Vanguard’s good point is about how it stays realistic and is actually about children getting confident while playing card games, going to card shops and playing tournaments. Of course the characters shout out stuff out loud, which card players don’t do in real life, but they could. However, you added some metaspace plot elements and that makes it very cheesy and funny!
About the gameplay, I wish there was some progression of some sort during the fight so all states are not equivalent and we don’t have a perfectly linear health progression. That said, it’s pretty well balanced and good picking can make the difference (mostly about checking if opponent has a majority of offence or defence cards).
I wish the final fight recognised the Draw you can do thanks to the final card you obtained, for a special ending. Or Loss. But I get it that makes more work, esp. since the Win ending is already quite elaborated.
I’m also studying how other games actually make a short story that ends, since I couldn’t do that and just worked on a Prologue. I suppose borrowing famous plot elements helps player understand things faster and have shorter scenes, but I wonder how to do it inside a more serious story. I’ll keep checking the other jam entries!
For looping animations, there is no choice anyway: even if Renpy implemented my proposal to set the transform/color values to last key values, there is no last value for looping animations, so you should always expect issues on continuing mid-animation and reset all properties to the ones you want before the next statement.
at the very end, when the character appears on the sunset background, the techy box flashes for a short time because switching to the actual bubble (I got the same issue on Renpy on my own project, I think I had to add a hide statement to force hide the wrong text box)
Thank you so much for playing! I have to admit it was more inspired by Yu-Gi-Oh! than Vanguard (that's still on my watchlist), but I did go for "as cheesy and unhinged as possible". Considering the development strategy of this game was "fuck it we ball", I'm pleasantly surprised the card game ended up being sort of enjoyable! I sort of embraced the moments of utter stupidity as a feature (e.g. Deneb one-shotting herself by playing her special, Astra being the strongest among the three).
I didn't think of it as a branching story (mostly due to time constraints), but the idea of an alternate ending depending on the last battle's results is cool! Wish I thought of it now, actually. I also wanted to make a special animation for, well, special attacks, but in the end I had to cut it out...
Making short games is easier when they're stupid (affectionate)! But for more serious stuff, I find starting from the end and having few story beats (and characters) clear makes it easier to avoid getting too much out of scope. Looking forward to the full version of Spirit Link!
EDIT: as for the visual glitches, I was aware of both but I just went "eeeeh... whatever, no time" and put in a fix for the first one which... didn't work much, apparently. I didn't think hiding the text box could work for the second one, so thanks! I'll definitely look into both for the next patch (which will come eventually, I'd like to at least add sound effects...)
Hm, in this case I suppose the anime version of Yu-Gi-Oh with virtual worlds and waking up in a cylinder, yes could be a greater source of inspiration. The movie also has incredible technology (I’m a manga purist on this one, although I do like some moments of the movie, so to me Yu-Gi-Oh is mostly about coming-of-age and friendship (a common point with Vanguard), crazy strategies using unwritten rules, respecting the game and one’s opponents, and a variety of games including tabletop RPG (my first contact with the genre) and some weird occult real-time combat game with unit management where your soul gets sucked in a jar if you lose.
But mostly meeting a friend at the very beginning, discovering a game and Cross x Engage made me think more about Vanguard (in Yu-Gi-Oh, the protagonist is an enthusiastic analog gamer to start with, then card games come later).
I see the weird things that can happen due to the limit of 3 actions each turn. In fact, for the final fight I tried to lose but it was just as hard as winning. Ending with a draw was, oddly, the easiest thanks for the card that hits both players. So yes, the fact you either hit or fully defend (not just divide damage by two) makes it pretty hard not to just win or stale once you start getting the advantage.
I found a serious short one in the meantime, exorcist killing lie! https://itch.io/jam/baf-jam-2023/rate/2112516
It uses a one-shot format, taking a key event in a bigger world, that includes some character evolution. Maybe I could do that next time. I realize I didn’t write my character evolutions properly though, so it was impossible in Spirit Link.
Comments
Vanguard’s good point is about how it stays realistic and is actually about children getting confident while playing card games, going to card shops and playing tournaments. Of course the characters shout out stuff out loud, which card players don’t do in real life, but they could. However, you added some metaspace plot elements and that makes it very cheesy and funny!
About the gameplay, I wish there was some progression of some sort during the fight so all states are not equivalent and we don’t have a perfectly linear health progression. That said, it’s pretty well balanced and good picking can make the difference (mostly about checking if opponent has a majority of offence or defence cards).
I wish the final fight recognised the Draw you can do thanks to the final card you obtained, for a special ending. Or Loss. But I get it that makes more work, esp. since the Win ending is already quite elaborated.
I’m also studying how other games actually make a short story that ends, since I couldn’t do that and just worked on a Prologue. I suppose borrowing famous plot elements helps player understand things faster and have shorter scenes, but I wonder how to do it inside a more serious story. I’ll keep checking the other jam entries!
I forgot about visual glitches:
I reported this: https://github.com/renpy/renpy/issues/4790 but it’s a won’t fix, so you’ll need to manually set the scale to final value before the next statement.
For looping animations, there is no choice anyway: even if Renpy implemented my proposal to set the transform/color values to last key values, there is no last value for looping animations, so you should always expect issues on continuing mid-animation and reset all properties to the ones you want before the next statement.
Thank you so much for playing! I have to admit it was more inspired by Yu-Gi-Oh! than Vanguard (that's still on my watchlist), but I did go for "as cheesy and unhinged as possible". Considering the development strategy of this game was "fuck it we ball", I'm pleasantly surprised the card game ended up being sort of enjoyable! I sort of embraced the moments of utter stupidity as a feature (e.g. Deneb one-shotting herself by playing her special, Astra being the strongest among the three).
I didn't think of it as a branching story (mostly due to time constraints), but the idea of an alternate ending depending on the last battle's results is cool! Wish I thought of it now, actually. I also wanted to make a special animation for, well, special attacks, but in the end I had to cut it out...
Making short games is easier when they're stupid (affectionate)! But for more serious stuff, I find starting from the end and having few story beats (and characters) clear makes it easier to avoid getting too much out of scope. Looking forward to the full version of Spirit Link!
EDIT: as for the visual glitches, I was aware of both but I just went "eeeeh... whatever, no time" and put in a fix for the first one which... didn't work much, apparently. I didn't think hiding the text box could work for the second one, so thanks! I'll definitely look into both for the next patch (which will come eventually, I'd like to at least add sound effects...)
Hm, in this case I suppose the anime version of Yu-Gi-Oh with virtual worlds and waking up in a cylinder, yes could be a greater source of inspiration. The movie also has incredible technology (I’m a manga purist on this one, although I do like some moments of the movie, so to me Yu-Gi-Oh is mostly about coming-of-age and friendship (a common point with Vanguard), crazy strategies using unwritten rules, respecting the game and one’s opponents, and a variety of games including tabletop RPG (my first contact with the genre) and some weird occult real-time combat game with unit management where your soul gets sucked in a jar if you lose.
But mostly meeting a friend at the very beginning, discovering a game and Cross x Engage made me think more about Vanguard (in Yu-Gi-Oh, the protagonist is an enthusiastic analog gamer to start with, then card games come later).
I see the weird things that can happen due to the limit of 3 actions each turn. In fact, for the final fight I tried to lose but it was just as hard as winning. Ending with a draw was, oddly, the easiest thanks for the card that hits both players. So yes, the fact you either hit or fully defend (not just divide damage by two) makes it pretty hard not to just win or stale once you start getting the advantage.
I found a serious short one in the meantime, exorcist killing lie! https://itch.io/jam/baf-jam-2023/rate/2112516 It uses a one-shot format, taking a key event in a bigger world, that includes some character evolution. Maybe I could do that next time. I realize I didn’t write my character evolutions properly though, so it was impossible in Spirit Link.
That was some of the most anime VN plot I've ever read... had me laughing at how ridiculous it got. Maybe a bit rock-paper-scissors at times but 10/10
rock-paper-scissors is truly where games peaked.
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it! We definitely went for the most anime thing we could think of.