This game has become my favorite and it plays “well” on my Steam Deck LCD. While there is a good bit of jank in Proton. It’s plays well considering there isn’t a Native Binary. Keep up the truly amazing work can wait to see more Betas.
One of my favourite games so far on itch.io. The artstyle is amazing, and I love your concept of two decks. Maby sometimes there was some confuzing things like Evolve on cards or when I hover on icons while battling the text didn't show, but you did this masterpeace in 3 months so that's nothing. Already send link to this game to all my friends, and I can't wait for full release
What version of Proton are you using? I added the exe as a Non-Steam Game and selected “Proton Experiment” or 9.x and it works perfectly, albeit with a little jank.
played for like 20h, i love that game. the only problem is that, 75 % of the time, i die bcs of a bug like when the card " BASH " just vanish from my hand when i use it( happen like 5 time) or just a freeze at the end of a fight. The furthest I got was to the level where the monsters evolve every time you kill them, having a good pc, the game completely lost its head, I was taking damage every second for no reason even when the game was paused, which was really frustrating, I had a great deck but finishing with 10 psy card is just impossible, I had 240 hp I still died, to tell you the truth.
Hey, just to let you know, the link to your press kit on your user page leads to nowhere. Not that I am press. I just click things. But I figured it'd be useful to let you know.
Please is there a manual or some documentation where it is explained how CURSE cards work? As in, what causes them to appear and how can you get rid of them? Also the EVOLVE system is not really explained anywhere I can see.
Hi! Sorry for the confusion - we made this prototype in 3 months so a lot of the player feedback is very weak.
Curse cards are added to your hand though enemy actions. When an enemy will be adding on to your hand, they'll signal this in their intents. We're working on adding enemy animations that make this clearer.
The Evolve system means that an enemy will evolve when their HP reaches zero. We have a tooltip pop up on the evolve status beneath the enemy - did you not catch that, or was it confusing when you read it? Thanks for playing!
Sorry for my ambiguity. Evolve as it relates to enemies is very clearly explained and easy to understand. I meant evolve as it relates to cards. For example, what is the significance of having EVOLVE 3 on the bottom of the Skeleton Key?
AVAST quarantined the executable about a week after playing with no problems. Re-downloaded the package and ran the executable, same result. I'm not sure what to do.
The game is super fun and every loss just energized me to jump back in and try again. I really enjoyed the different mechanics I can dig deeper into without them being a requirement to progress.
Oh, also, your game doesn't appear to have a good way of coping with the worst parts of upgradable deckbuilding gameplay. I mostly win by making a God Card and then thoroughly thinning my deck around it.
Won last game with a Scorch that dealt 110 dmg three times, drew 3 cards, and cost 0 energy. Paired it off with cards like the exhaust-1-draw-2 card. At a certain point it stopped being deckbuilding and more turned into MTG Blue Gameplay of "How can I thin this deck into nothing, and then redraw my murder button until my opponent dies without ending my turn?"
Feel like cards in-theme should have some kind of mutation chance the more they're trained, or some kind of max stat growth. I like the snowbally nature of it all, but I was rewarded maybe too much for making Scorchcalibur and throwing out everything else.
Draw effects should apply before the card enters Discard, to prevent mill redraw off a single card effect.
If you go the mutation chance, could make metaprogression about expanding the caps or reducing the chance. Mutation could offer transmutation potential into interesting cards with a risk of duds (another thing you're missing that would make a lot of sense for the fungal theme - random transmutation rather than evolution-based transmutation).
Also, I feel like enemies should have some way to counter extremely potent max damage cards other than their current shield mechanic. It's solid for it, but there's nothing that prevents me from making my big card murder 3 times over.
Also, there's just some cards I can't Frog? I don't know how I'm supposed to tell which are Froggable. Specifically looking at the broken armor one, that generates Tantrum? I didn't like it and I wanted it out but it just Isn't Froggable, and that sucks. I eventually had to Frog Potion it.
Setting aside combat: Explore deck.
Search needs to exhaust, not discard. I put 3 Searches in my deck and it let me mill out every energy extender I could get until I pulled out my training dummy and frog cards.
Also, all plinth cards should exhaust too. It makes sense to me if we're going to have it be possible to reshuffle the deck - ESPECIALLY if you intend to make plinths non-renewable; why would I want to risk a Frog or Training Dummy resurfacing when I've already used my plinths? What a waste of a search!
I love Search for its redraw potential, but it's way too potent in current state. It absolutely needs to be a once-per-explore-per-card.
On that subject, Scavenge is great. I like its utility of mainly producing Consume effect cards. It feels really good to have without being overpowered. Paired with good draw cards, it shines nicely.
I think the game is a little clunky right now (some monsters are inherently Timid without the status being applied at all times, for example) but it looks like a pretty good proof of concept. Hope to see you come out with a finished version soon!
PS: If you decide to stretch out testing new concepts, can I suggest adding more applicable debuffs? I'd love to see some interesting debuff manipulation beyond what Vulnerable already offers me.
Fever appears to quad-trigger even when that doesn't really make sense.
You mentioned the plinth oddities before entering a room causing a softlock, but specifically, double-card interactions appear to layer in a bad way. An example: I was in the green pool room and used a plinth card. It pulled me into the plinth, which triggered the loss effect from the green pool room. It showed me my explore hand (!), and then when I selected "No Thanks", it ate the leftmost card. Did that twice, eating my entire 2 card hand, and caused a softlock as I lost my Bash option because of it. I believe what happened is that the two dialogues ran concurrently and one tried to force the other to end, causing it to jump back to my explore hand, but didn't actually stop the other. But that's just a guess. Still not 100% why both cards disappeared.
As somebody, who has played many, many deckbuilders I have to say this is awesome. I only finished/died for the first time, and it has the most important quality i search for in roguelike: I just want to already try again. With the killing/ creating food combos it feels fair, even when you fail. It avoids the basic problem of many deckbuilders, which is the feeling of needing many balance patches from the start. Making the game hard, doesn't make it interesting.
The artstyle is awesome and delicious. It creates a perfect atmosphere which reminds me of, of course, Incryption but much more of little known Ring of Pain
Oh my god! This was such a blast to play! I loved Inscriptions card game and really wished for more like it. This fulfilled my wish, even in beta. I can not wait for the full release. While playing, I've found a couple of bugs.
1. When you are in certain "tunnels" you can only see your hand holding an invisible map
2. Not often, but when using Bash(ing) you get the slow effect as if you are walking up to a Trader
3. On certain "tunnels" after unlocking a door, you can see the outside "sandbox"
4. A very rare occurrence, I believe its only happened once. The "Lantern" that lets you draw two cards, only drew one. I had enough cards to pull from (9 cards)
5. While maybe intended, when looking at the map in combat you immediately put it away.
6. This one is by far the most serious bug. when you click to look into your deck, while you are choosing a set of cards (whether it's 'unlocking' or from a chest) it completely locks you out of the game. No input will be registered.
7. The "Stay Puffed" card doesn't always pull up two cards. I believe the dodge is working though. There was an instance when a card drew the "Stay Puffed" card but it didn't draw two more cards.
8. The "Inspiring Pick" card reads "Unlock. Gain 1 energy. Draw 1 card. CONSUME. GEAR. (2 uses)" So if I'm not mistaken, how can it say consume, but also 2 uses? (I didn't test to see if it reappears into your deck.)
9. One of the burger cards says it has 0 uses
10. Unknown if intended, you can not preview the card's locked special effects. Nor can you see how much energy they will cost.
11. When looking at a card that has a special effect that gives you another card that has special effects you can't preview THAT next card.
12. Another big bug is that the sound will be very loud when opening the game. The game doesn't save your settings thus causing the loudness, but it keeps the slider where it was at the previous instance. All this to say, you could have the slider all the way down but the next time you open the game it will be at full volume, but the slider is at the lowest.
p.s. I absolutely loved the way to find the Gloom Key, it is such a nice ending. What's funny is I always skipped that card, but finally I used it on my last run. (Secret Boss ending?) I will need to investigate if that key can be used earlier in the run. I believe finding that key caused the end to trigger.
Thank you so much for making this, such a blast to play. Will it be out on Steam as well? And would you be able to add arrow keys instead of using a mouse?
I played for a couple hours last night, this was incredibly cool!! The art style is really really fantastic, and I loved getting to set up so many healing combos with my cards in combat. I also love that there’s strategy to rest periods and how you play cards there as well.
For future development, I’m throwing my vote into the controller support ring and adding a way to snap the cursor to different objects/menus, my hands/wrists were getting really tired with all the holding and dragging, as fun as it was.
I would also like to see clearer communication for things like what cards can only be used during rest periods, and which can only be used during combat, which enemies are attacking you, enemy buff effects, and card effects. They have tooltips but they were still confusing to learn at first, especially all at once. I was also confused on how to use the cards that could only be used at camp “with enough space” like the training dummy, and whether the +1 attack buffs on your cards were for just one turn, just one battle, or permanent.
Other than that, this game is very very cool and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for the full release. :D good luck!
But i really enjoyed the prototype I've struggled to put it down and hope to see the development of this game continue. please check out the video if you have time.
I see this game going far and could be one of the next big games.
The game is great! But I always get stuck at the end of the second level and can't play the cards and end the turn, and could you please add an archive feature? Much appreciated!
Great art and interesting gameplay! Made it to the gloom door after a few runs. I really had some great time with it.
About the game balance, I think Rolling Death is way too op. I got two in my last run and the third boss were totally crushed since every hit from those cards would be fatal after some 2x damage upgrades. Not to mention it is a 0-cost card!
A bug that I encountered: I had two Psychosis in my hand and I played one of them. I died because of the self damage and that's fine. However, there are still two in my hand after I was revived.
Ran into a bug during an encounter where I couldn't use a card. It made the sound like I was grabbing a card, but I couldn't drag it out to use or interact with the cards in any way. Had to scrap the run, which is a real shame, but it's not all bad because this game is really cool and I'm having a lot of fun with it.
Honestly the art style is so good, the atmosphere here is truly such a amazing experience to play! Game-play is very fun as well so excited to see where you take this I'm hyped for the future!! keep up the great work <3
the game stucks after i defeated a wave of mushroom, this happens in the stage after the evolving boss, i have to shut down the game reopent the game but it just bring me to the very begning, i would be really appreciated if u can add some kind of autosave there, so i dont have to start over agian, overall it is a great time!
had a lot of fun with this one! checked your gdoc for bugs/etc and don't think I saw this, so wanted to note that while it's not necessarily a 'bug', you can if you have fever + the truffle with 99 uses in your hand execute a set-up where you can basically 'endlessly' buff 'eat to increase power' cards in combat. it slows down the game a lot (particularly bc it runs into a lag where it wants to trigger all the animations for drawing from your deck one by one, slower than you can play/draw cards) but probably more pertinently it might be on the extreme end of desired player behaviour. in one run I had two fever cards + two of the 99 use truffles and a deck balanced heavily towards dmg cards that buffed on eating, so with patience I was able to sit there and raise everything to such obscene numbers that I'd delete even the end demo boss upon playing anything. without looking at individual card balancing itself, I think a sufficiently generous 'cards played before forced turn end' hard cap would still allow for trick plays like this while mitigating the cheese enough to keep it challenging. another option is potentially to set a limit on how many times a card can be played per combat turn regardless of energy left.
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This game has become my favorite and it plays “well” on my Steam Deck LCD. While there is a good bit of jank in Proton. It’s plays well considering there isn’t a Native Binary. Keep up the truly amazing work can wait to see more Betas.
One of my favourite games so far on itch.io. The artstyle is amazing, and I love your concept of two decks. Maby sometimes there was some confuzing things like Evolve on cards or when I hover on icons while battling the text didn't show, but you did this masterpeace in 3 months so that's nothing. Already send link to this game to all my friends, and I can't wait for full release
okay but HOW is the 500mb zip 7 GB when you extract it, holy shit
Way too many image textures?
I played this on it's last version and loved it but I since switched operating systems to linux and can't seem to get the game to run at all.
Having a linux version would be really nice so I can enjoy it again, thank you.
crashed my steam deck when trying to play it with proton experimental :(
What version of Proton are you using? I added the exe as a Non-Steam Game and selected “Proton Experiment” or 9.x and it works perfectly, albeit with a little jank.
i was using proton experimental
also curiously when i did play the game on my windows pc (which was pretty fun) it eventually started to get unplayably laggy
Wow. The last boss is nuts. Finally beat it!
played for like 20h, i love that game. the only problem is that, 75 % of the time, i die bcs of a bug like when the card " BASH " just vanish from my hand when i use it( happen like 5 time) or just a freeze at the end of a fight. The furthest I got was to the level where the monsters evolve every time you kill them, having a good pc, the game completely lost its head, I was taking damage every second for no reason even when the game was paused, which was really frustrating, I had a great deck but finishing with 10 psy card is just impossible, I had 240 hp I still died, to tell you the truth.
Hey, just to let you know, the link to your press kit on your user page leads to nowhere. Not that I am press. I just click things. But I figured it'd be useful to let you know.
You've gotten an update! Thank you!
Excuse me, is there a Chinese language version of this game?
Please is there a manual or some documentation where it is explained how CURSE cards work? As in, what causes them to appear and how can you get rid of them? Also the EVOLVE system is not really explained anywhere I can see.
Hi! Sorry for the confusion - we made this prototype in 3 months so a lot of the player feedback is very weak.
Curse cards are added to your hand though enemy actions. When an enemy will be adding on to your hand, they'll signal this in their intents. We're working on adding enemy animations that make this clearer.
The Evolve system means that an enemy will evolve when their HP reaches zero. We have a tooltip pop up on the evolve status beneath the enemy - did you not catch that, or was it confusing when you read it?
Thanks for playing!
Thanks for the response!
Sorry for my ambiguity. Evolve as it relates to enemies is very clearly explained and easy to understand. I meant evolve as it relates to cards. For example, what is the significance of having EVOLVE 3 on the bottom of the Skeleton Key?
I also found evolve on the bottom of cards confusing, there wasn’t a tooltip for it iirc
Oh, that Evolve!
A card's evolve value drops by 1 every time it's played. When that value hits zero, you can evolve the card into something new.
Does anyone know how to limit the game to 30 fps?
AVAST quarantined the executable about a week after playing with no problems. Re-downloaded the package and ran the executable, same result. I'm not sure what to do.
The game is super fun and every loss just energized me to jump back in and try again. I really enjoyed the different mechanics I can dig deeper into without them being a requirement to progress.
Oh, also, your game doesn't appear to have a good way of coping with the worst parts of upgradable deckbuilding gameplay. I mostly win by making a God Card and then thoroughly thinning my deck around it.
Won last game with a Scorch that dealt 110 dmg three times, drew 3 cards, and cost 0 energy. Paired it off with cards like the exhaust-1-draw-2 card. At a certain point it stopped being deckbuilding and more turned into MTG Blue Gameplay of "How can I thin this deck into nothing, and then redraw my murder button until my opponent dies without ending my turn?"
Feel like cards in-theme should have some kind of mutation chance the more they're trained, or some kind of max stat growth. I like the snowbally nature of it all, but I was rewarded maybe too much for making Scorchcalibur and throwing out everything else.
Draw effects should apply before the card enters Discard, to prevent mill redraw off a single card effect.
If you go the mutation chance, could make metaprogression about expanding the caps or reducing the chance. Mutation could offer transmutation potential into interesting cards with a risk of duds (another thing you're missing that would make a lot of sense for the fungal theme - random transmutation rather than evolution-based transmutation).
Also, I feel like enemies should have some way to counter extremely potent max damage cards other than their current shield mechanic. It's solid for it, but there's nothing that prevents me from making my big card murder 3 times over.
Also, there's just some cards I can't Frog? I don't know how I'm supposed to tell which are Froggable. Specifically looking at the broken armor one, that generates Tantrum? I didn't like it and I wanted it out but it just Isn't Froggable, and that sucks. I eventually had to Frog Potion it.
Setting aside combat: Explore deck.
Search needs to exhaust, not discard. I put 3 Searches in my deck and it let me mill out every energy extender I could get until I pulled out my training dummy and frog cards.
Also, all plinth cards should exhaust too. It makes sense to me if we're going to have it be possible to reshuffle the deck - ESPECIALLY if you intend to make plinths non-renewable; why would I want to risk a Frog or Training Dummy resurfacing when I've already used my plinths? What a waste of a search!
I love Search for its redraw potential, but it's way too potent in current state. It absolutely needs to be a once-per-explore-per-card.
On that subject, Scavenge is great. I like its utility of mainly producing Consume effect cards. It feels really good to have without being overpowered. Paired with good draw cards, it shines nicely.
I think the game is a little clunky right now (some monsters are inherently Timid without the status being applied at all times, for example) but it looks like a pretty good proof of concept. Hope to see you come out with a finished version soon!
PS: If you decide to stretch out testing new concepts, can I suggest adding more applicable debuffs? I'd love to see some interesting debuff manipulation beyond what Vulnerable already offers me.
Neat!
Anyway, stuff that you didn't post as bugs:
As somebody, who has played many, many deckbuilders I have to say this is awesome. I only finished/died for the first time, and it has the most important quality i search for in roguelike: I just want to already try again. With the killing/ creating food combos it feels fair, even when you fail. It avoids the basic problem of many deckbuilders, which is the feeling of needing many balance patches from the start. Making the game hard, doesn't make it interesting.
The artstyle is awesome and delicious. It creates a perfect atmosphere which reminds me of, of course, Incryption but much more of little known Ring of Pain
Oh my god! This was such a blast to play! I loved Inscriptions card game and really wished for more like it. This fulfilled my wish, even in beta. I can not wait for the full release. While playing, I've found a couple of bugs.
1. When you are in certain "tunnels" you can only see your hand holding an invisible map
2. Not often, but when using Bash(ing) you get the slow effect as if you are walking up to a Trader
3. On certain "tunnels" after unlocking a door, you can see the outside "sandbox"
4. A very rare occurrence, I believe its only happened once. The "Lantern" that lets you draw two cards, only drew one. I had enough cards to pull from (9 cards)
5. While maybe intended, when looking at the map in combat you immediately put it away.
6. This one is by far the most serious bug. when you click to look into your deck, while you are choosing a set of cards (whether it's 'unlocking' or from a chest) it completely locks you out of the game. No input will be registered.
7. The "Stay Puffed" card doesn't always pull up two cards. I believe the dodge is working though. There was an instance when a card drew the "Stay Puffed" card but it didn't draw two more cards.
8. The "Inspiring Pick" card reads "Unlock. Gain 1 energy. Draw 1 card. CONSUME. GEAR. (2 uses)" So if I'm not mistaken, how can it say consume, but also 2 uses? (I didn't test to see if it reappears into your deck.)
9. One of the burger cards says it has 0 uses
10. Unknown if intended, you can not preview the card's locked special effects. Nor can you see how much energy they will cost.
11. When looking at a card that has a special effect that gives you another card that has special effects you can't preview THAT next card.
12. Another big bug is that the sound will be very loud when opening the game. The game doesn't save your settings thus causing the loudness, but it keeps the slider where it was at the previous instance. All this to say, you could have the slider all the way down but the next time you open the game it will be at full volume, but the slider is at the lowest.
p.s. I absolutely loved the way to find the Gloom Key, it is such a nice ending. What's funny is I always skipped that card, but finally I used it on my last run. (Secret Boss ending?) I will need to investigate if that key can be used earlier in the run. I believe finding that key caused the end to trigger.
Thank you so much for making this, such a blast to play. Will it be out on Steam as well? And would you be able to add arrow keys instead of using a mouse?
I played for a couple hours last night, this was incredibly cool!! The art style is really really fantastic, and I loved getting to set up so many healing combos with my cards in combat. I also love that there’s strategy to rest periods and how you play cards there as well.
For future development, I’m throwing my vote into the controller support ring and adding a way to snap the cursor to different objects/menus, my hands/wrists were getting really tired with all the holding and dragging, as fun as it was.
I would also like to see clearer communication for things like what cards can only be used during rest periods, and which can only be used during combat, which enemies are attacking you, enemy buff effects, and card effects. They have tooltips but they were still confusing to learn at first, especially all at once. I was also confused on how to use the cards that could only be used at camp “with enough space” like the training dummy, and whether the +1 attack buffs on your cards were for just one turn, just one battle, or permanent.
Other than that, this game is very very cool and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for the full release. :D good luck!
The artstyle is crazy good
outstanding game, best card game of the year
So much fun, can't wait for the full release.
Thank you so much! We're so excited to keep working on this thing!
I think it's the best card game I've ever played this year. I look forward to the day when it is done.
Thanks so much, that's awesome to hear!
for some reason when i win it plays the loss dialogue
Right now there is no win. Everyone dies in the end.
what? why?
This is a really fun game. A glitch I found is if you switch to exploartion decks right after combat, you will get softlocked.
I don't usually post on here.
But i really enjoyed the prototype I've struggled to put it down and hope to see the development of this game continue. please check out the video if you have time.
I see this game going far and could be one of the next big games.
Looks great, but the 'Leftovers' card had no effect (rest seemed to work fine, through all the way to the boss)
Oh wow! Ever since I played the game jam version I had hoped for an expanded version of this game! I look forward to future developments!
The game is great! But I always get stuck at the end of the second level and can't play the cards and end the turn, and could you please add an archive feature? Much appreciated!
Could you add a linux build ? :D
Apparently the windows build runs well on Linux!
Great art and interesting gameplay! Made it to the gloom door after a few runs. I really had some great time with it.
About the game balance, I think Rolling Death is way too op. I got two in my last run and the third boss were totally crushed since every hit from those cards would be fatal after some 2x damage upgrades. Not to mention it is a 0-cost card!
A bug that I encountered: I had two Psychosis in my hand and I played one of them. I died because of the self damage and that's fine. However, there are still two in my hand after I was revived.
Great game anyway. Keep it up!
Ran into a bug during an encounter where I couldn't use a card. It made the sound like I was grabbing a card, but I couldn't drag it out to use or interact with the cards in any way. Had to scrap the run, which is a real shame, but it's not all bad because this game is really cool and I'm having a lot of fun with it.
the game seems to just freeze for me after the first set of enemies. Right where i choose the foresight. Can someone help somehow 😭
Great so far, small errors here and there but that’s the entire point!
Just out of curiosity, is gross manipulation of the mechanics supposed to be the primary means to victory at this current juncture?
Honestly the art style is so good, the atmosphere here is truly such a amazing experience to play! Game-play is very fun as well so excited to see where you take this I'm hyped for the future!! keep up the great work <3
the game stucks after i defeated a wave of mushroom, this happens in the stage after the evolving boss, i have to shut down the game reopent the game but it just bring me to the very begning, i would be really appreciated if u can add some kind of autosave there, so i dont have to start over agian, overall it is a great time!
had a lot of fun with this one! checked your gdoc for bugs/etc and don't think I saw this, so wanted to note that while it's not necessarily a 'bug', you can if you have fever + the truffle with 99 uses in your hand execute a set-up where you can basically 'endlessly' buff 'eat to increase power' cards in combat. it slows down the game a lot (particularly bc it runs into a lag where it wants to trigger all the animations for drawing from your deck one by one, slower than you can play/draw cards) but probably more pertinently it might be on the extreme end of desired player behaviour. in one run I had two fever cards + two of the 99 use truffles and a deck balanced heavily towards dmg cards that buffed on eating, so with patience I was able to sit there and raise everything to such obscene numbers that I'd delete even the end demo boss upon playing anything. without looking at individual card balancing itself, I think a sufficiently generous 'cards played before forced turn end' hard cap would still allow for trick plays like this while mitigating the cheese enough to keep it challenging. another option is potentially to set a limit on how many times a card can be played per combat turn regardless of energy left.
this looks AMAZING! you plan to release a Linux download or Browser version?
Why did I lose after opening the gloom door?
It’s a work in progress.
The finish screen is seemingly random, and when you beat it, it just loops you to the same ending rng as a death.
Then back to the beginning!
I’m sure they have additional zones or alternate endings in mind.
need the full game!!!