Played more today (this is my favorite of the jam games so far), and it's really difficult to time playing the cards and avoiding the gear things. A smoothing out of that mechanic seems like the biggest change needed. I do really like the card mechanics, especially as we made a card game as well for this jam!
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If we were going to build this into a complete game, some of the changes we would make would be:
The enemies move only after you move - so instead of everything just always doing their own thing, they're all frozen and then when you play a card and after it resolves, THEN all the enemies would take one step, etc. This would make the game way more strategic.
We would also want to do more with the cards - like, when the game starts, ~10 hazard cards would get added to your deck, and when you drew one, they would cause an effect. And just a lot of variety on the kinds of cards you have...
Maybe removing Health and making it so that getting hurt causes you to discard a number of cards at random instead - so that everything is better tied into the Cards/Energy system.
But... I don't know if we'll have a chance to come back to this one... it was a lot of fun to work on and we might see some of the pieces make it into future games... ;)
Thanks for playing!