Necrunmancer by Adam Martin

[raw]
made by Adam Martin for Ludum Dare 55 (JAM)

Background

The heroes are coming again, as the resident necromancer, it is your job to stop them. Run through a gauntlet of battles and summon your monsters to defeat the heroes. The more you win, the harder it will become.

How to play

Battles take place in turns. * First, you will play any cards you can afford from your hand, and then click "End Turn" (you hand will be discarded, so use them or lose them). * Then, the enemies will strike back. They will, generally, attack summoned monsters first, and then the player, if no monsters are left. * Finally, you will regenerate some mana and get a new hand.

ld-55-overview.png

Card types

There are 2 types of cards, summons, and utility.

Summon cards

These are your minions that will do your fighting. The have an attack, defense and cost to play. The higher the cost the stronger they may be.

ld-55-summon-card.png

Utility cards

These cards do something to you such as increase your available mana or health. They do not have a cost to use.

ld-55-utility-card.png

Enemies

There are various enemies you will fight, each has different attack power, and some have unique attack styles such as the archer only attacking the player.

Ratings

Overall 454th 3.688⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Fun 344th 3.708⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 930th 2.979⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Theme 311th 4⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 877th 3.208⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Audio 348th 3.604⭐ 26🧑‍⚖️
Mood 568th 3.565⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Given 25🗳️ 36🗨️

Feedback

Bry
16. Apr 2024 · 02:45 UTC
Enjoyable music and good audio overall. Seems to be an issue on the "You Won" screen (there are scrollbars and the cards are too small to read the text). With more cards there could be good strategy, as it stands now there isn't much choice to make on a turn-by-turn basis with the mana pool always being so low. The concept is great and I could see this in a polished state being a very playable and interesting game.
Gabriel Mendonca
16. Apr 2024 · 02:47 UTC
Your game is awesome, loved the idea and the visuals!!
bearcage
16. Apr 2024 · 02:52 UTC
This was a fun one! The overall structure was reminding me of the gauntlet dungeons in the For The King series (in a good way) — the balance of conserving mana vs trying to avoid taking passthrough damage from leaving archers alive an extra round was a fun source of tension.

I'd have loved to see some kind of an upgrade or progression mechanic — maybe choose between more hp or more mp every N fights or something?
Silverice
16. Apr 2024 · 02:54 UTC
Fun game loved the concept, the Mage was cool and also liked the combat mechanics. For some reason, the red skeleton has 1 attack and 3 hp, and the white skeleton has 2 attack and 2 hp, but it seems the white skeleton was able to resist more damage than the red one, i compared it a few times and always came to the same conclusion. Overall a fun game!!! Good work!
Pusheeneiro
16. Apr 2024 · 02:57 UTC
Great deck building game
Kyle Spence
16. Apr 2024 · 02:58 UTC
Fun game. I really liked the visuals and the scroll movement effect. Some of the enemies were placed off screen for me. If there were more cards and variety I could see myself playing a lot more :)
Wumbomancer
16. Apr 2024 · 03:05 UTC
Agree with @bry, fun little game, just a couple of issues with getting rewards. With a little extra polish, would be a really fun side scrolling card adventure!
🎤 Adam Martin
16. Apr 2024 · 03:12 UTC
@bearcage there is an upgrade after every 5 fights, I didn't note it very well in the description.
Shasaur
16. Apr 2024 · 12:09 UTC
Great game which shines with it's completeness. It has a lot of content, decent number of mechanics, a great difficulty ramp-up!

My only feedback would be to make the art a little bit more consistent, for example, some entities have a white outline, whilst others have none. (also I believe the hellhound is floating)

Great work overall though!
LDJam user 259831
16. Apr 2024 · 17:42 UTC
Cool game! I wish there was the option to skip the card rewards as at some point I was drawing hands with only mana potions and no summons. The artwork is very nice, gameplay is fun. Overall very enjoyable.
Zak4tt4ck1
16. Apr 2024 · 23:23 UTC
music is an absolute banger
Tobius
17. Apr 2024 · 00:55 UTC
Choosing when to play cards and when to save mana was fun. One way to make the game more fun would be to give the player more decisions to make.

The look of the game was innovative, 3d/2d parallax background on rails was new to me. One way to make the game more innovative would be to have a different resource for playing cards than just mana.

Summoning creatures to fight for you was very thematic. To make the game more thematic I would've liked to see more emphasis on the act of summoning instead of just focusing on what was summoned.

The background and foreground looked great, I really liked how the knights looked as well. Removing the semi-transparent panel behind the cards and splitting the clouds and sky into separate parallax layers would improve the look.

Really good sound track, catchy! Sound effects for all attacks, summons and interactions were good too. I would've liked an ""end turn"" and ""turn started"" sound effect as well.
Simon Rahnasto
17. Apr 2024 · 22:06 UTC
What a delightful little game you've created!

Firstly, the music and audio are nice and cohesive. They add a nice ambiance to the gameplay experience and go very well with the graphics!

It was fun to try to manage your mana and make strategic decisions in the battles, you have a very solid foundation that I think could be expanded into a cool mobile game!

Overall, your game is fun, geat job! :smile:
RaimondoSenpai
18. Apr 2024 · 12:34 UTC
Very good job guys, the game has nice mechanics is quite well balanced and is fun to play. also you gotta be carefull on when using spells to save mana, the ambient is fitting. solid fundation game might improve it guys gl hf
SleepyStudios
18. Apr 2024 · 20:00 UTC
Cool take on the deck building genre. Managing your mana strategically was a great design decision but maybe there needs to be more mana (or more options) to prevent the situation where you're just top-decking hoping you out-last the enemies? Speaking of which, nice variety of enemies anc creatures - was plently surprised about picking up new cards with new creatures as I progressed through. Nice work!
Surfa
18. Apr 2024 · 20:10 UTC
Gameplay wise this was alot of fun. The music loop got repetative fiarlly quickly and the graphics were inconsistent in their quality. Really like the 3d/2d background and some the sprite work was really nice but felt some was lacking a little bit of polish (archer for example). Overall a really good entry to LD 55 :thumbsup:
K-toll
18. Apr 2024 · 23:35 UTC
I'm discovering this type of mechanic with your game which, fortunately, isn't too difficult. But I must have the wrong strategy. It's going to take me a bit of practice to understand the distribution of the cards, the number I can use depending on the turn and the bonuses earned. I had the impression that I often had a bad hand.
Anyway, good job!
Deive_Ex
19. Apr 2024 · 03:56 UTC
The music is pretty good and the gameplay is pretty nice, it's just a shame it gets repetitive real quick (which is normal in a Jam). Congrats!
Gawain Doell
19. Apr 2024 · 05:59 UTC
This was surprisingly pretty deep for a jam game! I really liked the twists, first that some enemies would deal direct damage. The second big twist was that magic score carries from battle to battle, so it became more about long term management. These were really refreshing for this kind of game, and made for some fun strategies chaining the combats together.

My biggest complaint is the card text size is way too small, often unfortunately unreadable. (I played the web build and there does not seem to be a way to make the game full screen?) I have played enough other games of this style to pick up what everything did, but I strongly recommend going bigger on the font sizes!

I have a minor gripe with how it is balanced. There is this sweet spot where the player is just barely getting by or has to not go full overpowered to conserve between combats. I thought that part of the power curve was very fun, as I had to really think about taking blows vs having mana next turn/combat, and what might come next in my deck build. In the jam version this lasts only about 2 or 3 combats max before the enemy creeps over the power level and stomps the player flat (or a bad shuffle kills the run). If this expands, I would love to see the game get rebalanced so those "tight but fair" situations happen more often.

Overall, great job to your team! I had fun with my couple of runs, the sound, music, and graphics all come together to make me feel like a summoner, so this is right on target. You got a great start to something here. :smile_cat:
🎤 Adam Martin
19. Apr 2024 · 12:34 UTC
@gawain-doell we tried to tweak the build for mobile (just build settings) and it broke full screen mode, just found this out last night, so we'll get it fixed.

Glad everyone is enjoying it so far, and we may attempt a balance pass after the jam, stay tuned!
JoshAnthony1990
19. Apr 2024 · 16:26 UTC
I like the premise. I enjoy deck builders, and I enjoy created creature combat. For a jam effort to attempt deep strategy, I think it was a fair effort, and I had fun with it.

At its core, this combat mechanic of this game is Magic the Gathering, but creatures only, and no control over who attacks what. That lack of control was my biggest frustration, because it didn't let me prevent losing scenarios (like targeting archers first so I can reduce player damage). Even something like having a creature that forces blocks (e.g. Hearthstone's Taunt keyword) would give me some amount of control over attack targets, and that would've been more enjoyable to me.

Again, though, for a jam effort, what you got in there was fun. With some refinement, I could see this being a game I'd pick up.
ping78
21. Apr 2024 · 21:28 UTC
What a cool roguelike deck-building game you've built here. Nice visuals too and like Zak4tt4ck1 said music is indeed an absolute banger. Well done.
WilliamSoares
23. Apr 2024 · 15:07 UTC
I could spend hours playing this game! I loved how simple and cool is your card sistem. I see a lot of potential! Well done guys
Smidgens
25. Apr 2024 · 12:53 UTC
Fun little game. It might be really neat if the background environment changed up a little the farther you got into it. Different enemy types to match too. Lots of fun stuff you could do with this as a full game. I loved the visual style too.