The Children of the Hand by Ian McD
play in browser on itch: https://imcdo.itch.io/children-of-the-hand
Fight enemy summoners and purchase new summons!

Controls:
Space key to toggle viewing the monster cards in hand
Left click on card to select, left click on map to summon selected summon (must be near summoner)
Right click 2 cards then press c to combine them!
WASD to move summoner
Meet the Summons!
Snoblar
Snoblar is your schnozical classical melee fighter. They jump into the action!

Trocto
Trocto is your squidy midrange fighter that licks his opponents to death

Snorch
Snorch is your fleshy ranged boi.

Levturn
Levturn is your go to healer unit.

Chimeras
The base combined unit. Their appearance and attacks will be based on their ingredients

OTHER
...?
V Play by downloading windows build or playing on itch! The web build is a bit laggy so best experienced on windows
| Link | https://gitlab.com/ian_mcd/ld55 |
| Link | https://imcdo.itch.io/children-of-the-hand |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/the-children-of-the-hand |
Ratings
| Overall | 1175th | 2.712⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1192th | 2.423⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1024th | 2.865⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 517th | 3.75⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 730th | 3.517⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 705th | 2.821⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 837th | 2.583⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1105th | 2.796⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 31🗨️ |
Well done overall though!
The view angle could maybe be a little more zoomed in but overall I had fun spawning and combining.
I couldn't really interact with the shop between levels. Don't know if it was a bug or possibly I wasn't able to parse what my interactions did? (I was playing the web build and you did warn ahead of time so it might just be on me). Good work!
Some feedback on ways to improve maybe:
1. Why would I ever hide my deck of cards? It was never blocking the view of the playable area. I ended up using this "mechanic" when the card selection got buggy lol.
2. When selecting a single card, the indication of selection was a slight elevation. That's too subtle! Just make it way brighter or outline it or something -- slap me in the face with an obvious selection.
3. If I'm about to summon a unit, I'd like an indicator on the terrain (e.g. summoning circle) or a change in the mouse cursor. It was simply difficult to identify if I was in a "summoning" state.
4. Some of the character animations seemed to be glitchy, but whatever I found that adorable.
5. I had no incentive to plan my card usage with either timing or placement. Some game design adjustments could be made that require the player to be in certain positions to use certain summon cards. Or maybe the player must run around collecting mana to cast cards (which all have some unique cost each).
All that said, I still really enjoyed the game. Hope you continue it!