Hi all,

My name's Sam, I'm a professional game engineer based in the UK who fancied a bit of a change from boring industry work :) I am using this opportunity to learn more about areas I don't cover much in my day-to-day work, such as pixel art/colour theory and game design.

I've been working on Cards'n'Castles for about 2.5 days, and I've just put it up on Itch.io and Github. Not sure how much I'll get done over the next week, but hopefully I can finish it to a playable quality before the end of the jam.

https://sambigos.itch.io/cardsncastles

https://github.com/samuelbigos/cards_n_castles

It's also playable in HTML5 here: https://samuelbigos.github.io/cards_n_castles/

Thanks and happy jamming!

Today I had a think about how I could improve the control players have over the battles. I came up with the idea of 'power' cards, which would be playable during the automated battle and provide buffs to your units or debuffs to the enemy. The first step towards that was actually adding cards to the game, which I did today. Now you drag your units onto the battlefield from your hand. The idea will be that you gain access to new cards as you win battles.

Added some semblance of a story and progression/rewards to battles today. You now get a choice of cards/units when winning a battle, and you progress to the next battle. Now it's just a case of making 10 or so balanced battles where the player slowly unlocks new units.

I think from a system standpoint the game is pretty much complete, I'm not going to have much more time to add anything new. Now I need to add sounds, some post-fx and sprite updates, and possibly update the colour palette because i think what I have at the moment is quite dark and bland.

I have submitted! https://itch.io/jam/my-first-game-jam-summer-2020/rate/706661

I think the game is at least playable and completable right now, though it is missing some features I wanted to add.