Arcane Ante by Rob6566
Draft poker hands and upgrade your deck to fend off a horde of summoned minions
Play in a browser here
Team up with a subversive goblin to defeat the evil Summoner Fizzlebeard. Upgrade your deck to defeat a stream of stronger and stronger summoned minions.
Featuring:
- Card enhancements - Modify your deck to enable more powerful hands.
- High Score Leaderboard
- Many enemies - Can you reach and defeat the monstrous Margaret from Marketing?
- Adaptive music - I tried switching music between different parts of the game. The music is ok, but the concept seems good.
- A subversive goblin - Due to overwhelming demand, Bluort (of LD52 fame) is making a return!
- 100% no jokers - But there are a few jokes.
How to Play
There's an tutorial in-game. Here's a quick summary without Bluort's creative flair: 1. Draft one of three cards to one of three poker hands. 2. Beside each of the three available cards, you'll see the next cards up if you choose it. 3. Score points by drafting better hands. 4. When you draft a hand, damage will be dealt to the adjacent summoned monster equal to the score. 5. If a monster's attack timer reaches 0, it will attack you for damage equal to its remaining HP. 6. If you reach 0hp, you lose. 7. When you pass a points threshold, you'll get a shop ticket. Use these to enhance your deck.
Scoring hands
- Hands are scored based on points x mult.
- Each card in the hand scores points for its face value (2s score 2, Queens score 10, Aces score 11 etc...)
- Each hand type also has a base points and mult
- It's possible to enhance cards to increase their points/mult.
Hand Types and (score X mult)
- High Card (5 X 1)
- Pair (10 X 2)
- Two Pair (20 X 2)
- Three of a Kind (30 X 3)
- Flush (25 X 4)
- Straight (30 X 4)
- Full House (35 X 4)
- Four of a Kind (50 X 7)
- Straight Flush (80 X 10)
- Five of a Kind (100 X 12)
- Full Flush (140 X 14)
- Five Flush (200 X 18)
A note on game resolution
Works best full screen on a 16:10 resolution. I didn't have time to make it work nicely at 16:9, but I'd suggest using the minimised version and using browser zoom to make it bigger (as some of the cards are pretty small).
Tools used
- Engine - Unity 2021.3.11f1
- Art - Aseprite, Photoshop, some copyright free playing card images
- Music/Sfx - beepbox.co, Audacity, flicking cards at my microphone until it drove my housemate crazy.
- IDE - VSCode, with a little help from copilot
Bug fixes
17 Apr - fixed bug with Ace high straights being identified as High Card
| Link | https://rob6566.itch.io/ludum-dare-55 |
| ludum-dare-55 branch | https://github.com/Rob6566/Jam-Template |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/arcane-ante |
Ratings
| Overall | 168th | 3.511⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 146th | 3.5⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 158th | 3.38⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 276th | 3.054⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 303th | 2.691⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 125th | 3.367⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 118th | 3.209⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 238th | 3.036⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 51🗳️ | 83🗨️ |
Excellent art :D
Visually I was expecting the first one to replace the used card. And I would've loved either heals or more time for the bigger foes. Or maybe I was unable to utilize upgrades proper. For example, I didn't realize at first the timer delay was on draw/use instead of immediately.
Good work! I'd like to see more polished version of this.
@byazzle Thanks for your help playtesting! I think it's a lot more balanced after you went infinite and I buffed the enemies / nerfed the timer manipulation (the original timer manipulation increased the timer of all enemies)
@robowarrior1982 I decided in the last hour before submission to do my own card art for the face cards rather than the default images instead of cleaning up the "score"/"shop" pages. Not the best idea, I guess! Thanks for the feedback.
@danigabe Thanks. I probably bit off too much scope with this, and spent too little time on polish. I had originally planned to have the cards animate to their new position when you drafted one, but ran into problems with it and did the button hovers instead. I think that would have made things easier to understand.
@candlesan Thanks!
@oadt Yeah, the UX on which cards come out is pretty confusing. As I mentioned above, I'd originally planned to animate the card movement, which might have helped. 100% agree on the HP - it kind of defeats the purpose if you will always die in one hit. And agreed on the shop too. A friend suggested automatically popping up the shop a card is purchasable. Animating the button was my attempt to draw attention to it. Thanks for the feedback!
@coderaurus Thanks - yeah, I did notice the scaling bug (I think when you clone a card the copy isn't scaled correctly, but then fixes itself on shuffle). Yeah, I did think of having the "next-up" cards just slide to the right instead of grabbing the three beside the card you selected. It really just needs the card movement animations to show what's happening. I might change the Timer delay text in the shop to clarify it.
Thanks @abrds - yeah, the dimming was my compromise after animating the card movements wasn't behaving.
Yeah, I'm leaning towards making a post-jam version with some more visual flair and quality of life stuff. From the top of my head:
- Some more monsters and smoother difficulty scaling. Possibly a "boss" every 50 rounds, possibly you fight Fizzlebeard and the game ends.
- Prevent more than 1 '+1 timer' on a card.
- Make the "scoring" page look a lot better.
- Animate buying a card, so you can see the effect being applied (or at the very least, put it on top of the discard).
- Animate cards moving when you draft one.
- Animate enemies spawning.
- Animate enemies attacking.
- Give the player a bunch more HP, so you don't pretty much always die in 1 hit.
- Make the shop vouchers thresholds ramp up a bit faster.
- Improve art.
- A UI that shows the composition of your deck.
Thanks for a game. And have a nice Jam!
Cool game, it took me a while to understand the interface, it's not super intuitive at first glance despite the tutorial. What makes it confusing is that cards to be picked and future cards are lined up with the hands, but after a couple of tries it's easy to use. Audio is a nice touch, and making poker combos is always satisfying. Kudos for doing the compo!
@inkweeper Sorry to hear about the stronger enemy! There's definitely a bit of strategy around delaying hands so you don't have to deal with a new timer until the other hands are almost ready to go.
@vinzbad Thanks!
@nazorus Guilty! Agreed on the confusing UI. In hindsight, I think I could design it so the cards aren't lined up like that, instead in circles linked to the card.
@lightningst Thanks! I have't seen the next up cards disappear, but there could definitely be some bugs. If you shrunk your deck down so there wasn't enough for Next Up I think it would refer to unassigned elements and crash.
@milq Thanks! I loved your game too. There wasn't really a design choice behind the cards - I just grabbed some that weren't copyrighted. If I take the game further, I'll probably do custom art that fits the lore (but I didn't have time in the jam).
I'm a keen board game player (I own over 200 and have have played most of the BGG top 100), but have only designed a couple of (not very good) prototypes. I decided to switch to computer game development as it's far cheaper and easier to distribute and has more design space. I've played a tonne of roguelike deckbuilders (and am building one, probably releasing next year). Do you play on board game arena?
Before:
Fix:
After:
It wasn't easy to understand the gameplay but then it was all right after some time!
@shared Nice work making the high scores! Actually I messed up, it's LD51. TBH Bluort is a lot less famous than he thinks he is. Thanks!
Thanks @hare-software. I am working on a post-jam version at the moment. Yeah, there's definitely UX problems with:
- Grokking which hand cards are going to.
- Understanding that the 3 "next up" cards to the left of the chosen card will be available next.
So far I've added colour backgrounds to the available cards and the next-up ones and offset them a bit (as some people thought they got the rightmost 3 images). I'm also planning to animate the cards moving.
I'm thinking of letting the player drag cards to hands instead, and possibly getting rid of the buttons (with maybe a config option to show them).
I like the idea of a shop to improve the deck, but in practice the new cards didn't show up regularly enough and didn't have enough of an impact in the battle when played. Well, that could also be skill issue on my part.
Also, excellent job designing and building the entire game in just two days! The dialogue in the game was entertaining as well.