Space Whale Veterinarian🐳🌑 by MEGA Marlon

You're a space whale veterinarian at your day job. Fix up the Space Whale by traveling through its entirety but take too long and you'll pass out. Harvest resources from inside the Space Whale to take to the auction house and increase your capabilities for the next run. Your goal... get through that Space Whale!!!
OVERVIEW:
* 🐳 <- This is a 1000m sickly space whale. *
*🧑🚀 <- This is you, a Space Whale Veterinarian, who's tasked with healing the sick space whale. *
🃏🃏 <- Each turn you'll be shown 2 cards. Select 1 card to use its effect, the other card you don't select will earn you resources.
*🕳️ <- The deeper you get into the Space Whale the more valuable the resources... whalespeed *

CONTROLS:
*🖱️ D -Select left card *
*🖱️ K -Select right card *

| Link | https://megamarlon.itch.io/space-whale-veterinarian |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/space-whale-veterinarian |
Ratings
| Overall | 544th | 3.405⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 563th | 3.19⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 489th | 3.159⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 308th | 3.886⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 611th | 3.273⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 304th | 3.15⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 682th | 3.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 19🗳️ | 18🗨️ |
why use the d and k key, htey are so far apart. :o also are they set correctly for some reason it always animates the other card or am i seeing things?
I also love how weird the game is thematically. 😅 Great job!
The only point I can see it's the fading text after loosing a run is a little bit to slow and having a way to skip to quicker to access the shop could be great.
Overall, it's a really nice game ! Congrats !
It took me a bit of time to realize that you only get the top-of-card resource bonus for the card you don’t pick. I think it would be more intuitive to the player if you swapped the display those top bonuses dynamically. With the swap in place, the player would get both the top and the bottom on each card, plues the cards would be easier to read and quickly evaluate/compare the two choices.
I liked the idea of limiting the number of turns with oxygen, and challenging the player to figure out a way of getting further. However, I found the oxygen cards to be too strong. After buying 2 of them in a row (+2 and +3) I essentially fully broke the run. I will admit that I was a bit upset that I didn’t get to see the score breakdown when I won, as I tried to maximize the score over distance.
All in all, I think this is a really nice starting point for a constrained deckbuilder. I hope you continue working on it, or at least extend the idea a bit for a post jam update! I love to see more content and mechanics, something like: environment hazards, enemies, suit improvement cards, weapon/tool cards..