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Battles of Hexarath's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #24 | 4.080 | 4.080 |
| Overall | #45 | 4.100 | 4.100 |
| Gameplay | #61 | 3.760 | 3.760 |
| Authenticity (use of resolution restriction) | #69 | 4.640 | 4.640 |
| Visuals | #84 | 3.920 | 3.920 |
Ranked from 25 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Did you work in a team?
I worked alone and it was a lot of fun!
Was the resolution a challenge?
Not at all. It's my 3rd LOWREZ and I usually create small pixelart for my games anyway.
What did you learn?
That I'm improving a lot and it's sometimes important to take a break from the main project. I also met some cool people along the way, as always!
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Comments
Wow, I can't believe I missed this during the jam. This is excellent! The soundtrack reminds me of old school Final Fantasy games. I know others have mentioned the tutorial was long, but I found it very helpful and honestly I prefer this type of tutorial. Having these mechanics spelled out for me was a huge help.
You fit a TON on information on the screen at once, which is amazing. I love how the unit cards are really easy to understand as far as HP, mana cost, and attack power goes. I really enjoyed this (the computer kicked my ass lmao) but I'd 100% play a full version of this game. I love deckbuilders and strategy games, and this was very intelligently thought out.
I also love how the decks are very small. I think this is the first card-based game without 'drawing', which is actually really cool. It takes the RNG out of card games while the cooldown and mana systems balance the pace of each game. In general the design of this is so well thought-out!
I think the coin might be tough to balance, it feels like from a tactical perspective you basically want to use your coin every time it's up since it basically accelerates your early game and lets you play much stronger units up-front.
All that said, I love this game. The entire package is so polished and fun! Amazing job!
Thank you very much for taking your time after the jam to play it! I really appreciate your kind words!
The game is planned to have a post jam version, but it will take some time, because it'll be remaking it in my game engine.
That's because the plan is to have a real matchmaking and database, do multiplayer would take one click to launch, without hosting/joining.
Cheers!
Fantastic! I love card / tactical hybrid like this. I really hope this gets a post-jam version which fixes up a couple of the UI issues discussed on stream, but still looking forward to playing more of this if I have time to spare!
This is an amazing bit of work! The mechanics are solid, the art is very well made, and the music is great. I am thoroughly impressed by the amount of mechanics that you managed to put into this game in such a short time frame, and they all feel like they’re working wonderfully! I wish I was better at these types of games :D
That said, there were some interface issues that nagged at me.
Going right into the game presents me with the card/deck management screen, which was really cool, but it wasn’t immediately apparent how to get out of it and into the game proper. I can definitely understand the desire to want to show off all of the cards you have in the game and all of their mechanics, but, for me, at least, I generally like to just drop into a game with “the defaults” to get a feel for play before I start spending time going over the details of my options. I think it would have been better to just drop players into the main menu, instead of the deck manager.
I love the animations on the hand of cards in the game proper. It looks amazing, even for such a small resolution. That said, the area where it triggers the slide out is… off. Not so much in the slide out, but when the card slides back in. There seems to be an area of only 3 or 4 pixels at the bottom of a card, when a card is slid out, where the card stays out. A lot of times I would be trying to drag the card to play it on the map, but the card would be sliding back into my hand because I moved my mouse wrong. I think the card should maybe stay up so long as the mouse is over the hitbox of the whole card.
Also, when playing a card on the board, trying to play the card in the tiles immediately under the card is difficult, not the least because I cannot see under the card. Perhaps the card can go translucent while being placed?
I had some issues with the dialog windows too. Often they didn’t feel like they were closing when I would think they would and I try clicking on the game board to make them close but that would cause me to move a unit. At one point, I used the escape key, and that ended my game prematurely. Maybe if the dialog box is visible, the game board itself should not take inputs… after all, if the dialog box is open, the player must be reading something rather than focused on making an actual board move.
When actually in a game, there should be a confirmation dialog instead of returning immediately to the main menu… to prevent the issue I described above. Never know when a player just made a stupid mistake :D
Beyond the above interface issues I had (which, I totally get it’s hard to get a UI to be just right, especially in the time constraint for this jam!) this is an amazingly put together game! AND IT HAS ONLINE MULTIPLAYER!! Above everything, I’m impressed by the amount of work you were able to get done in only two weeks!
I really wanted to get deeper into this game, but I struggled with the tutorial and wasn't able to figure out how to advance through it. It seems like a very ambitious project. I can't believe you got multiplayer support into this thing in the two week constraint.
But I would say the ambition is part of the reason why I couldn't get through the tutorial. There is so much depth and complexity that you have to explain, and it's hard to fit that into the 64x64. A game like this requires a very long tutorial or series of tutorial challenges, and that's the sort of thing that just takes more than two weeks to do well.
I played a board game online and I had fun. Wait what? it was a GameJam game? no way! Impressive work full of imagination and pretty polished. You're getting better by the day!
It's incredible that you put so many mechanics in a jam time. There are tutorial, many different card abilities, deckbuilding, netplay (haven't tried online mode yet, sorry).
And you managed to fit such game with lots of text and stats into lowrez restrictions. Well done!
Hey, thanks a lot for your positive feedback! I'm happy that you had a good time playing the game.
If you haven't played online yet, I'll be hosting a tourney this Saturday! The winner will have a possibility to create his own card. I hope it's going to be a lot of fun.
We still have so free space, so if you'd like to participate, do let me know!
Nice game, a lot of variety in the cards with unique powers. That’s a lot of work to put up :) Controls, particularly dragging, is a bit tricky. Nice music also. Great job!
Thank you for your feedback! Yeah, sometimes the dragging feels bulky :/
Glad you enjoyed playing it!
It took a few tries to get into, but once I figured it out, it was a lot of fun.
Though, I had to go into the HTML code and modify the resolution. I couldn't play it at the default resolution. The bottom was clipping, and the size made an already overwhelming tutorial extra overwhelming because of the screen space. Halfing it made it manageable.
All the little pixel characters are clear, readable, and look great. The music is amazing! I could have that on in the background all day!
Some of the card UI interactions felt a little clumsy. I often found myself fighting between clicking when I should be dragging, and dragging when I should be clicking.
But overall, very nicely done.
I'm not sure if you remember, but there was a moment in Discord early in the jam where you weren't sure what your core gameplay was going to look like. You had a few ideas about what it might be, but you seemed caught up in the details. I gave you some advice about picking one and going with your gut, and here we are! I'm honestly blown away by how far this game has been taken and how much you've done. You should be really proud!
Awesome job!!! : D
Thank you so much for your detailed description of your experiences! I'm glad most of them are positive!
Yeah, you're totally right about some stuff being clumsy. Well, if I had time to polish :P Things would look different, but overall I'm happy with the end result!
Also, I'm hosting a tourney in this game and the prize is that you can have your own card in the game! If you want to participate, do let me know!
Thanks!
Thanks for the offer, but I'm booked out all weekend. But that's really cool!
Best of luck with the tournament!
Just checked out your game. Really cool and well done! Your text was very readable and the art as well. All of the animations on the cards and in general were really nice too. Impressive to be able to finish a card game with such a small time frame.
Thank you for your positive feedback! It means a lot to me. Glad you enjoyed the game!
Impressive piece of work all round, very well done!
(The game didn't fit vertically in my browser/widescreen monitor by default, so a bit of the bottom was clipped off until I zoomed to 90%. I also found the text harder to read when it was zoomed so big.)
Ugh, sorry for the bottom getting clipped:? Unfortunately, there's literally nothing I can do about it, because it's caused by itch' unresponsive window nature.
Thanks for your kind words
Wasn't able to play in browser but the music was playing and I just had to download it to play it. Amazing job! very cool idea for the restriction!
Thank you very much! I'm sorry you couldn't play in the browser :/
Congratulations on smashing so much info into a small resolution D: this part is top notch!!
As for the rest I wish I could skip the tutorial and learn by myself if possible :P other than that Good job /o/
Thank for your feedback! You can skip the tutorial by pressing ESC/back button twice!
I am impressed that you made a whole tactical card game by yourself. I made one in a team of two for the GMTK game jam 2021 and ours was a buggy mess. I only played the tutorial so far but I like what you have.
Thank you! Yeah, it was a little challenge to make it, I'm not gonna lie, but I'm pretty satisfied with how it came out. Thanks for the kind words!