Kalòmancer by BinarySpark
A CARD CRAFTING EXPERIENCE
Kalò-mancy - the art of summoning
- :flowerplayingcards: An auto-battler card game featuring 62 unique cards and many interactions & effects.
- :hammer_pick: Make your own cards! Change the numbers, change the names, create your own strategies!
- :checkered_flag: Six unique challenges with increasing difficulty, putting your deckbuilding skills to the test
Craft Your Own Deck
Have you ever played a board game and wished that that one card was just slightly different? You can make that happen.
Choose from a selection of :blackjoker: card effects and start changing its values. You can change the :crossedswords: Attack or :heart: Health of any card, but also the parameters of the :sparkler: special effects of that card. You can make a deck that spams small tokens, wipes boards or buffs other cards to the high heavens.
The more powerful a card is, the more :largebluecircle: Aether it will cost to play. You and your opponent have only a limited supply to spend each turn, so choose your cards carefully.
How To Play
Mouse and keyboard required.
The easiest is to learn by playing - go out there and try some new things! But if you'd like to learn more, here are some rules and tips.
Playing Cards
The game is played in rounds, featuring three phases: - First, your opponent places cards ('summons') on the board. - Then, you may play cards of your own. - When you end your turn, combat will begin.
You play cards using :largebluecircle: Aether. Every turn, you and your opponent gain +2 additional :largebluecircle: Aether to spend per turn, allowing you to play stronger summons.
Combat
During combat, all summons attack automatically. The order goes from left to right, alternating between your summons and your opponent's summons. Targets are chosen randomly.
When attacking, summons deal damage to their targets, receiving no damage in return. If a summon has no opposing summons to attack, it will deal damage to the opponent directly instead. The first to run out of Life points, loses.
New cards that are summoned during a combat round, such as by card effects, do not attack until next round.
Keywords:
- Summon: A card on the battlefield.
- Taunt: Opponents prioritize attacking summons with Taunt.
- Armor: Reduces damage inflicted from any source.
- Deathtouch: If a summon with Deathtouch deals at least 1 damage to their target when attacking, it instantly kills the target.
- Stealth: This summon cannot attack, and cannot be targeted by attackers.
Credits
- Jorrit Neslo: Card art, UI art
- Sam Minh Ly: System design, audio, particle effects
- Mika Molenkamp: Programming, UI implementation, animation
Fonts: 'LT Soul' by LyonsType, 'Kingthings Exeter' by Kingthings, licensed under SIL Open Font License. Sounds from pixabay.com. Music: 'Fantasy: Lament for a Warrior's Soul' and 'The Kings Feast' by RandomMind.
CRAFT YOUR OWN SYNERGY NOW
Ratings
| Overall | 102th | 4.103⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 80th | 4.121⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 621th | 3.336⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 569th | 3.698⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 175th | 4.31⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 940th | 2.39⭐ | 52🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 439th | 3.724⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 105🗨️ |
I am at a loss of words. Truly amazing work!
Really like the visuals of the cards
notes on mechanics:
With the card creator mechanic I just feel that it is begging me to create a completely broken deck, full of creatively overpowered cards that have some insane synergies. But I doesn't seem to let me. I tried a bunch of different combinations, and while they worked very well, they just didn't feel broken. Since you have drawn inspiration from Inscryption, I think you will understand what I mean.
I have a bit of a problem with the attack random enemy mentality of auto battlers in general. It just feels to me that it is taking out a very welcome strategical element from the gameplay i.e. being able to predict the outcome of ending your turn. But this is a general discussion with valid points on both sides and not really aimed at your submission. though I would like to hear your thoughts on this :)
the deck builder is very engaging, I spend quite a bit of time there. it would be nice if you could layout your deck in the middle to get a better overview of what you are working with. the base cards being in the side drawer if you need to create a new modification.
Cool entry, innovative approach, love the deck building.
Very impressive submission, if all those systems were coded in 72 hours from scratch you guys are amazing. If you had some code prepared for this sort a game it is still very impressive.
Sometimes the "hit a random enemy"-mechanic is not really rewarding, but overall the game feels very polished and it was a nice experience.
I even went to "fatigue" with previous version of it. A lot of clear. A bit more damage and health for cleave (to kill shields). Poison for uber hamster.
Impressive game. Its polished and well thought through and through..
Very impressive!
I assume the ai plays random cards out of their deck, but the deck creation is versatile enough to give them "playstyles"? If not I can't imagine how you manage to make that work in so little time!? and obviously no shame if that is what it does - the ai feels great. Great variation of cards and the game is easy enough to just pick up with out reading a block of text. I played until I won all battles and needed need to update the deck when it didn't work against one of the decks, and that just felt perfect. You also manage to have a cohesive look of every thing.
The feedback I have is that maybe there could have been some sort of indicator that the target is picked at random (maybe a sound effect of a dice roll, or that it turns to a couple of targets before it locks in on the correct one). I played the game once without checking the tutorial, and that was really the only thing I went to the tutorial after to clarify. I think also allowing the player to decide what position a card is played in would be quite a small feature that would allow for a lot more strategy. But then again I'm amazed how polished it is so it wouldn't surprise me if you used all time you had. Great job!
Nice graphics and design, nice job!
I really liked this game, in fact i was trying to pitch my team to do a card battler too, but i was outvoted.
the ability to customize cards definitely adds a lot of longevity to the gameplay
@blank-3d the auto battle part was mostly done for scope. We wanted to make sure the card creation got in so we decided on an auto card battler. If we were to continue devloping this idea, that is definitly the first thing we'll look at.
@bjornstenlund the AI is indeed mostly random. We tried to 'program' the AI by giving them cards of the right costs to allow them to play them in the right order, combined with only giving them 4 or 5 unique cards to ensure somewhat consistent behavior.
@batisdark thanks for playing and getting to the end! Great to see you used the card creation system to overcome specific challenges, that was exactly the intent. I see you have a lot of area damage which seems appropiate for the final challenge.
Some feedback:
- I loved the card art and iconography
- The music is great - especially the intro track
- It was a bit overwhelming being faced with dozens of cards with heaps of ways to customise them when I clicked "Start game". I think it'd be better to introduce this slowly, or send the player straight into an easy combat.
- It would have been good to show the cards in hand on screen all the time. Having to hover to see the text makes it a bit difficult for a new player.
- My initial hand (I only added one card to the deck I was given) was all 8+ cost cards, and I couldn't play anything for the first few turns. The starting deck should probably have some cheaper cards (or maybe I got unlucky).
- (very trivial thing) The "End turn" button felt a bit out of place. I think because games like Hearthstone/Slay the Spire/Magic put it on the right/bottom.
- It would have been nice to have descriptions of keywords (although I recognised them all from other games).
- The ability to edit cards is cool! I liked the balancing (eg: adding extra skeletons to Necrohamster multiplied the cost increase by the skeleton stats). This (and choosing which enemy to fight) made it feel more like a sandbox than a game. It would have been good to be able to modify the deck over time with small changes.
Awesome work!
While I didn't ticker a lot with the card changing mechanics what I tried was quite fun.
The combat itself was excellent especially the whole UI/cards control (I wish our card game had such elegant UI/control).
Great job!
That being said, because the game obviously borrows heavily from Hearthstone, I found myself expecting things like the mulligan mechanic and more control over the unit order. The card editor was interesting, however I feel that the mana cost increase from changing a single stat was a little too steep.
I think if you'd focus more on card crafting it might be really interesting take on the theme.
However I'd like to say that visual execution is really good and for me only lack of OST / SFX was really a bit problem to feel the impact.