Wow, what a great jam! I've seen and played so many phenomenal entries, it's inspiring to see all the jammers who come together for this :smile:

All the feedback We've gotten has only motivated me further to continue with my game, as such I decided to post a few thoughts on my game, and potentially solicit feedback for a further release.

I started the jam with wanting to take an existing board game, and add some kind of twist to it. When the theme of summoning was announced we gravitated towards chess and roguelike using cards as your "summons". I don't think it necessarily fit the theme the best, but I did think its a fun concept.

The first focus of the game was getting the board generating onto the tilemap, as well as having them placed properly with each new wave

The next big focus was being able to place pieces from the cards on the board. It was decided early on that there would be a fog of war to prevent you from seeing your opponent pieces while placing yours. There has been feedback from ratings that this isn't always intuitive, so it's now an option in the full game :smile:

After that the focus was on being able to "merge" the pieces to form the next one. This could be done either from card -> piece, or card -> card

Then was the overall game flow, including moves, simple (dumb) enemy AI

The last big focus of the core mechanic was getting the wave transitions working

The final day was spent largely on game polish, adding effects, and the AI. While the AI wasn't perfect it was a vast improvement from the initial version (pick a random available move). The final AI in the jam went something like this:

• if there is a move to kill the king, take it
• if there is a move to kill a piece, pick one at random
• else pick a random available move

It's not perfect and I've already thought of a few improvements, but this is definitely an area of focus for the full game. Unfortunately many chess engines like stockfish won't work because they depend on standard chess boards and rules. Also many of them are GPL which make it impossible to do a full release without releasing your source code. If someone knows of a chess engine that could work with non standard boards/rules I may consider adding an "interface" with it so players can download it separately and optionally.

The other cool thing (I thought) with the game was effect cards. Cards that would somehow change the board or pieces. Unfortunately we were only able to get two different types in (x gets y’s moves, increase move length) so there wasn't much variety and your pieces got VERY overpowered :sweat_smile: This is an area of focus for the full release. If you have a cool idea for an effect card (somehow changes the board, rules, or pieces) I'd be happy to hear and potentially incorporate them!

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading! If you've played and rated the game thank you so much! If you have feedback, suggestions, or would like to get updates about this project, I'd love to hear from you in the comments :smile:

If you are interested you can play the jam version on itch here

Some wrap up thoughts:

• Godot is a solid engine that makes it VERY quick to get things implemented
• Getting a full nights sleep is very important for maximum productivity
• Leaving the final day to polish was a really smart thing we haven't achieved in many jams before :joy:
• Focusing on the core mechanics first meant more time for bugfixes and polish
• Wrapped up at 1556 lines of gdscript (754 being in the Game (main) file :joy:)