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In the Cards's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #4 | 4.268 | 4.268 |
| Graphics | #5 | 4.482 | 4.482 |
| Overall | #11 | 4.214 | 4.214 |
| Innovation | #13 | 4.036 | 4.036 |
| Gameplay | #18 | 4.018 | 4.018 |
| Theme interpretation | #117 | 3.446 | 3.446 |
Ranked from 56 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
GitHub repository
https://github.com/anttihaavikko/tarot
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Comments
Not much else to say other than what everyone else has commented. Very polished game, fantastic visuals and audio with addictive game play. Absolutely great work
Holy man what an addictive game, I just spent like the last 2 hours playing and it felt like nothing. The gameplay feels incredibly polished: all the animations, sounds and special effects. Overall an awesome experience.
And btw I'm also from Finland :)
Hallo,
Thank you for sharing your game. I’ve already saved its RATING;
1. verified: GAME due to observed it in the SUBMISSIONS List with keyphrase “card” as filter
2. observed: noticeable background music, sound effects, and voice-overs to remind self of Prof. SNAPE from the HARRY POTTER Movies
3. observed: noticeable animation techniques to remind self of PARAPPA THE RAPPER (PS1)
4. learns: developer of GAME also developed do;MIN(0), rank#1 in Game Off 2021
5. observed: in MAIN GAME, clicked CARD appeared to NOT stay in set position; verified: LEADERBOARDS to learn that GAME appeared to be PLAYABLE; re-verified: MAIN GAME, to learn that the correct technique of putting the CARDS is via dragging them near the border, and then releasing the mouse click to set the CARD in the farthest of that row or column;
6. learns: after verifying putting CARDS immediately where the TARGET STAR is causes a scenario where TARGET is NOT settable by any CARD due to already surrounded by CARDS
7. re-verified: putting CARDS such that the inner positions have CARDS; reached: score of 34,540, when a set of CARDS disappeared due to an EFFECT in a combination of CARDS to cause the TARGET STAR to be NOT anymore settable; adds: at the TIME, observed self to already be verifying the ELAPSED TIME;
8. learns: via SCREENSHOT, “UNDO” button to exist;
9. adds: did NOT yet use available TIME to verify the technique to speed-up the increase in the SCORE; example: which CARDS adjacent to each other causes an increase?, et cetera
10. notes: learnable
Thank you. Health!
Why something so simple in essence could get so complex and hard to master? The level of polish of the game is astonishing, congrats. I often feel like I'm not understanding what I'm doing or what should I do to overpower my cards, but the concept is interesting and feels amazing at play. Will play some more runs later to get it fully, but this is all 5 stars to me, sir. Congrats on an awesome entry, thank you!
Wow, this is so polished for a game jam! Everything from the gameplay to the sound effects to the juice. I love the endless possibilities of synergies when combining the powers, I had some pretty crazy combos and managed to get 150k on one of my playthroughs (which probably isn't that high, but was better than I had been doing haha). And... I couldn't stop playing. I caught the "just one more time" bug pretty bad.
My only thought is I would love some kind of tutorial. Obviously, nothing that explains every card or anything like that. More about the scoring. I will say I'm still mildly confused about what the multiplier is multiplying, or if destroying cards gives me points or just makes the game last longer, or really how I am getting points aside from the cards that explicitly add points. Is each round worth a number of points and then the multiplier is applied to that number plus the cards that give you points in the round? I'm guessing that's what it is, and if so, I don't think stating that takes anything away from the discovery of the game, but does give players who have no idea what's going on (aka me) a good starting point.
Either way, I really enjoyed it. Great job!
Yeah 150k is already good in my books. It's pretty close to my personal record which is around 250k. I did have one 3-4 mil run before I had implemented the leaderboards but the scoring might have been a bit different back then too. Oh and I did pull out one 700k run which I ruined back to zero by a dumb miss play with those minus score skills. And I honestly have no idea how the current #1 spot has achieved that 1 billion score. 🤯
The multiplier multiplies all the score gains. By default you only get score when you "level up" and the amount is based on the empty squares on the board. I didn't feel like explaining this was really necessary. I kinda hate trying to explain things too much cause usually players really don't want to read too much. Probably cause I as a gamer really dislike too lengthy and gameplay interrupting tutorials myself. But I guess throwing a quick message explaining it shortly (like the initial placement messages etc) wouldn't have hurt if timed correctly.
And yeah, transforms and destroys don't do anything else really (on their own). Of course they can be enhanced by some skills to also score or increase multiplier and so on. So destroy basically starts off just like that, making more room to keep playing longer (and having more empty space for bigger scoring too when leveling up).
Thanks for the feedback! ❤️
Haha that's fair! I am definitely an over-analytical kind of player. Maybe not even a tutorial, but a menu option for "How Scoring Works" or whatever for the nerds like me. Again, great game!
Lovely amounts of animation, graphics quite nice. At times one couldn’t understand what happened when the cards go together, and why, so that was a bit confusing. It would be nice if there was a way to look into the deck, to see what you would get. When placing a card in a corner (inverse corner?) it was difficult to specify which side you wanted to go in, and I couldn’t find any undo.
Well all the effects that happen are destinies that you have chosen yourself. Of course some of their descriptions might be weirdly worded. Undo is only available when your placed card doesn't trigger any destiny effects. Didn't want it to be used to erase tactical mistakes, just mouse slips and that is the closest thing to distinguish them. And it would also be a bit more complex to rewind all those triggered effects.
This looks and sounds SOOOOOOOO good, it's very polished and juicy!
The gameplay is extremely addictive too - even though it felt hard to figure out (I probably actually haven't figured out much, actually...)
It could help to add a mechanic to reduce RNG (ability rerolls, or a larger amount to choose from?) as sometimes you really can't get a combo or get saddled with two terrible choices. Other than that, the mechanics are super interesting and fun!
Thanks! Yeah the RNG is maybe a bit too big of a factor. It's the same for everyone on the dailies though so that's where the real test of skill is. There is a reroll mechanic too but that is behind another destiny that you need to pick first. I kinda wanted to limit the choices to two only to actually have those situations where you'd also need to choose from some not so great options. It serves as a purpose to finally end your otherwise endless god runs too as you'll sooner or later need to ruin your combo with some conflicting destiny. Sure it feels somewhat bad on player aspect but it's required really.
That's interesting insight, and the choices totally make sense. Game design is hard (who knew?? ;)), especially with tight time constraints limiting the ability to test and iterate on mechanics.
Really cool ! Loved graphics and gameplay. Fun with quality, great work ! As always :-)
I'll just say as others comment: it's so polished!
Everything has a little detail, animation and sound added, which makes the game feel very responsive and smooth. Top notch quality game!
this game is so polished, that it makes me want to figure out how to polish my games to be that cool! the gameplay was fun, the animations are awesome, the UI was smooth. this one is for the top lists for sure!
Well polished game with very smooth gameplay. Showing a ghost of how the card would slide is super intuitive. The one thing that did not click for me at the start was that cards have no effect themselves apart from the destinies. I thought I was missing some info of what a card would do when placed. Getting a destiny like: "200 points per empress whenever the emperor is destroyed" gave me the idea that the emperor had some built in way to getting destroyed. It wasn't until later playthroughs that I understood that destroying the emperor should also come from your destinies.
I would have liked some more control over the destinies or cards I draw, because now it is very much RNG dependant on whether you get a good run. All you can do is prevent places where you cannot place a card so you don't lose when a star is placed in a location you cannot reach. The "destiny reroll" was by far my favorite of the destinies obviously ;P
Overall very good game!
Very wiggly!
Great fun, easy to learn, impressive replayability. Really enjoyed playing this. You can feel the care and attention to detail in every aspect of it. I could see myself buying an app version of this and playing it on my phone on the subway to work.
My favorite aspect is the way you thoughtfully threaded the theme into the destiny effects.
If I were to give one note, it would be to go buck wild with the card art - one of the special things about tarot are the different artists' renditions of the cards. Enjoyed the art that you had here, but felt it could lean into that pizzazz so specific to tarot decks.
Great stuff, thank you for the game! Cheers
This looks like a finished product already, top notch quality!
Congrats on the project!
I'm very surprised that how polished this game.
At first, I just placed the cards without understanding the destiny but it was so fun thanks to the well polished sound effects, voices, and screen presentation. Now I'm excited that how combo can do after understanding the destiny.
I think this great game is easy to play but very challenging and can be enjoyed both for the beginners and advanced players.
Sorry about my poor English, but thank you for such a great game!
This is the most polished and replayable game I've seen in a jam, I absolutely love it! I have been returning to it over and over again the last few days. The presentation is gorgeous with lots of details. The slight pitch-variations in the music just adds so much! The UI is not missing anything, and even includes details that you'd expect to be overlooked in a jam-project. (Like the effects display when hovering a card, where every effect that includes the card somehow is displayed, not only the card per say you selected in your destiny).
The difficulty curve is great. In the beginning, you get a bit overwhelmed by the destinies effects and it's difficult to keep up and develop good tactics, but when you've spent some time with it and begin to learn the names and what they actually do, it becomes really addictive. The way you display it on the UI and the ease of going through them again is 10+. The voice-over is perfect. The clichés title and effects are very well combined and make a lot of sense.
One reason that I didn't comment this game sooner is simply that I hadn't really found something to "include for constructive criticism" and I've had to really game it out to find anything. But after some time, I did find a few things I "don't like":
To begin with, the only bug I've found was the effect that would fill surrounding tiles with "Tower" when playing "Temperance". There would never spawn any Tower cards. I've only had this destiny in one playthrough so I've not been able to replicate it, perhaps it was just something in that perticular game?What I'd wish for the most would be -some- base score for effects. Like there is a destiny that increases your score when a card transforms, but I feel there would be better if the score was there from the start, and that there was a destiny to increase it further or something. As it is now, it feels great when you have a magician transforming whole columns and starting a chain reaction transforming the columns, cards around, and they in turn transform their own columns and neighbours. The camera shakes a lot, lightning flashes all around, music pitch increases aaaaand, gained score after this 20 second fireworks: 0. And it's a bit unsatisfying in a game like this. :(
But all in all, full score in all categories, well done!
Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback!
Maybe the skill is worded a bit weirdly but it doesn't do what you though it did. It reads:
Fill all surrounded empty tiles with ([2]) when placing ([1])
Meaning that it will fill all the empty single tile gaps you have on the board. So it's really meant for patching up some mistakes and it like quite a few other skills has few upgrade skills for it too (available only after getting the base one first) like allowing to fill 2 tile gaps or also scoring when filling with it.
Just having the transforms add some score by themselves would be a bit too good in comparison to everything else. It has quite a high chance of comboing with itself so it might get out of hand quick. Well it does have the downside of transforming randomly so you always have the risk of triggering unwanted things too like all those minus score skills. There are quite a lot of skills that don't really do much by themselves but obviously the column/row transforms take a while to act out and understandably will feel unrewarding.
Oooh! Right, that makes sense! Not a bug then! ;D Thank you, will test it!
Game felt weird at first but then I lost and "Oh, thats how it works" happened :)
Everything seems really well made - the art, sounds, music, animations. And you even have leaderboard! So many got leaderboards in these projects I feel like I'm stuck behind times :D
I feel like cards art might be swaped to more simplified and distict once table becomes so big its hard to see it in every details. Didn't make that far into the game yet so who knows maybe it ok already.
Tarot on steroids. Very polished and well made. Awesome contribution.
Very cool game. The basics are simple and entertaining enough, but the modifiers you get take it to an entire new level. Its a lot of fun finding interesting combos. Also lots of polish and juice. Nice work!
Sounds make it realy juicy!