That's fair, but yeah only 10 images per color. A lot of people asked for a better way of choosing the image when crafting so I'll add that.
Either way, thanks again for playing and I'll be trying out your demo later today!
Fullen
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A member registered Nov 29, 2016 · View creator page →
Creator of
Interactive map of Faerun, made to supplement a pen and paper D&D experience.
Create your own deck, design your own cards, or craft them randomly! Level up and beat a difficult roguelike challenge!
Card Game
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Thank you so much fren, this is such a lovely comment!
More images won't be added to the base "pack" for both balance reasons (The more images you have, the less you will get duplicates), and because I don't wanna keep blowing the budget on them, at least for now.
What's left is the 4 "cutscene" images for the rogue, another 8 images for events and menu buttons (Waiting on the artists), 3 music tracks, and steam integration, I should be releasing January or February!
Thanks again for your comment and if you ever stream or record you playing please let me know c:
Hello fren,
First of all, thank you so much for your lengthy comment and playthrough video. It's really appreciated.
I'll address some of your comments below.
-I don't quite understand what you mean with Mana symbols looking different on the game table. Maybe you mean that the mana on the UI is a circle/ball and like a hexagon on the card. In this case, yeah this is an issue that I tried but wasn't able to address myself, so I'll need to get the help of an artist to improve it.
-You are correct, it is the card rarity and it has no relevance to the gameplay basically at all other than giving the player an idea of how strong a card is. The only reason it is the way it is is because I wanted to make the card symmetrical and couldn't come up with a better design.
- The map "going up" is a fair criticism, but I've tried making it go down instead and made for a bad UX at least with the assets and design I have going on, so I keep it going "up". While I get it is a bit silly think of the map being like in front of you instead of a top down view and that way maybe it makes a little more sense?
-The shop says "Owned: 2" because you have two copies of a card, so when you buy that card you know you'll get the showcased variant, and a third copy of that art. It is this way because you might want the card for the variant you are purchasing, or you might want it for an additional copy of a card you already own.
-Variants don't share anything except card art and color, this is correct. While this might seem a bit silly, please keep in mind that every card in the game other than the starting decks is randomly generated every time you play. Regarding card generation and colors, each color has a subset of effects it has an affinity with. For example "Sharshooter" cards among other effects, are more likely to generate "Deal x damage to any target" kind of effects. The effects have an 85~% influence, but the other 15% of the time you might get any other color's effect.
-Whenever you click a targetable target, a big purple effect with sparks and whatnot spawns on top of the thing you clicked, but I will try to make it clearer by maybe making the text for the part of the effect you are currently targeting for, a different color while you target or something to that effect.
-The UI is a bit slop because I used asset store assets for most of it and did what I could with it. Having an artist work on them proper would be really nice but is a bit out of my budget at the moment. That said, screens like the Meta progress upgrade screen are particularly sloppy. Thank you for your comment on the tutorials, I tried my best! Also thanks for pointing out the spelling error in your vod.
-Regarding crafting, from what I saw on your vod, it looked like you never spent any gems on your cards, so the casting cost remained super high. The times you tried using gems the cost didn't go down because the effect and timing you wanted were quite strong, so getting them cheaper required a hefty amount of crystals. However, for balance reasons, the "max" casting cost is capped and balanced around your current difficulty level. This is a flaw that I realize now I have to address since a new player would feel the gems are doing nothing, but in fact, you just needed more gems, or going for a different timing.
The amount of available crafting options is based on your INT stat, I believe you had around 8 effects to choose from when first crafting, and while it is a fair amount, that's a random pile you get out of 60+ possible effects, so it is still working with restriction.
Funny that you mention "Crystals" for effects because that's what they originally were, and in fact, in the back end, the effects and timings you get as options for crafting still behave like crystals on an invisible inventory. I moved into the current system because having to drop the effects was tedious and also getting an effect you didn't want at all would mean you were stuck with it through the whole run instead of getting a new set of effects on each forge. However, there are probably ways of making it work and I might try new approaches for this mechanic in the future.
Regarding encounters, the way that, for example, StS approaches it is "Don't build this kind of deck without any way to deal with its counters because the final boss might be a counter to your deck and you won't be able to win" Here the solution is somewhat similar. You can either go "All-in" with a specific strategy and pray you don't encounter your counter, or make sure you include some safety options in your deck. You can probably beat most runs on lower difficulty levels without much of a worry about deckbuilding against counters, but for higher DL's, there are some tools that you really wanna have in your deck, like at least one card that shuffles your graveyard into your deck and so on.
Regarding player interaction, I think you make a very fair point. I made this game mostly based on what I like and what kind of game/gameplay I wanted to make, which might be to the detriment of the final product's marketability and widespread appeal. I don't think I would be changing that aspect of the game this late in development since I want to complete this project and put it out there, but again, you make a very good argument and going that way would probably be more attractive for more people.
Again, thanks for your feedback! Have a good one!
Hey fren, thanks for your comment.
The minion that gives stats to another card can target itself because the "trigger time" reads "When this minion enters the battlefield, put a +1/+1 counter on target minion" which means the minion has to successfully enter the battlefield for it to trigger, and in turn, the minion itself is a valid target by the time you decide targets for its ability. At least that's the logic behind it.
It seems you played as the Warrior which is the most "beginner-friendly" class, so the cards and effects its starting deck has, are quite simple. I recommend you give the Trickster or the Archeologist a try if you want a more complex starting deck! Also, some combinations of Equipment pieces make for quite interesting and explosive decks.
Regarding the AI, yeah, it's all made by me without any sort of learning algorithm or advanced things like that, so it behaves sub-optimally in some situations.
I hope you get the other classes a try and let me know if you need help with unlocking anything and whatnot.
Cheers!
I recorded a video and it's really hard to hear without headphones, but a weird whirling sound starts as soon as I open the game. It's not the hard drives. In the video you can hear the Hard drives spin up a bit after the whirling sound starts but that's just coincidence since last 3 times I opened the game they didn't go off, plus the game is being stored and run in an m.2 drive, not the hdds.
I dunno if I can do much to help but can record a better video if you need it I guess.Some notes I took while playing, It's all friendly suggestions, so don't read them as if I'm angery about them or anything.
-The default "use" button should be F instead of C, and the Character screen/Inventory should go to C (Which would also make sense since you know "C"haracter)
-I wish the camera didn't move while I'm fiddling with my inventory
-When dragging an item in the inventory, having which slot this item is usable on be highlighted would be very nice
-If I'm standing over more than one item and press the pickup key, everything is picked up at once, (personally) I'd rather having to press once per item, especially since the text can overlap and make it hard to read when everything is on the ground.
-Zoom-in after the last hit before leveling up is very cool, but maybe make it last just a bit less time.
-Run key feels a bit redundant. The character is plenty fast as it is, and I already have to care about a lot of other keys. Maybe just making the regular speed a bit higher, or do an automatic sprint after running outside of combat for more than 2 seconds or something like that to keep map traversal fast.
-If the potions are ONLY consumable and can't be stored in the inventory, automatic pickup could be better, although I get it if you think having to pick it up manually is better. But if that's the case do the pickup key F instead of C (please).
-After getting hit, it feels like you get invulnerability frames against the enemy that hit you, but not against other enemies, so I ended up taking like 3 hits right after being hit once. This feels really bad for this kind of game, I would heavily recommend giving at least some invulnerability frames against all enemies when getting hit. Also a visual indicator like blinking or flashing red/white to know how long that lasts. (After re-testing, something weird is happening there is flashing but it feels inconsistent because I can still take damage, I think. Again, maybe against other enemies instead of the one that hit me already)
-Basic attack consuming mana feels bad.
-Enemies colliding against each other feels a bit clunky.
-Movement speed for some enemies feels unfair and looks silly. I was being chased by a frog and he was zipping around like a racecar, way faster than its run animation would imply.
-Recovery on the basic attack feel way too long. Not only it intuitively feels like I should move way earlier, but also it increases the game difficulty in a way it isn't needed, and also feels at odds with how fast the pacing of the gameplay is otherwise.
-I feel like having a diagonal animation for my attacks instead of 4 directions only would be great, but I get that's a pain in the ass to make.
-I feel the initial area should be a safe zone and monsters shouldn't be able to follow me there.
-"Traditional" design for these kinds of games locks you in the room until you clear the enemies. I get if you intentionally want to ignore this and make it so I can freely move regardless, but I feel like some things like the teleporter should only be available/usable if I cleared the surrounding enemies. However please keep in mind I'm just thinking "out loud" and I get it if the design you have in mind is supposed to go a different route.
-The swordgirl's "Q" ability feels redundant with the Spacebar ability/dodge. (Unless it does something other than dashing that I'm missing)
-I feel like the character should be able to run past a wall when half the sprite or so is over it. I often feel like I get stuck in a corner because on little pixel on my foot is colliding with the very edge of the wall.
-The bats are very cute and the sprite is cool, but at first I thought they were like foxes or something because of the color (and because they are cute). Not really a big complain but wanted to share it nontheless
That's about it. I'm looking forwards to seeing how the game evolves. cheers!
It's clearly a very early prototype so I won't go on about obvious things like you fall through the floor when spawning and that's no good.
However here are a list of things I think would make for much more natural controls and an overall better UX:
-The "open" sign should be highlighted as other interactable things are when I'm looking at it.
-If I can pick up things with right click, I instinctively want to put them down with either left or right click, G is clunky.
-Player control is super slippery and feels terrible. I know it's just a prototype but please give the character better movement
-Make sure that you place the items the character carries in their hand on a separate camera so you can move around carrying them without clipping into things
-I couldn't figure out how to make a cup with two shots of expresso, I didn't try that hard, but I would hope it is a bit more obvious in the future.
Other things I don't wanna mention since most things will naturally improve as you keep devving. I think the concept can be fun but obviously needs a lot of work, so I hope you keep at it!
Pressing ESC when opening the options fucks up the menu.
Pre-warm your assets, everything freezes the first time you do each action.
Enemy models should look at me when they fire, or maybe rotate the upper part of their model to indicate they are shooting at me instead of just the missile spawning in my direction
Framerate seems to be uncapped? Even if Vsync is off cap the framerate
The texture for the mech windshield being cracked is way too low resolution, especially considering how everything else that's 3d looks quite higher fidelity. (I'm talking about the second(?) state of cracked, the first one looks okay)
The railgun didn't produce any visual effects when shooting after swaping weapons a couple of times.
Overall looks and feels much better than last time I played. You seem to have a bunch of levels in the making but I think you should focus on improving every component of the player mech and enemies, and just make one very good level.
There are a lot of details that add up to the game feeling not great like the enemies being too simplistic in their movement, lack of clarity of what hit you and from where it hit you when taking damage, lack of sound effects such as when your mech hovering in the air.
Again, I don't think the game is "BAD" and please don't take the above as angry criticism, I'm just trying to list the things that stood out the most as needing to be addressed. Like making game is a long process and you still have a long way to go, but keep at it.
Hey friend.
The traits are used to determine what kind of effects a color will get. For example, if you give it the "Gentle" trait, that color will get healing effects.
The Names, titles, and descriptions are used to generate card names. So let's say you make a mod that features an image of Goku, you can enter "Goku" in the Unique name slot. If you get a rare card that features that image as the card art, that name can be used in the name generation, so you could get "Goku's Rage" or whatever fits the effect that card has.
Names are completely optional. The game will just generate other names if the image doesn't have any particular names or titles.
Lastly, to use a mod, you just need to click the "MOD" button in the main menu, click the mod you want to use once (It will highlight in blue) and then just go back and start a run.
Edit: There is no proper documentation for the traits. I do have a list for them in the game's Discord server but nothing easily accessible. If you want them, let me know and I can send it your way or invite you to the discord server.
Hey friend!
Thanks for your comment.
I understand the card art being confusing, unfortunately, it is kinda intrinsic to the project at this point.
Regarding the deck editor, having a stat window as you mentioned is quite a good idea! I do need to rework that interface, so including more info might be a great addition.
Hey friend, thank you for your comment!
I understand that the mill mechanic can be a bit frustrating, however, it is a necessary evil since otherwise, players could craft perfect combo decks as small as their initial hand size and always have the perfect hand. If the player is concerned about mill effects, the best way to go is to either make sure to have an answer ready in the deck such as grave shuffle effects, or control tools, or alternatively just pad the deck with more cards which will reduce consistency but also reduce your susceptibility to mill effects.
The balancing does need more work, that's true. The fact that everything is random makes it quite difficult to balance, but I will keep trying to improve balance.
Regarding card packs going to the inventory, there are three reasons why I made it this way.
- Your luck at the time of opening the pack increases your chances of getting better cards, so you can save your packs until your luck is higher for potentially better pulls.
-The same is true even if your luck stays the same since how late in the dungeon you open the pack also improves how strong the pack is.
-Lastly, it is this way so you can go the entire run without opening packs as a challenge.
I understand if you don't agree with this being a good design choice, but at least I wanted to explain the logic behind them.
The one thing that has me confused is that you mentioned how these aspects have changed since the last time you played. I don't think these aspects have ever changed and have been like this
At any rate, I appreciate you playing and I will try your game this weekend! Cheers!
Hey friend!
Thanks for your comment!
After you craft a card, you need to open your deck editor with Q or the deck editor button on the top right. There you can add cards from your vault to your deck. You can also change card variants, which work by making all cards with the same artwork obtain the same effect. If you buy a new card from the merchant or open a new card from a pack that shares the same art as a previous card you already owned, now you can turn all copies into the new more powerful variant making your deck much stronger!
Hey friend, thanks for the feedback!
I will try to work on performance. Not that much has changed since the last demo, especially nothing related to CPU as opposed to GPU, but I'll look into it.
Raw stats are pretty powerful at first but they are tied to your intelligence stat. There's still a lot of balance left to do, crafting powerful spells is very important on higher-difficulty runs, but getting more gems becomes easier as you progress. I should adjust crafting costs for new players so they also get to craft cool effects even with limited gems.
Hey friend!
Thanks for the feedback.
I'm really sorry your game hung up. Could you send your player.log file and savegame.save files located in the following path: C:\Users\YOURUSENAMEHERE\AppData\LocalLow\Fullen Games\Card Artisan
Regarding the other points;
Milling has been considered overpowered by other players so it has been toned down time after time even though it is a bit slow.
The problem with changing text is that if you are on speed 1 you can click through each one of those phases that go by fast, so it's hard to tone them down for other speeds but I'll see what I can do.
A sound effect for changing turns would be nice, I agree.
Tooltips are in the game on every screen except for the deck selection. They appear whenever you hover a card.
Thanks again for playing I'd really appreciate it if you could send me those 2 files to try and see what caused the game to hang.
Thanks for playing and for your comment, friend!
A tutorial is definitely needed, I've been evading making it for a while, but it will be done soon enough.
The art will be replaced at some point and hopefully it will be better than the current placeholder AI art, but I'm happy to hear it kinda worked for you.
The champion not playing anything is due to each deck being randomly generated, they probably got a really bad deck with not enough cheap cards. However this is less of problem the higher you go on the difficulty ladder since enemies get stronger and their decks do so as well.
Again, thanks for the feedback and for your time!
Thanks for playing, friend.
The specs on that laptop should be more than enough, so it must be related to being run on Linux. Can't really do much about it since I don't even have a Linux environment to test the game, but I hope that at least it was playable on Low.
I agree, the 3d environment is pretty shoddy and I hope I can improve on it further down the line.
Thanks for playing, fren!
I'm not sure if you noticed but you can change the settings to make the turnflow much faster. Also there will be an option that makes the phases fly by instantaneously (Still the turn itself isn't as quick as the games you mentioned but playing with those settings would likely make it much more bearable).
The GPU going high is because I'm a moron and I developed this while learning what the heck I was doing. As a result, a lot of things are images instead of sprites. This causes overdraw and uses a lot of GPU regardless of how strong your GPU is. (It also elevates the minimum required specs since very weak GPUs don't like dealing with this). This has me a bit scared since I don't want people thinking the game has some miner or something stupid like that, but fixing it entails a massive refactoring of the game, so I haven't tackled it and I'm not sure If I'm strong enough to do so.
At any rate, thanks again for playing and for your comment!
Hey friend!
Thank you very much for your comments!
Balance is quite difficult to achieve with how many random aspects the game employs, still, I'll try to improve it down the road!
Here's the invite to the Discord server! https://discord.gg/CAf2kQrYu I'll be happy to see your meme mods!
Hey friend!
Thanks for the feedback, the new version is being worked on and it's set to release this week with fixes to those issues you mentioned. I'm very sorry that you had that annoying experience, especially since the bug that causes that is very silly. I hope you come back and check it out this weekend when the new update goes live!
No problem the least I can do is give a proper reply to comments!
There's no static cards (yet). SRs and URs have a chance of being generated with unique names based on their card art. Refining can either decrease mana cost, remove negative effects, or increase attack and resistance, so maybe you got one of the other refine bonuses.
I think one of the charms of the game is how it sometimes generates cards that seem very well designed even though they are completely random.
Well, first of all, thank you for all the feedback, and for playing in general!
I'll go over some of your comments.
-Difficulty: It is a bit hard for me to balance the randomness of enemies, the power of the meta-progression elements, and the power of the different classes with the player skill. The first 20 difficulties could be very easy for veteran card game players while difficulty 0 could be nightmarish for new players. I'm thinking of ways to balance this, but the AI being kinda of weak right now is a result of me nerfing it so much for the sake of inexperienced players feeling cheated by cheap AI cards. Also, I'm thinking about nerfing the meta-progression skills since they are a bit too strong at the moment. Lastly, you mention enemies not playing differently. They indeed don't change much in the way they play, but rather their decks get stronger the higher the difficulty. I know this isn't ideal but it is what I could manage for now. Not playing cards only occurs because their randomly generated deck was maybe terrible and they didn't get any cheap playable cards.
-Strength and potions: This is true, strength goes from being quite desirable to being basically useless with meta progression. I'm thinking of ways to deal with this.
-Infinite loops: The game has a hard cap of 50(I think?) triggers per card per turn, but that does take some time to reach with two cards. People like going infinite so I left the cap very high, but it might be a bit much, I'll do something about it.
-Quests, meta progression, and how they are unclear: These two systems are in fact a bit unclear when you first pick them up. Hopefully, once I get tutorials going this issue will be solved. Also right-clicking to level-down should be implemented at some point.
-Keeping decks: A system to keep records of your previous run's decks is being worked on for both the purpose of just checking your best decks of all time, to having them available for custom runs once those get implemented.
-Cards rising bug: That was supposed to be fixed but a recent change might have broken them I'll check it out.
-Quest tracker: This was requested by other players and I do want to implement something like this at some point, so yeah, it is on the list.
-Giving enemies a face: This is indeed something I should do, I'm going to try and figure out a way to get this going at some point.
-Bugs: I'm really sad to hear you encountered so many bugs. Having a screenshot of what the field looked like when those occurred would've been extremely helpful for the bugs in combat. For the loading bug, I haven't encountered them myself lately, but they have been known to happen before. If you even encounter them again in the future, sending your savefile my way would be really helpful. It gets overwritten as soon as you start a new game, so if you intend to send it, please keep that in mind.
-Game crash: Haven't seen this one before. I'll try to test out the scenario you mentioned.
-Card combinations being bad: That specific scenario (Add 1 mana for a cost of 2) was supposed to be forcibly fixed already but I guess it can still happen, I'll look into it. In general, I do want to keep some level of silliness for card generation, but I'll think about restricting more dumb combinations in the future.
-The Assassin quest; To unlock the assassin you need to craft a Minion with 1 active and 3 passives, add it to your deck, and play it during battle for the achievement to unlock.
Again thank you very much for your feedback and comments friend!