Tower of Cards by ShaunJS
Tower Defence Deck Building Card Game!
This was a lot of fun but very unfinished. No menus, no tutorials.
Spend gold, build towers, shoot orcs. Every 30 or so kills you get an upgrade card and can upgrade a tower! Also every now and again you have the opportunity to buy new cards for your deck.

Towers only last so long, so make the best of them! You can maze enemies but the game won't let you block paths.

Some broken dodgy stuff sometimes goes on with the hand/card sorting. But whatcanyadoooo.
Made lots of similar dumb scoping mistakes as last time but I think the overall idea comes across better in this entry! Still not my best work but definitely higher up there this time around.
| GMS2 Source Code | http://www.shaunspalding.co.uk/files/TowerOfCards.yyz |
| Windows | http://www.shaunspalding.co.uk/files/TowerOfCards.zip |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/tower-of-cards |
Ratings
| Overall | 147th | 3.722⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 94th | 3.796⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 373th | 3.315⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 298th | 3.704⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 169th | 3.685⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 385th | 2.66⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 438th | 2.38⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 357th | 3.019⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 8🗳️ | 6🗨️ |
Here are my thoughts when it comes to coding errors:
If I clicked upgrade but then had no cards that could upgrade, I couldn't unselect the upgrade card and/or play any of the cards in my deck. Anytime I'd try to play a card, I'd get the "Can't Upgrade!" message. Also, a byproduct result of this error is a random blank space in my deck as it grows from the "Reshuffle" function. (see screenshots: http://bit.ly/ToC-captures)
Sometimes the minions would walk over from a grass area to a cliff area, I'm guessing because of a bug somewhere in the collisions/path-finding code. (see screenshots: http://bit.ly/ToC-captures)
Programming errors aside (!):
As of this version, it's kind of easy to last forever in the game if you build lots of gold mines in the beginning, because that gold grows exponentially for the rest of the game and having only a couple towers is more than enough to survive the first few waves. A couple times playing now and I've gotten to where I have >2000 gold and have no problem putting down dozens more towers for an impenetrable defense! If you decide to polish this game, I would suggest tailoring down the endurance rates of the gold mines and walls—they last a bit too long on their own right now.
It would be nice to have an ability to break down structures for half the money returned or something, but that's nominal. Also, some variety in the enemies, but I remember you mentioning stuff like that in the stream.
Of course, adding some music and more sound effects would help fill out the experience—but what you've done with the code more than explains why these areas are lacking by the end of the 48-hour timeline. This level of programming is far beyond most everything else I've seen at a Ludum Dare.
Overall, man you know I'm impressed! Not only is the UI with the card building and the camera actions smooth and pleasing, but the path-finding and variety of towers is also engaging and fun enough for me to play your game more than a few times now. Congrats on a successful entry!
[Further, I'm a big fan of your work and your tutorials have been immensely helpful in my own programming growth. Thanks so much for what you do, my man! Cheers.]
And yeah I agree with you on the all the design stuff there, lots of different ways to improve and I knew the difficulty was way off (and could sense the goldmines were going to be a tough one to get right) but hey, that's Jams for you.
Thanks for playing and for the detailed comment!
-S
definitely just a prototype but I hope you expand on it. Makes me want to reconsider ditching GMS2 for godot..
#### POSITIVE
- Feel's good create the structures, I feel so powerful.
- Presentation and Graphics are over the top.
- Music fit nice.
#### OBSERVATION
- Just the glitch of the card in the upgrade. (I thinking esc would deselect, but instant I quit... This happend 3 times).
Feel so polished.
Graphics are cute and consistent and the games feedback was very good, placing down cards felt great. The gameplay is engaging but the lack of a play button took me off guard as I was still familiarising myself with the cards and various stats when suddenly I was under attack. I guess dropping me in the deep end added a level of panic you don't usually get from tower defence games :stuck_out_tongue:
Oh, and the upgrade card bug was a little annoying, but as long as you kept getting low level cards, it really didn't break the game that much.
Anyway, great job overall!