Fun, love the way the cards interact.

So polished for a compo game. Very innovative as well.

That was a fun and polished little card game! Once I got enough smiley faces, the correct strategy was just to draw the whole deck every turn, and I focused on maxing out my stars. I quit out once I hit the "Get 5000 in 100 days" challenge as it would take way too long, but I was making about 50 per day so I would have achieved it.

The card enhancement makes this much more interesting than at the first glance. Might have to check out this mystic vale you speak of. The ui is well laid out and works well. I wonder about the balancing, I'm probably missing some strat. Is a cool game!

Delightful! Can't believe you fit all this in compo!! Great work.

What a nice game!

I love the idea and execution, with a super coherent and original art style.
Once you get enough green faces to just cycle through your deck, the game become a bit uninteresting, but that's an edge case and nothing that can lower the impressive amount of work you put into this.

Great job!

Really like the idea, feels really polished, good job!

Maan, I just got to exactly 50 stars a day when I was maxed out during the 100 day challenge. So given that I did not have any more spots to put anything at, I would have been shy of a couple few points.

I think a mistake I made was not understanding if the arrow points to the entire above row or just the above symbol. I also missed that there was a skip button.

Well made game dude! Really fun :)

This one is pretty addictive!

It has a solid game loop and mechanics.

I'm being so unlucky, 3/3 times I tried to grab "just another one" it was a bust.
I guess I should have memorized my deck better. :D

I was 1 point away from surviving the third wave, but I just couldn't make it; 1 extra draw got me a bust.

This game needs more attention and ratings for sure.

I find this combination funny:


It could be useful in combination with "arrows", but still. :D

Also, sometimes arrows pointing down are on the 3rd row, so it looks like they wouldn't do anything? The same goes for the arrow pointing up in the 1st row.

And some extra points from me for making it work in the browser.

Last but not the least, thank you for playing my game.

@airwaffle oh yeah, I wasn't sure about the way arrows work too.
Whether they affect a single row or not.

@airwaffle and @quasilyte

Thanks for playing!

1. I think there's a bug with up arrows and they don't work at all right now : ( I'll fix after judging is over.
2. Down arrows only affect the direct thing they're pointing at, not the whole column.

oh yea, and the arrows pointing off the top/bottom of the card are indeed useless - ran out of time to remove those hehe

Some really cool ideas alongside a super chill vibe, great stuff! Not to beat a dead horse, but there are balancing issues that make the gameplay repetitive and whathaveyou. But I really enjoyed it nevertheless! (Also, how did you do the background?)

@glove - thanks for checking it out : )

the background is an image i made that's just dots, and then i did a bunch of shader things to it using this unity asset https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/all-in-1-sprite-shader-156513
it lets you do a bunch of different effects to images and i just fooled around with it until I got the current effect
I was pretty inspired by Balatro if you've seen that game

@mickey-sanchez Nice game, really addictive! A lot of work for compo! Also, you can fix bugs during the judging. The rule is exclude adding new fitchures, but bugfixes is ok, just write a patchnote :smiley:

Fun idea! This game could use some speeding up, though. I can mathematically win the 5k stars in 100 days challenge but I'm not going to click on cards 16 times then wait for all the stars to add up, and do that 100 times, lol. So my income is 55 stars with all boxes filled, I need to collect 4501 stars and it's day 41 (with 90 days left), meaning I will have theoretically beaten the game at day 123... Hope that's good enough :D

Also can confirm the up arrows don't seem to do anything. Definitely not when placed on the bottom row, as I was checking the diff once I needed 50+ income, and nothing changed.

Would maybe also be interesting if an up/down arrow would affect the row of other cards if they were pointing outside of the card (e.g. top row up arrow would affect bottom row of card on the left), to increase risk/reward.

Good stuff! :D

I played until I'd filled all of my cards and hence can calculate my score:


I'm gaining 68 per turn, so need another 41 turns after day 74 (60 work days left in final quest). so final score = day 115 :)

good:
- really nice game concept; (reasonably) simple rules and mechanics but that requires some thought about risk taking and strategy. I haven't played Mystic Vale but this game makes me want to -- seems like you've distilled the "positional card upgrade" idea well.
- pretty good completeness/polish; in particular it's really impressive that you've got quite nice pixel art (cursor shadow!!), animations for everything, music & sfx, and (partial) in-game explanations for things.

bad:
- the game becomes horribly clunky once you're "safe" and chipping at the longer missions. getting through the 5000 in 100 was 99% just button pressing and waiting. I think a quick post-jam bandaid for this would just be massively ramping up the animation speed between days 10 and 20 or so (like, 10x faster please ^^). a "how many stars you gained this turn" indicator would be really good for mid to late game. an "auto-play cards" button might also be nice; to make it early-game friendly, it could be "auto-play cards until 3 busts". also, a bust counter would be great, esp if it included the greens in the max count; e.g. 2/5 if you have 2 busts but one ":)".
- the strategy also has a pretty big discontinuity. it seems like early-game you're somewhat desperate for stars and very cautious about busts (both in terms of deckbuilding and in choosing whether to continue dealing cards or not), since that's how you lose earlygame, while also wanting to hit a few upgrades to be sustainable and gain enough stars in the later levels. but once you're past that: busts, smiles and upgrades all become irrelevant and you're purely looking for rows that add 3 stars. maybe you could take inspiration from e.g. Slay the Spire here, and on later levels occasionally add in new cards to your deck with several busts, that would encourage you to pick up more ":)", and reduce the solitaire aspect of "play all your cards" by making sequences that involve busting possible again.

at first, I didn't really see how it related to the theme, but that became clear later in the game where it's all about making sure every slot is a star. so, if you wanted to be thematic, you could keep that in mind for any lategame tweaks (but if you're doing post-jam stuff, who cares about the theme? ^^)

anyway, great work!

I like the concept of needing to gather things and upgrading the cards- which run out of space. There be though the story bit issue for me I don't see a connection with cards to working/being fired in this concept. The colorful graphics were very nice!

Really nice! I played a couple of rounds until about day 25 each time.

Some things I noticed when playing:
* I'd really like a few more options to manipulate my deck; add/remove cards, add/remove upgrades, etc.
* Once you make yourself bust-proof, it becomes a waiting game to find upgrades with as many stars and correct arrows as possible. If you expect players to become bust-proof frequently, I highly recommend a "draw all" button, because clicking through the whole deck is what got me to stop playing.
* When I first started the game, the voice jump scared me because it was surprisingly loud and happened before I processed anything on the screen. Once I got my bearings though, the voice was nice.

@indivicivet Thank you soooo much for taking the time to write up such long thoughtful feedback. I agree with everything!

What a nice game with awesome vibe! Great job!

I got to work... but it seems I wasn't very good at whatever this job is. 😅🤣 This is a solid concept, and it is _very_ well executed. The level of completeness and polish on display here is super impressive for a compo entry! I really enjoyed the card and menu animations, and the background was a fun flavor that made the whole thing feel more visually interesting. It would be nice if, after ending the workday, the time to move on while counting stars didn't grow linearly. A constant time for the counter to tick up would've been great. My only other quibble is the... well, sexual moan when you end the day. Great for tennis, not for this game, although it did crack me up. 🤣 Very well done! :tada:

@bloodyaugust lol - yea the end-of-day sound really sounds super different than I meant it to - i wanted it to be more a sigh of relief - oops!

Very fun mechanic to upgrade your cards (instead of adding cards to your deck) and gameplay is very addicting. I played until the "200 in 10 days" deadline, which I reached by day 25. By then I could play my whole deck every turn with an income of 46 stars, so it kind of felt like the deadline was no real challenge anymore. It was however very satisfying to build this deck and I could see myself playing many, many more turns with some tweaking and balancing. The card artwork is simple but adorable and the music made for a great vibe. Great entry! 💜

- The scrollbar at the bottom should be grabbable as well :grin:
- Some feedback on where an enhancement can be placed or not
- I love the relaxing music, and the sound effects are great :smile:
- Maybe the cards can be drawn automatically, at least until the player receives the bust warning. Then the player can decide whether to risk and click again or end the day.

Overall, this is in my top 5 of games I played in the jam. An amazing first entry, and that in compo :clap: :thumbsup:

- Are the enhancements with the arrow down in the last row and arrow up in the first row useless?
- Maybe they could loop around to the top of the card? (a bit overpowered probably)
- Also, it's a bit of a shame that the arrows don't work on other arrows