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Quell's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity | #1448 | 3.593 | 3.593 |
| Enjoyment | #1858 | 3.111 | 3.111 |
| Overall | #1866 | 3.296 | 3.296 |
| Presentation | #2362 | 3.185 | 3.185 |
Ranked from 27 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
Deckbuilding Roguelite but you control the enemies
Did your team create the vast majority of the art during the 48 hours?
Yes
We created the vast majority of the art during the game jam
Did your team create the vast majority of the music during the 48 hours?
Yes
We created the vast majority of the music during the game jam
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Comments
This is really neat! I love the music. The gameplay did feel a bit luck-based at times, but would probably be a lot easier without that bug, so I won't hold it against you. The game is simple but interesting, which is what you want for a game jam. Well done.
I see what you meant when we talked last weekend. That bug makes the game significantly harder.
Regarding the game... It definitely was a pretty ambitious idea. Personally, I wouldn't have dared to attempt a rogue-lite deckbuilder for a 48h jam, haha. So considering that, what you managed to achieve in such a short time-span is remarkable.
Balance is kinda wack, but that's to be expected given the timeframe. And UI could really use some work in order to make the game's initial barrier to entry lower. As right now it is kinda intimidating at the beginning, until you finally figure out what's what.
Despite all that, the idea was pretty creative overall! Not a bad entry into this year's jam.
I really, really like the idea!
The gameplay was nice and the amount of content is neat for such a short timespan. However it felt a bit too random, more like, if you're lucky to make until round x, you win the game. By always choosing the "easiest" path once you got lucky you're going to win. But balancing in 48h is absurd so it's completely understandable.
Visually it was easy to understand and the monsters were cool. UI could be a bit more fitting but it works.
I liked the song. The SFX felt a bit lacking though, would be neat to have all the card effects going bonkers at once on a monster!
Managed to finish the game on my third run, the only bug I found was the text showing I had only 1 card left upon entering a new portal. But it was more of a visual thing 'cause once I started quelling the cards would be counted correctly.
Overall a very nice entry, would like to see the idea expanded.
Cool idea, it's always neat to see someone make a game that could be played with cards in real life.
The art is pretty cool, I like the different elements and the colors you used for them. The game could use a lot of polish with the UI and all that, but I completely understand how that can get left out when you only have 48 hours. The gameplay is interesting, but it seems a bit too RNG dependent. It would help if the element doubling worked, but the randomness of the wand makes strategy difficult. I think it would be interesting if it would shuffle the deck before each encounter and you can see what cards will be played in order. It would also be interesting if you had the ability to put one unnecessary card back in your deck during each encounter. That way you could plan the optimal order to quell the spirits.
But overall, a cool submission with a lot of potential!
Awesome music! It was difficult coming up with a strategy to try and achieve 10 wins. I tried choosing portals that matched the cards I had to get that double effectiveness, but I always wound up running out of energy. I think a good addition would be to show the list of portals before having the player select a new card. That way they're not picking a card more or less at random. I think this could acts as a nice planning session. Overall nice job! Definitely spent some time playing this one. :)
Ooh, I like this idea. It gives you a little more information, but then you also need to decide if it's worth picking into another element to be better against one or keep focusing
And thanks for playing! I appreciate it!
It is a very cool game, i really enjoyed picking out a strategy for the elements, I didnt quite get it how the cards fought each specific monster but it was quite nice, the art is also quite cool.
I love games like these, and this is a very interesting one! I know other people have commented about the bug(that always left me disappointed) and show deck always showing all cards, but based off the idea alone this is great all around. Very impressive for 48 hours! The strategies I was trying to come up with were fun like trying to make a deck only a few elements as possible. Some RNG balancing would help a lot, for example when you get a choice of portals having them be more evenly spread across elements instead of getting 3 fire portals and 1 rock. The connection with the theme is a bit weak but that gets a pass from me, I had a blast.
Please do notify me if you do a post-jam version with fixes! Would love to play it!
Thank you for the kind words! I really appreciate it :)
I've got a post-jam version with the bug fixed at the very least. My goal this year has always been to polish up whatever I make to publish to android, too.
I'll do my best to find and ping you when I have more updates, but a follow would make sure you don't miss it.
Thanks again!
Very fun concept, although it's painful when you have that super effective card but it didn't register and it's the difference between a win or a loss. Still, it's interesting what strategies can evolve from not getting to control your cards!!
Thanks for checking it out!
Yeah, I have stopped physically recoiling every time I think about someone playing my game and it not working, but it's still painful knowing that bug got into the submission build.
I'm really excited to keep developing this one. I had a handful of cool card ideas (including abilities/rules text!) that I just didn't have time for. Who knew card games required so much infrastructure to work??
Hey great job! I'm a huge fan of deckbuilding games so this was right up my alley! I enjoyed it, but I would say the UI was not the best.
Super, super agree lol. Thanks for playing!
First things first, I’m a big fan of the art in this one! The little icons are expressive and have cool colours on them, and the creature designs are much better than anything I could think up. I also like how the card is enlarged with a star when it’s (intended to be) doubled.
It took me a while to get the concept at first, and now that I’ve played a few rounds, I think it could be a really enjoyable game that I’d come back to if it had a few changes to the balance:
The starting deck choice is extremely cool - I love the choice of fewer high powered cards vs more low powered cards and I can see that having a big impact later on in the game - but all the card decisions after that are not very interactive. For example, when given the choice between Landslide (4), Draft (1), Pebble (1), 4 is the biggest number and there’s no reason for me to choose the other one.
Rather than a power number, the pure choice of which element would help your deck is probably more interesting, and the card’s power could be based on the difficulty of the room you just cleared. Or maybe there could be dual-type cards which are obviously advantageous over single-type cards but could appear with lower power levels on average.
At the moment, it’s unfortunately lacking in skill: some encounters are impossible to win even with perfect draws, and the only run that I won involved me not thinking about which enemy to attack first.
I think it would also be nice if the “show deck” was shown at all times and didn’t show the ones that have been played in this game so it’s easier to strategise over what’s left.
Still, with some of these changes and more variety, I think this would be a really interesting game that people would come back to!
Also the title screen/cover art is fantastic.
Thank you so much for all the kind words and detailed feedback. I truly appreciate it.
I'm glad to see that so many of the things you suggested were ideas that I didn't have time to get around to. I ended up not having enough time for balancing the card distribution other than "pick 3 cards randomly from all cards to offer" which obviously introduces a wild amount of variance. And that idea might have even been a little more acceptable had I gotten around to cards with abilities!
I like the dual-element suggestion; that hadn't made it onto my brainstorming list!
And to your final point - yes, I absolutely agree about it not feeling like there's a lot of room for skill or expression. Hopefully it will feel better after updates to card distribution, finer encounter tuning, and a dynamic decklist during battle that helps you better understand what's left to be played.
My plan was always to take whatever I made for this jam and develop it for a full android release just to get the practice of selfpublishing, so I expect I will be able to achieve all this!
Thank you again so much for the feedback. Truly appreciated. Jam on!
Exciting! Let me know if you get around to making an updated version, and I’ll be sure to give it a try.
I think there was something that I didn't get with this. When you control the enemies, do you control the order you attack them? I think I'm missing something from the player feedback. I played a bunch of rounds and still was a bit clueless on what I was doing :(. I like the concept of what I did understand though. Sorry.
Great job for finishing something of this level for the 48 hour jam!
Fair feedback! I spent way more time on the infrastructure of the game than I had anticipated and didn't leave enough time to properly give player feedback.
The idea is that you decide which enemy you guide ("attack") first, but your deck is played randomly until that spirit's power is reduced to zero. So the strategy was intended to be about sculpting your deck and then choosing battles that favor your deck's elements. Then once in a battle, it becomes a decision of playing the odds. If you know you have a bunch of fire cards in your deck, do you go for the fire spirit first and hope to get a match and spend fewer cards? Something like that. But it clearly isn't conveyed well!
Obviously you don't owe me more feedback, but if you have the time (and if the above makes more sense), what would you have liked to see to help convey that?
Thanks again for playing! I appreciate it!
Okay. I kindof picked up on most of that. I think what would be cool, is when cards are played, the deck list that you can peak at grey out so you have a better idea on what cards are played. Or maybe have the player have like 2-3 cards in their hand per round. Oh wait, right, the monsters are wha tyou choose to attack. Hmm...
Or letting the deck play one card at a time and you can see if you want to play a second card on the same monster or switch to a different one then come back later?
I hear yah on not having enough time for player feedback. I didn't even have time to have an end screen (win or failure).
Fun game, takes a little while to understand how it's working since my first few playthroughs were picking random enemies. But then it hit me, that was actually a pretty nice moment! The art fits consistently, and I had a good time! One comment is that some player feedback will be nice here (to add to that game feel, as well as helping understand the game). But good stuff overall!
I love deck builders, and this is a really interesting take on one! I especially love your design on the little monsters, very cute!
Great game! Took me a game over to realise how the game worked, but then I was away.
Very satisfying when you get a type-match, good work :)
This game is one of the most CFHM games i've played.
Of course it has the programmer art (which is actually good its just that how its put together is a bit programmer-art-esque) and is actually very fun despite first impressions.
The concept as well is a creative take on the theme and on deckbuilding.
Gives me serious Wisps vibes. Good job!
Yeah, I knew I was in trouble when I spent over an hour making one enemy lol.
I knew a card game was going to be a big task for 48 hours, but I didn't realize just how much of that time would be spent programming infrastructure.
Thanks for checking it out, JC. I appreciate the feedback :)
Cool idea! Though I think the game is too random and there's a pretty annoying bug when type-matching bonus doesn't actually count. I remember your last year's game Wisps and it was one of my favourites! I glad you took similar board game-like approach
... I am absolutely devastated
yep, sure enough. There's the bug. I know exactly when it happened and why. This morning as I was trying to get through as many items as possible. I updated how the match bonus was processed and replaced the actual power increase with the power increase to the text only.
Well fk
Thanks for finding it.
Hey CFHM, good to see you again this year!
I haven't really played many card games so it took a few tries (along with reading the description) for me to grasp how the game worked. The take on the theme is very creative and something I haven't seen yet, and the sprites of the portals and enemies were charming. When I began to understand how the game worked it gave me a sort of "Aha" moment lol.
Since I'm really unfamiliar with deckbuilders, it's a bit difficult for me to properly comment on design. However I feel like a little bit more player feedback with like animations and effects could really help someone like me figure out how the game works (Obviously it's a jam game; a proper deckbuilder is impressive).
Overall it was really fun! I think I might keep playing it every now and then like I did with your last submission Wisps; these sorts of games are kind of growing on me and I might try more of that genre soon.
Great work, and goodluck with the rest of the jam!
Thanks Daniel! Appreciate the feedback!
Yeah, player feedback and clarity was my biggest hurdle after getting out the prototype. I really wanted to emphasize pretty much everything more.
Thanks for sticking with it and I'm glad you had an "Aha" moment!