Rune Rangers by Taximan981
Capture a variety of cool and cute creatures in Rune Rangers!
As a novice Rune Ranger, you'll embark on expeditions to find new creatures that you can add to your team. Once you come across one, get ready for battle! Start casting your capture spell and send out up to three creatures to help you out!
Through the Spell Grid, engage in fun puzzle battles where you'll use your companions' spell runes to counter the spell of your target, and deal damage back by taking your own tiles!
Easy to pick up, but deep enough to keep you coming back, Rune Rangers features a simple yet satisfying gameplay loop of battling creatures, capturing them and battling more creatures to expand your collection. Collect multiple of the same creature to learn more about them, and maybe even find some unique variants...?!
| Link | https://taximan981.itch.io/rangers |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/58/rune-rangers |
Ratings
| Overall | 152th | 3.862⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 167th | 3.724⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 17th | 4.207⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 230th | 3.931⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 272th | 3.948⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 527th | 2.654⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 549th | 3.304⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 43🗳️ | 43🗨️ |
Nice entry!
Alright, before I say anything critical, I just want to say that I would lose hours playing an expanded version of this concept.
The art is spot on, the music is fine, but the core gameplay loop is wonderful. I do think that it could offer a bit more friction during the selection time.
That's all I can say though. Fantastic work.
The only thing that I found a little bit frustrating (and this might have just been me not understanding the rules) was the way that each creature had their shapes made available seemingly at random - I never felt like I could look at an enemy board and immediately know how I wanted to respond to it; instead, I had to do a lot of trial-and-error while looking at my creature's current available moves. This might just be a skill issue though, as I have a notoriously poor memory, and could not keep track of which creatures could use which shapes 😅
I've never played anything like this before, and it's really well done - Good work! :)
It would be great to see more mechanics from different creatures working together - right now it is a great start for something more complex later on to add synergies and more challenging fights with probably creature upgrades and so on.
The spinning thing on the game board is very distracting and feels like unnecessary clutter.
The creature designs are really nicely done, and makes the whole experience more fun capturing them. The lore descriptions are also pretty fun.
I feel like the the UI could have a bit more overall visual polish.
Overall a fun game and a great entry.
anyways good game!!
I like the creature designs... Orbuncle is a fave.
I did run into this annoying bug that caused me to stop playing.
That overlay appeared when placing it one battle and never went away again. Interestingly I could still pick up and move it during the battle round it appeared in but after that it was just stuck there permanently.
There were a couple creatures I did not acquire, but I kept getting many duplicates which always fight with the same patterns which got a bit repetitive.
Really nice entry though. Great job!
I also thought of making an creature collector type game but decided it would be too big of a scope. So congrats to you for actually doing it!