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Godot Version
4.3
Wildcards Used
N/A not implemented
Game Description
This game is reflecting the Balatro looks with an experimental card game. Objective: Defeat the entire enemy deck before your health reaches 0 to win the game. Setup: You play as Jimbo against the opponent's deck. You draw 8 cards while the enemy draws 5 cards. Attacking: Drag cards of the same suit from your hand onto the enemy cards to attack. You attack with the value of your used card (Jack is 11, Queen is 12, King is 13). The enemy defends with the value of their card. If the enemy card's health drops below 0, it turns into a mirror card. For example, if you attack an enemy 3 with a 7, you gain a -4 mirror card. Ending Turn: Click "End Turn" to end your turn and let the enemy attack. Enemy Attack: When the enemy attacks, the last mirror card with the same suit from the last row (sorted left to right) will engage in battle. The mirror card reflects its value as damage and decreases the enemy card's value by that amount. A mirror card can only reflect once and is used up even if it has HP left. Any unmitigated damage hits Jimbo directly. Drawing New Cards: Click your draw pile to draw 8 new cards when you have no cards left in your hand. You can destroy cards in your hand by dragging them onto the destroy spot or clicking "Destroy All." You lose an amount of health equal to the value of the destroyed cards. Winning: You win when the enemy has no cards left. Enjoy the game and good luck! 😊
How does your game tie into the theme?
It has a mirror mechanic that reflects damage. it mirrors Balatros looks closely
Source(s)
N/A
Discord Username(s)
iLLe
Participation Level (GWJ Only)
my second time
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Comments
Took me a while to get used to the rules, but this so much fun! Great work!
I don't know how similar your game is to Balatro's core gameplay loop, but I had a lot of fun with this game! It definitely took me a while to understand what I was doing, but it was worth playing til the end! I would love to see a full game like this- perhaps with your own visual flair to make it stand apart from Balatro. c:
I've never played Balatro, but the art style is instantly recognizable. Very clean presentation, I especially love the Options menu and UI in general. As others have stated, I think adding a tutorial would help a lot with understanding the rules, but overall very nice work.
Love the artwork and music! Fun game!
Remarkable work recreating the Balatro look and feel! The mechanics create a neat puzzle that was compelling to solve too.
Thanks :)
Cool game! I just started playing and figured out the mechanics. I think I could figure out the optimal strategies on subsequent matches. There were only a few bugs that can be easily remedied: music doesn't loop, could still press buttons on the right after running out of cards, and game doesn't full screen. All in all, wonderful job.
Glad you found the game cool :D Thanks for pointing out the bugs. I'll work on fixing those. Appreciate the feedback.
It took some time to figure out the mirror mechanics, but when I got it it was a fun game to play!
There is some confusion about number changes - it seems numbers change with a bit of a delay, so I often felt like the card before movement was 5, but I got hit on 6 - but then I noticed that the number updated was 5.
I love the art and sounds, but I'm confused how to rate it, given it's from Balatro :D
Thank you for the kind words! :D I fought really hard to fix that bug but still haven't figured it out yet. The damage calculations are correct as far as I can tell, but the visual representation of the card value is often off by one after a fight. I'm pretty new to tweens, and my guess is that somewhere in my tweens lies the problem, with some "awaits" in between a destroy tween and the "taking damage" tween, which maybe causes a race condition where the card gets destroyed before the texture is changed.
Tbh I never used tweens, I use animatedsprite2d - you don't have to use animation there, you can just refer to each sprite by number. And e.g. in my current Minesweeper game, I just set the sprite frame number to the logic number and it's quite convenient to organize.
But yep, awaits are hell :D I ended up doing state machine to avoid races and tons of awaits (there are still a lot of them though)
But I'm also new to all this, like 2-3 months in godot/game-dev, so I'm not sure my approaches are good as well, just sharing how I approach these issues
I went the lazy route and used a hurt shader that im tweening. I was too lazy to create spritesheets with 6 frames each for 52 cards😂
interesting! then I have no idea what you are talking about - I so far worked only on the sprites level :)) maybe will try to get in shaders and stuff later :)
Nice card game! The artstyle here is truly reminiscent of the Balatro game as you have intended. I like how you used the Jimbo sounds from Balatro when he gets hurt too (that's what he deserves for giving me The Goad while I have Arrowhead, haha)
An in-game tutorial would be nice (as others have mentioned), I jumped in and got confused at first but the text explaining how to play did help with that.
Overall a quick and fun card game! I can see a potential for it to have a multiplayer mode in the future where you duel another human player.
I took a while to understand how it worked, but when I got there. it became fun and enjoyable. The graphics and audio really stood out to me. The game have a need for a tutorial, but when you read the description and try hard enough its pretty simple and fun. Great game!
I'm so glad you enjoyed the graphics and audio! I'll definitely work on adding a tutorial to make the game more accessible. Appreciate your feedback!
Took me a few tries but eventually got the win! The gameplay was quite unique and enjoyable. I struggled a few times with some overly unlucky runs though, haha. Also, you did an incredible job replicating the Balatro style! Good work overall.
Thanks for the nice words :) and happy to hear you enjoyed it despite the unlucky runs. Thanks for the feedback!
I won!
Fun little game - the mechanics seem well, and the graphics are nice too. I would suggesst to try to make the icons of the cards more distinguishable and maybe also the colors themselves (or different ones) for the reflection cards.
Other than that, I think it's a pretty good entry
Thank you, Congrats on winning :D
Your suggestions about the card icons and colors are noted. Your suggestions about the card icons and colors are very valid because often it can be confusing to determine which reflection/inverted card is part of the next turn. Thinking about that, maybe some contextual tooltips or highlighting opponent mirrors when hovering over an enemy card would have helped. That's something I'll try to improve on in the future. Glad you enjoyed the game!
The visuals are incredible, very nice shader and animation work! I think the game could use a tutorial (like mentioned in another comment), though I eventually understood the mechanics after reading the description and playing for a bit.
I think the additional mechanics you mentioned dropping in another comment would be great for the game (along with a tutorial), would love to see a post-jam update!
Excited to hear you liked the visuals and animation! :) I'll definitely work on a tutorial and consider adding the additional mechanics. Before I put in the effort, I first have to read up a bit to see if I could get into any legal trouble because of the blatant ripoff or potential intellectual property infringement.
In the end, it's a fangame, so it will be purely a passion project. :D
You could try contacting localthunk directly, others have had decent luck getting a response!
A little difficult to understand at first but turned out to be fun afterwards!
Regarding accessibility, a really neat job was done!
Happy to hear you had fun in the end! :D I had planned to add different stages of difficulty (like more/less HP or increasing enemy deck size, with added handicap cards that only the enemy could draw, or maybe a boss card with more health or abilities). In the beginning, it was very hard to win for me, but now, after so much playtesting, it feels too easy if you follow certain strategies.
I'll work on improving the learning curve and making the game easier to understand from the start. Thanks for the feedback!
Impressive work for only 5 days of development time. Haven't played Balatro so can't compare the games, but this great, liked all the small visual elements and shaders, the overall game feel was excellent.
Appreciate the kind words! Glad you liked the visual elements and overall game feel. It was a lot of work in a short time, so your feedback means a lot!
Solid work! I was surprised how easily I made sense of the rules after one playthrough, like many card games, they initially feel intimidating but once I played, it all clicked. I really dig the interpretation of reflection. Excellent work on all the game juice, generally card games aren't my thing but this felt really good to play.
Great to hear the rules made sense for you after a playthrough :) I'm happy you enjoyed the game. Appreciate your feedback!
Wow. I don't know how you replicated the look so perfectly, but it does look exactly like Balatro. The new game rules are also clever. My only note is that when the game came up, it was jarring to not hear the Balatro soundtrack start playing. lol. Amazing work - congrats on the submission.
Glad you liked it! I started with a YouTube tutorial to learn what makes Balatro special. To be honest, I couldn't replicate its most praised part, which is the 20 minute single soundtrack that plays throughout the whole game, mixed with pitching and seamlessly fading to different points in the song during different situations in the game.
My project focused on tweening, shaders, and visual fidelity, and in the end, I learned a lot! :D
Also, I can highly recommend godotshaders.com
I found the swirly paint shader there, along with the fake 3D card hover and CRT effect.
Fun card game. Took me one play through and loss to figure it out, but after that it was strategic.
Nice work on the animations and the card dealing fx.
Thank you :) Happy to hear it's not too complex of a gameplay. Glad you liked the animations and card dealing effects. Appreciate your feedback!
Wow ok. As a huge Balatro fan (Completionist+ club) you did such an excellent job of recreating the look and feel of Balatro, great work. As for the game, I will say the rules are a bit too complex for there not being an in-game tutorial. I had to read the rules of the game 3 or 4 times over before I got it and I'm still not 100% sure I understand them. Even then I feel like the game doesn't offer much in the way of variety or strategy. Maybe that's because I only played it once, but I'd imagine every game of Reflectro would play out about the same, and whether you win or lose is based more on the luck of the draw rather than the player's strategy.
When I say all this though I think I am just comparing your game to Balatro itself, which isn't fair. However, much like Balatro, this is a quite original concept for a playing card-based computer game. I think with some refinement of the rules and mechanics, it could be something pretty cool.
Thanks man :D. A huge chunk of time in this project went into focusing purely on visuals, tweening, and setting up shaders. I had planned to give the player more control with Jokers,swap cards and maybe undo cards, but unfortunately, there wasn't enough time to implement.
It took me a few rounds to understand the concept, but I had a good time with it! Couple small bugs I noticed if you feel like working on this more after the jam (for the web version specifically):
Thanks hope you had some fun :D
I just added howtoplay instructions .
Thanks for pointing out the bugs. I will fix them after the jam