Cards of Life by TheMiSta92

About
Cards of Life is a point and click adventure with the goal to live a long and happy life by choosing the correct cards. There is a big amount of cards which have a variety of outcomes and offer a lot of replayability.
Team
Michael Staudinger: Lead Developer
Antonia Haslinger: Design and Graphics
Dieter Köberl: Jr. Developer
Tools
Unreal Engine 5 | Adobe Creative Suite | Git
Thank you for testing and rating! We're looking forward to LDjam 51!
Ratings
| Overall | 439th | 3.719⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 284th | 3.75⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 611th | 3.391⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 549th | 3.781⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 479th | 3.906⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 220th | 3.839⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 241th | 3.938⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 41🗳️ | 35🗨️ |
I felt that in most cases where I felt I was making the best decision I was still having a negative outcome. After 6 or so playthroughs my record was 22-years. I think this game will really benefit from incorporation of a little bit more feedback around decision making.
I loved this game, one of my favorites so far in the jam. The art was breath taking and the story was a lot of fun. I played this game on stream with my community allowing them to vote with me. If you are turning this into a long term project, I think introducing a party game concept would be a great idea, or even integrating something like twitch into it. Maybe even people voting from their mobile devices.
The thing I think you could work on/add is music and sound design to amplify the gameplay. Also maybe a bit more attention to background art/detail.
This game was fun, fit the theme great and has humor as well. Amazing work all around.
Even though, many times feel like the outcome of the selected card was purely random, which contradicts the mechanic of the choice. As another comment suggested, getting feedback around your choices will help to make choices feel meaningful and understanding the hidden mechanics of the game.
Could you upload to itch.io maybe? Really want to play this game :cry:
I love card game. Love pick 3's. Love roguelikes. This is a very nice blend of those!
The one thing that I think would improve the game is a a little more clarity on what the choice RNG might be. The same choices don't yield the same outcomes, so it's difficult without a lot of plays or a guide to learn how to make smarter decisions.
I played through this way more times than I expected. The casual gameplay and quick runtime made it easy to keep justifying "one more round". I never managed to surpass my first run, which survived until the mid-40's.
Sometimes the outcome of a chain of events felt strange in the context of the cards selected so far, like picking blacksmith and then immediately chopping off your hand with an axe and then dying. But I get that the outcomes were probabalistic and overall it was really fun and felt cohesive. The graphics on the cards were solid as well, really nice work guys!
Some technical notes: The download size is pretty big for a small game, not sure if that is just due to the engine and performance was a little bit sluggish on my laptop.
It was a little bit hard to determine what the outcomes would be, which I think is kind of the point, but I would sometimes get the same cards which would lead to different outcomes. This makes it feel pretty random and I can basically choose any card as I don't know what the outcome will be and can't learn based on a previous run.
It was not obvious to me what the counter in the top right was, I think it was your age? But I only figured that out after the game.
Still, I had fun, the cards are nice to look at and the writing was good!
@nsadie Thanks for the feedback regarding the download size. We tried to focus more on the game and added a big feature on the last day which led to the size going up. Thanks to a bit of buffer time, we managed to go down to the current size though, before our effort we were above 600MB, so I think we were still able to yield good results in that short time. Regarding performance it's hard to optimize anything in that short amount of time, but we still hope you had a nice time with it.
Gameplay wise, it felt a bit too random to me, I didn't really have any way to inform any decision, and was not quite sure what karma does. Also, I think it would be great if you couldn't have the same choice twice in a row, even if it was quite fun to spend my whole life trying to learn to read and randomly succeeding and failing haha.
Good job!
The art is impossibly adorable.