Shards by mechanicallife
Warning: This game has some gore, in the form of finger dismemberment.
General Walkthrough
In this game you have a collection of shards that you play with. Shards are stone tables that can be placed in the pentagram.
Shard rarities are: Starting, Common, Rare and Legendary shards. there are around 80 Shards in the game.
When the summon starts they are activated in a clockwise order starting at the bottom. When a shard is activated they add their power to the summon. Your goal is to reach the summon power target for the demon each summon.
Gems are items that give global effect that you enable by placing the gem in one of the slots around the pentagram. The crystal is a special gem used to start the summon and activate the pentagram. This gem has to be placed in the bottom gem slot.
You can look up at the demon or down at your hand by placing you mose at the top or bottom of the screen.
You can also inspect Gems and Shard by right clicking on them.
The amount of fingers on your hand represent how many lives you have left, if you lose all five fingers the game is over. If you complete 15 summons you have won!
Buy stronger shards and build a good collection to reach further!
If you see the option "Challenge" in the main menu, it's a version of the game where your starting collection is just random Commons instead of the normal tailored starting collection.
Controls
- Left mouse button to move Shards and Gems around the table.
- Right mouse button to inspect and read Shards and Gems.
- When in the shop Pull an item down to the bottom of the screen to buy it.
- when not in the shop or during a scroll animation, place the mouse at the bottom of the screen to see how many fingers you have left. Or at the top of the screen to view the demon and the target summon power.
- Esc brings up a pause menu.
Shard Keywords
- Summon: Refers to the power number in the pentagram.
- Discard: When a shard is discarded it's placed in your discard pile which is shuffled in to your draw pile when the draw pile is empty.
- Right arrow icon: Refers this shards' clockwise neighbour in the pentagram.
- Left arrow icon: Refers this shards' counterclockwise neighbour in the pentagram.
- Destroy: A destroyed shard is removed from the pentagram and discarded.
- Exile: The exiled shard is removed from your collection completely and can no longer be drawn.
- Transform: Turn a shard into another temporarily, it's returned to its original form when discarded.
- Conjure: Create a shard temporarily that is removed when it is discarded.
- Swap: Switch places of the referenced shards in the pentagram slots.
- Permanently: If used before some alteration to a shard that alteration is permanent and will remain on that shard for the remainder of the game.
- On Play: Describes an effect that trigger when this shard is placed in the pentagram.
- On Activate: Describes an effect that trigger before a shards' power is added to the summon.
- On Destroy: Describes an effect that trigger when this shard is destroyed.
Note* The web version has been updated since the original upload. We fixed a crash when entering the shop and fixed a missing reference to an image asset. If you wish to try the original, you can download the windows version!
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/shards |
Ratings
| Overall | 87th | 4.125⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 309th | 3.75⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 74th | 4.063⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 264th | 4.063⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 123th | 4.396⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 69th | 4.146⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 80th | 4.188⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 28🗨️ |
My only complaint is that the camera movement felt really janky when looking up and down, but fairly minor. Great job on this!
very strong inscryption vibes. Very cool atmosphere. Finger cutting could be more impactful, I wish we could see the demon we are summoning more clearly.
Individually weak items being super op when used together gives creates a fun dynamic (sometimes leads to unavoidable failure when you can't combo, but we are given 5 lives to deal with that).
Gameplay was a little samey, so I didn't really want to start over when I eventually died. Each level was identical, just with a higher number to reach. Some mechanical variance would go a long way.
I bought the gem to give me an extra shard each hand but I don't think it did anything.
@vivid-hallucination Yeah some more variety would certainly help, unfortunately the whole thing got a bit overscoped in general for the team. Did you equip the Gem you bought in the pentagram? The feedback on that part is a bit dodgy.
I may try challenge mode another time.
Reminds me of Inscryption, both with the vibes, and also with how much of a full game it feels even though you made it in 72 hours, and I'm very excited to see how you're planning on expanding it in the future, if there's a plan for that.
I would definitely buy a full release on Steam, it's an absolute masterpiece!
amazing game
However, I encountered some issues with the camera movement and reading the shards but I think that might just be me!
The game offers addictive gameplay and strong Inscription vibes. With a bit more polish and clarity, this game has the potential to be a standout roguelike experience. Kudos to the team for creating such a complete game in just 72 hours!
Nice job :)
Please can you vote on my game too?
The seamless looped music helps the relaxed but dark mood. Quite impressive depth for a jam :)
The concept of this game and it's execution are really something else though and those are small tweaks I would make to what's already a great entry. Really amazing job guys you smashed it!
The atmosphere is really great, super dark and haunting, and the finger dismemberment was a cool touch. Nice job!
It did take me both a failed run and several attempts after that to fully understand the upgrades. I didn't understand that the gem-like things at the bottom were my buys. And I just thought the pulling surprise star towards me was a way to open it. Since you don't pull the selected in the star to buy it, I didn't at all understand for the longest time how to spend the last buy.
I bought the finger restore crystal as first, and I must say all finger restores are quite overpowered since they are extra lives basically. And I found a bug, I think, because you can have more than 5 fingers with these restores so that if you afterwards should loose one it just snaps right back after the cut.
There were quite a few "neighbors get get +5" and while I guess there might have been some shards that did something with their own power, it seemed to mostly make that one shard basically be worth ten more than its given value. So I didn't quite understand the strategy in that one. Equally the legendary 60 shard seemed to effectively mostly be a 30 shard (unless you actively skipped its neighbor places) and while it said -15 to neighbors at least once it for sure subtracted more than that for some reason.
In all though I enjoyed the game, though it seemed quite risk-free after I had gotten the finger gem since I mostly had 5 or more fingers on my hand. I would have played to the end, I was pretty far, but then I played a shard that should draw 2 shards and the game just didn't do that and everything just stopped.
Very solid entry! Well done.