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A jam submission

Run the Rings - ClassicView game page

Deck builder roguelike space game with ANSI art graphics
Submitted by SlightlyMadman (@finalscrewgames), mikefictitious — 18 hours, 56 seconds before the deadline
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Run the Rings - Classic's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Overall#274.0004.000
Roguelikeness#723.6253.625

Ranked from 8 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Successful or Incomplete?

Success

Did development of the game take place during the 7DRL Challenge week?

Yes

Is your game a roguelike or a roguelite?

Yes

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Comments

Submitted

love the aesthetics and the music, great job!

Submitted

Wow, that's an addictive rage-quit material! I had a problem to do any real progress, always needed another card in my setup, but almost every time I felt I'm just a tiny bit from the perfect deck. So, the balance is probably quite good. The movement on the map was fun in a few playthroughs, later it was just an obligatory step leading to the next battle.

Good job!

Submitted (1 edit)

This was a lot of fun! It took me a handful of tries to win it, but experimenting and figuring out a viable build was pretty satisfying.

Having to power up your ship at the start of combat was nice because it meant that there was always a risk of unlucky early card draw killing you even if your overpowered deck was steamrollering most enemies. That said, the only strategy I found for mitigating that was stacking my deck with a ton of engines since besides having a basic or fusion reactor, none of the topdeck cards seemed consistently useful enough to justify having them. Once you're drawing back up to a full hand every turn, you can use all those evade cards you also have to survive pretty much anything and take your time sifting through your massive deck looking for the cards you need to actually do damage.

I also appreciate that the enemy was playing by the same rules since it led to high variability in what the enemy was able to do, sometimes failing to play anything useful and getting crushed and other times getting an advanced weapons system out early and causing problems. It also led to an amusing accidental cheese where I let my opponent clog up their hand with 4 evade cards so they were only able to play 1 card per turn.

Another observation, early on it's advantageous to fight all the enemies to build out your deck, but once you reach the later sectors it seems better to avoid as many enemies as possible since they don't drop better cards and there's a very real risk of dying to unlucky card draw.

I feel like the game would benefit from more enemy types (maybe including some mini-bosses and/or a final boss) and a bigger variety of cards, but it's a nice amount of content for a 7DRL.

Developer

I've added a new download to the page with a v1.1 file (windows only for the moment, sorry). The play-in-browser version is still the original 7DRL submission (and it's still available as a separate download as well), but if anyone wants to try a version with some major UI enhancements (core gameplay is unchanged except a couple balance tweaks), it's there.

Game concept and graphics are really interesting! Would be good to develop it further!

Submitted

Nice theme and decent implementation of rogue-like deck-building.

PROS:

  • The basic systems of the game are easy to grasp and the standard objective and failure state make the design nice and simple for newer players.
  • The ships look pretty cool and have some nice firing and explosion animations while playing the cards.
  • The squeaky noise on death definitely softens the blow of failure, lol.

CRITIQUE:

  • Combat felt slow because I basically had to turn my ship on every time I ever encountered an enemy. I wish that I was persistently combat-ready when entering combat and the cards were more focused on combat options rather than just trying to get my ship up to the point where it could fight.
  • I don't think the design benefits from an opponent ship having their own deck/hand rather than just having a telegraphed "this is what the enemy ship is about to do" and then letting players decide which card to play based on that info. It feels like the player would feel cheated often if they hadn't memorized all the possible card options that an opponent ship could have and then attempt to play around those cards (though your deck is so small often that playing around things isn't really possible).
  • Would be interesting if combat had residual effects on the player's ship. Right now It feels like players are encouraged to engage in combat more often rather than decide if they want to take the risk because you can only gain resources and never have residual negative effects after finishing the combat. You could die, but you need to get the fuel from somewhere if you want to grow or survive.
Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing! I cracked up the first time I heard the death sound effect and knew we had to add it to the game.

I definitely agree that there being no residual effects presents problems. In a game like Slay the Spire, managing your remaining life adds some interesting choices and risks to fighting, whereas here you basically want to fight any ship you can. I had planned to add actions that permanently remove a card from your deck, as a form of persistent damage, and may add this in still in a later update (after the jam).

I personally like the level playing field of the enemy having a similar deck, but you're right I'm not doing enough interesting things with it to justify it. Maybe draft rewards could come directly from the enemy's deck. I also would have liked to add more cards that might have effects based on the cards the other player has.

Thank you for your feedback, it's very helpful!

Submitted

I really enjoyed this. The combination of the cool, original graphics and the music helped me get into the game. Once I was into it, I started to enjoy the card game mechanics a lot. It would help a lot if there were pop-ups for resource generation, taking damage etc, I didn't ever figure out how many hit points I had. It would be fantastic to see this game expanded.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for playing! You're definitely right, the resource generation would have been better with more indications than just a tiny number going up or down on the side. I also probably didn't communicate this clearly, but there are no hit points, just cards. Taking damage means discarding a card. If you have no cards, you discard a system instead. If you have no systems, you die.

I'd like to flesh things out more (and add more cards) in a follow-up, but I'm going to leave this version as-is for now so it doesn't affect judging.

Developer

There is a downloadable version available as well at the game page. I'm not sure why it isn't showing up here.