Deck Collector by optimatica

[raw]
made by optimatica for Ludum Dare 58 (JAM)

Collect the cards, fight enemies, sell your famous cards for profit.

DeckCollector1.png

Try to collect all the cards if you can. Only winning matches increases your cards value and losing a match decreases it. You will also have to sell your hero cards to stay afloat.

How to play 1. - Buy the card packs 2. - Assemble your team 3. - Press Battle an watch the fight 4. - Sell expensive items for money

Ratings

Overall 568th 3.263⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Fun 544th 3.105⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 187th 3.605⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Theme 502th 3.5⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Mood 681th 2.921⭐ 21🧑‍⚖️
Given 13🗳️ 12🗨️

Feedback

Cameron Dunlap
Oct 06th · 23:42 UTC
I quite enjoy the concept, although I think an upfront explanation of the game's mechanics would have done a lot of favors.

From what I can glean in my numerous attempts: There is time, health, and mana. The timer cycles and activates each card based on its conditions (4 hourglasses means 4 cycles of the timer, 3 crystals means 3 mana, etc.) which increases your damage dealt, shield hitpoints, maximum hp, etc. Base damage dealt increases over time based on the cycles.

While I think this would be very intuitive, I think one change would have made the game feel a lot less luck based. If you could see the hand of artifacts the next opponent has, you'd be better able to put together a functional set of equipment to counter their approach.

Overall, I love the concept and I think it really fits the theme. I wish I could have sustained myself long enough to see how much the juggling of equipment, cost of rerolling for new cards, and the continued cost to engage in a battle and risk halving your holdings played a part.
Koolruz
Oct 07th · 03:51 UTC
I also really liked this concept a lot - It took me several rounds of combat to eventually figure out what was going on, but once I did it made a lot of sense. The only real piece of feedback that I have is that I didn't feel like my cards were building synergistically with one another, and sometimes they ended up interfering with each other (as they all required mana, and only the card with the lowest mana cost would ever fire). Instead of just always firing the card that was ready first (which always ended up being the lowest mana value card), I would have expected that the order that I placed cards down would have been the order that they were played (for example, the second card in my list would only start counting its timer down after the first card in the queue finished, no matter how long that first card took to fire), which might have been a fun way to set up multi-stage combos.

Overall though, this is a really cool twist on the deckbuilder and autobattler genres, and I like the idea a lot!
SinusQuell
Oct 07th · 07:51 UTC
I love the idea! I had some problems winning the fights though. I think having some start items that are fixed would be good, to reduce randomness. Also, sometimes it seemed that I lost when I should've won and the other way around.
Tommeh
Oct 07th · 09:39 UTC
Very cool game! The amount of content great and in my experience the balance was pretty good. I like autobattlers a lot and this game really hit a good spot. I had trouble understanding how to actually make money in this game, but once I understood that items gain value after every round, I started having a lot of fun. This game has a lot of potential for further development.

Amazing job guys!
zexurge
Oct 07th · 14:09 UTC
interesting idea, though really had no idea what was happening at the start, and too easy to get softlocked
BlackCat508
Oct 08th · 04:47 UTC
really simple concept and fun to play! I actually found it pretty hard but maybe I have a skill issue
Stratcat66
Oct 08th · 19:17 UTC
I liked how smooth things worked: Hovering over cards, moving them, the "card" feeling.
What would have improved the game was a better explanation of what happened (that was not clear to me in the end).
Also the auto-battle was a bit fast for me.
Nevertheless I see potential in it.
Planetary
Oct 08th · 19:25 UTC
Hmm... I like the idea, and also it fits in theme. The auto system is nice (maybe because I love it in general lol), the graphics are pretty good (as a comparison, I can't even draw like that :rofl: maybe because some kind of a skill issue), and the audio part fills the engagement needed to play. Well done!
Pegasus
Oct 08th · 19:25 UTC
I restarted a few different times but really could not figure out what I was supposed to be doing. I think I eventually understood what each of the stats did but the cards still just seemed to fire off if/when they wanted to. I'm sure with a tutorial or some instructions this could have been really good - add it to your submission page for the next people pls!
Kaspjej
Oct 08th · 19:32 UTC
Really cool idea! But it feels a bit too random right now. Sometimes I don’t get any weapons at the start. Also, I thought the little arrow button was to skip the battle, but it just makes me lose every time.
LDJam user 268934
Oct 09th · 06:56 UTC
The concept of the game is awesome i can see this evolve "easily" into a full game. In the comments above you see it lacks explanation. Games need an explanation, you can write it down after on the page if there is no time in the jam. This helps your ratings :) Personally i like some game juice during battle mode and a little higher speed (2x button).
So work to be done and money to be made here (ruff gem)!!!!!
Eugenik
Oct 09th · 15:04 UTC
Nice work.
GARYglhf
Oct 09th · 18:06 UTC
Cool game, and nice art. Very interesting, I liked it.
LDJam user 383013
Oct 09th · 18:13 UTC
Sorry but I didn't understand how you are supposed to build your deck
TungGD
Oct 09th · 19:17 UTC
As someone who loves auto-battlers, this is a really fun idea. It's quite confusing at first and too much luck-based right now, but I can see it becoming a great game given proper development time.
Jaco van Hemert
Oct 09th · 21:14 UTC
I really, really want to like this game. I think the concept is very good, and the polish is great as well. However, I just can't seem to manage to survive for terribly long -- either because I don't really understand the mechanics (more on that below) or because it's too random. E.g. I got an opponent with two swords that obliterated me in no time. I still want there to be a lot of randomness, but maybe there needs to be some ways to control the randomness a little? E.g. draw 3 cards, discard 2 kinds of things.

As many others have mentioned, it took quite a bit of time to understand how this game works at all. Some amount of explanation of what the icons mean and how battles play out (even just on the game page) would have helped a ton to get me onboarded. I still don't understand what the number that counts down from 4 and then goes into the minus does, or how I do damage or gain mana when I have no cards. I think those two might be connected? I.e. positive numbers add mana and negative adds attack? Or something like that? Would have loved an explanation.

While I had trouble getting anywhere, it feels like this game has lots of potential for something great; amazing job!