so maybe you've already fixed that. Good job, guys!
Nice Gardevoir plushie in the back there btw!


P.S. I played PostJam version
If more versions of the game are planned, I’d suggest adding a feature to view your full collection and see which cards you’re missing; it would also be great to open more than six packs at once; or to reroll packs with different rarities, such as common, rare, or epic, to help complete the collection.
https://youtu.be/HK0ZsD7rFzI
I am in a love-hate relationship with Uncommon Cards.