The day of LD46 results is here!
I'll be playing games that are in the danger zone (just under 20 votes) that are accessible via web browsers in the few hours leading up to the results.
There is no queue, no submission, though if you are on 17-19 votes and have a web build - feel free to let me know in chat :)
I'll be live at 18:00 GMT / 19:00 UK / 14:00 EST. You can find me on twitch on the link below:
1 day down and we have made nice progress! Still hard to see if we'll have time for the initial idea - but we'll see what we can do. For now, please check out some of the AMAZING art done by the wonderful @spacey3d. Feel free to follow her on https://twitter.com/spacey3d.
Introducing the Tank:
and the Bard:
We have four more characters to share with you over the weekend ❤
We are glad to see people loved the adorable Tank and Bard classes we revealed this morning. As promised, here are two more of the heroes you can play with in our game:
The Mage:
The Warrior:
Tomorrow we'll reveal the final two playable classes, the Priest and the Thief. Then we'll introduce you to the nasty rat enemies that you'll be facing on the battlefield!
Here are the final two adventurers available in our LD47 card game! Great art thanks to @Spacey3d :)
Introducing a new card combat game with original mechanics and wonderful illustrations:
Here's a brief overview of the game board:
We are so pleased that after having a look at the code today, we were able to fix the crashing bugs that were prevent people from playing the game originally. Thanks for those who let us know in the comments section.
Being a board game and card combat game, the gameplay of the Curse of Cattenburg is indeed best experienced by playing! You can play it by using the download link on the Game Page (for an UE4 game, its only 150MB which is not bad!).
In the mean time, here's a lovely video to give a sneak peak of the gameplay, created by @brainoid.
https://youtu.be/v07-yQ7UdwA
In The Curse of Cattenburg, you form a party of feline adventurers and combat against the vile rats of the kingdom in an original card game.
[credit to @spacey3d for our wonderful character illustrations]
I'll explain one of my favourite party setups:
The Mage is our main source of damage, with the ability to one shot most rats! Her stun ability also helps control fights early on against multiple targets.
The Tank's main role is to defend the mage (defending a character shares the damage dealt) as she can be killed easily. He is a natural survivor too, with a huge 45 health pool.
The Bard brings a high wisdom stat, which giving the party 6 action points to play with per turn! His special ability boosts the party's attack power too, which will allow the tank to dish a more respectable 5 damage!
Feel free to let us know some of the characters you've enjoyed playing with! The crit and dodge master Thief? The health restoring priest perhaps? Or maybe the ever-reliable Warrior?
The main gameplay element of The Curse of Cattenburg is the card combat game. This is an original idea Brainoid and I have been wanting to explore recently, and LD gave us a great chance to do so. We have gotten some great feedback so far, and we are considering the possibility of developing the card game part of our game further.
We would love more feedback to help feed into this future development of the card game, outside of Ludum Dare!
If you're unfamiliar with the system, the game board looks a bit like this:
On the bottom left: this is your party. You can have up to 3 characters in your party.
On the bottom right: this is the enemy party. They also can have up to 3 enemies in their party.
On the bottom centre: this displays your action points, which is your resource for performing actions on your turn.
The 18 cards in the centre: these are slot cards that you need to reveal by spending action points. Once revealed, most cards will need to have a character played on them in order to perform that action. A character can only be placed on one slot card per turn.
The left and right edges: this is where each parties support cards live - cards that allow a party to transform an already-revealed slot card.
Memory: The 18 cards in the centre are shared between enemy and player. This means any cards revealed on the enemy turn, can be remembered by the player and utilised on their own turn. Our current design is that after each turn, the 3 rows of card shift down: with the bottom row being discarded and a fresh top row being dealt face down. This adds a slight element of strategy in revealing cards. For example: If you reveal a card on the top row, you know when it comes back your turn, it'll be on the bottom row and so you have information about which cards you can use without needing to spend an action point on revealing. Conversely, you can choose to reveal cards on the bottom row, to deny your enemy the information gain for their next turn. The memory concept also gives an additional reason to reveal cards, even if you cannot place a character on those cards this turn.
Targeting: Unlike most card combat games, you do not simply drag your character on to an enemy in order to attack. You must reveal a slot card that allows you to attack. There are a variety of slot cards that allow you to attack: - Specific target cards, that target the 1st, 2nd or 3rd enemy only. - Conditional target cards, that target someone based on their stats (like lowest health) - Special cards, for some enemies their specials will attack enemies (such as the warrior who cleaves all enemies) The aim here the optimal strategy dynamic, based on the cards you reveal. Your decisions each turn are vastly influenced by the cards you reveal - as they really are your list of possible actions. Support cards can help you transform the board to your favour, but support cards are limited.
Characters: The characters are designed to have their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, the mage hits the hardest but can easily be killed. The bard is weak, but brings great wisdom - which translates into more action points for the team. The priest has the ability to heal the team using her special ability. The aim here is to give the player choices, and have the sense that each character has their benefits, but importantly their weaknesses too. Some of the less exciting cards, such as defensive cards or hide card (that prevents being targeted next round) will be essential to prevent your glass cannon mage from getting taken out early. The idea is that your party's health is persistent between different combat encounters, so if your mage dies in battle - that's it, they're gone. You're now in a party of 2.
Thanks for taking the time to read this - and again we would really appreciate any feedback on the card game as we are considering developing it further outside of Ludum Dare.
Despite being a static camera card game, thanks to the Unreal Engine we realised that The Curse of Cattenburg was still very demanding for some peoples setups, especially those streaming and/or using an Integrated Graphics Processor. As a result, we are super pleased to announce we've added graphics settings to the game which should allow significant improvement in performance.
Access the settings via the Options section on the main menu, or by pressing ESC during game. Changing the values in game will allow you to see the impact of the changes in real time.
We would love to have feedback on our jam entry, even if you don't have time to rate it. We are most interested in feedback on the card game mechanic as we are considering developing it further. Have a lovely weekend!
As with previous years, I'll be streaming LD games and giving feedback on stream over at:
I only play entries if the developer is in chat. If a game is called but no developer is in chat to respond within 60 seconds, the game is removed from queue. This may sound harsh but it rewards those who are actually present, and ensures I get through games pretty quick. It also means those waiting in line do not need to worry about people who missed their game coming back later and jumping back in line ahead of them.
The Tank, wonderful character from our entry The Curse of Cattenburg, hopes to see you there!
I'm currently LIVE on:
I only play entries if the developer is in chat. If a game is called but no developer is in chat to respond within 60 seconds, the game is removed from queue. This may sound harsh but it rewards those who are actually present, and ensures I get through games pretty quick. It also means those waiting in line do not need to worry about people who missed their game coming back later and jumping back in line ahead of them.
The Bard, a wonderful character from our entry The Curse of Cattenburg, hopes to see you there!
We really enjoyed making this game and have received a lot of great constructive and positive feedback. We've put a bit of work in this past week to act on that feedback. The changes are mostly about improving the user experience, with tooltips to help the player understand the mechanics. There are also improvements to the AI decision making, along with quite a few combat tweaks and bug fixes. This update includes:
General: - UI tooltips to help explain character attributes and card mechanics - UI hover of cards will now display the card and its base attributes on the right-side of the screen - Game difficulty settings: You can now choose easy, medium or hard when starting a game. This will amend the base attributes of the various rat enemies in the game - Improved drag accuracy when dragging cards with the mouse - Additional audio has been added for card flipping and when effects are applied to a character. - The starting party is now the Warrior and Priest, which gives players a slightly less squishy character along with an extra action point early on in the game.
Card Game: - Critical strike damage reduced from x2 damage to x1.5 damage (your poor mage may survive longer now!) - Visual effect to help emphasise when an attack was a critical strike - AI decision making has been improved to prioritise killing low health targets and being more sensible when using heal cards. - Defending has been reworked: Defending will now always reduce incoming damage by 50%. When other party members defend a character, the remaining 50% damage will be split between the target and any additional defenders.
Board Game: - Balanced Relic Tile distribution to prevent super early boss encounters and games that drag on too long - The more often you fight, the more likely you are to encounter relic tiles (some form of reward for engaging in combat) - Dice rolls are displayed in a slightly more visual way now (still just text, sorry!) - Prevented clicking "Roll" button repeatedly, which would prevent you from closing a dialogue popup
Screenshots:
A tutorial video plays when you enter combat for the first time:
Tooltips now appear when hovering over cards, along with showing the base version of the card
You can now view your character stats before choosing who receives the attribute upgrade
Some of the less obvious cards are hopefully now clearer with hover over tooltips
Critical strikes are now represented by the word crit, instead of just a brighter attack effect
There are now two more difficulties to choose from (easy was the original difficulty setting)
Upcoming Changes
We are looking to make a Linux build, but unfortunately its a bit of a hassle to do in Unreal Engine. Should be getting a Linux build by the end of the week though.
Of course rate the game based on the original version, but we hope existing players and new enjoy the changes we've made to The Curse of Cattenburg 😸 You can download it from my itch.io page.
The day of LD47 results is here!
I'll be playing games that are in the danger zone (just under 20 votes) that are accessible via web browsers in the few hours leading up to the results.
There is no queue, no submission, though if you are on 17-19 votes and have a web build - feel free to let me know in chat :)
I'll be live about 18:00 UK / 14:00 EST. You can find me on twitch on the link below:
Thanks everyone for playing The Curse of Cattenburg during Ludum Dare 47! It was fantastic to have so many people give such lovely feedback to our cat themed original card game! We were also exceptionally pleased and proud to have ranked 3rd in Art and 12th Overall.
We have been discussing expanding the game into a full-game over the past few weeks, and we've already been cleaning up the code base and having many, many conversations about design directions we could take the game. We're somewhere between Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon in terms of game flow at the moment, with the Card Game created for the jam being at the heart of the game - to resolve combat. We're looking to add some deck-building to the game, too.
If you're interested in following the game, we've just made a brand new discord for people to join to get game updates, discuss the game, give feedback and report bugs.
Thanks everyone for playing The Curse of Cattenburg during Ludum Dare 47! We were really proud to have ranked 3rd in Graphics and 12th Overall.
We have decided to develop the game into a real game! We're currently ironing out the overall design, we're thinking somewhere between Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon in terms of game flow, with the Card Game created for the jam being at the heart of the game to resolve combat. We'll also be adding some deck-building to the game ❤
If you're interested in following the game, there's a few ways you can keep in touch:
It's great to see so many posts about people excited to be taking place in the jam! I too am excited, especially since I get to team back up with the same team that delivered Cattenburg in LD47 😻
If any of you are looking for something to listen to whilst we count down the remaining 8 hours, I was recently a guest on a Game Jam podcast called "Jammers Podcast". In the episode we discuss in depth different ways that people can approach game jams, sharing tips and suggestions to make sure that you get a worthwhile experience out of the jam. You can listen to it here.
Goodluck and enjoy the weekend everyone!
We would love to invite you to try our LD 48 entry! You can play and rate it here.
How to describe it? It's a game with a fun story about three Jazz loving frogs, who somehow manage to be the only ones who can save the world from a darkness.
Mechanics-wise, it has automated lane-based combat, where you can play cards to influence the swing of battle. Deciding when to play your cards and which cards to save will be the difference between making it to the deepest depths of the darkness.
Let us know any thoughts and suggestions in the comments section of the game page, we'd love to hear. 🐸♥
Good day, Ludum Darers!
Last night I recorded a playthrough of our LD48 entry Freg, Fregg and Freggy and chucked it on YouTube. I know a lot of people will only play WebGL / HTML5 games, but as our team used Unreal Engine 4 - making a web friendly build isn't an option for us 😔 I hope this video gives those people a way to still experience the game!
https://youtu.be/yHHf9F08qig
My recommendation would of course be to play it yourself, so if you like the look of it - please do feel free to download and play for yourselves! Enjoy 🐸
That's right. You get to play the unlikely heroes, Freg, Fregg and Freggy, as they battle deeper into the darkness to confront an evil dark force.
The combat is automated, though you earn cards that you can use to help your freggy friends through battle! With some original jazz and wonderful 2d and 3d art - we'd love for you to give Freg, Fregg and Freggy a try today 🐸💚
As with previous years, I'll be streaming LD games and giving feedback on stream over at:
I only play entries if the developer is in chat. If a game is called but no developer is in chat to respond within 60 seconds, the game is removed from queue. This may sound harsh but it rewards those who are actually present, and ensures I get through games pretty quick. It also means those waiting in line do not need to worry about people who missed their game coming back later and jumping back in line ahead of them.
Lady Elizardbeth, a wonderful character from our entry Freg, Fregg & Freggy, hopes to see you there!