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NVR3VR - !!Digital Blackout!! (bjam vers)'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Audio | #25 | 2.670 | 3.083 |
| Weirdness | #29 | 2.887 | 3.333 |
| Visuals | #31 | 2.670 | 3.083 |
| Gameplay | #34 | 2.526 | 2.917 |
| Overall | #35 | 2.540 | 2.933 |
| Theme | #42 | 1.949 | 2.250 |
Ranked from 12 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How did you interpret the theme?
You're a security AI defending against a massive coordinated terrorist strike on power grid infrastructure: DIGITAL BLACKOUT!
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I cannot believe that I did not rate this game yet. I really thought I did because it does not show up in the haven't rated section of my rate page? I am so sorry about that. Onto the review.
This is a really complex game. For a while I had no idea what I was doing or what was happening. I was able to beat casual but not really fully knowing what things did made me unable to make real strategies. The text for the cards was a bit small on my screen, but it helped so much by having it expand when hovering over the cards. The music also sounds really cool but it is just a little bit distracting so I sadly had to turn it off when I was playing. From what I did understand, this is a really cool and original card game that I had fun trying to learn what to do. If there was an interactive tutorial like a fake practice game, I feel it would make this game so much better to learn. The art was also really nice and it appears that there is a lot of lore for just a simple card game!
You did a really great job making this!
Really cool story and Game!! i hope you get more ratings as fast! besides A Card Game about Blackouts is so Good to exist and you did PERFECT!!!
Wow, this certainly didn't get many ratings, did it. : (
One thing I have learned from doing a couple of game jams is that having the greatest number of ratings doesn't always mean you are the best or win. Sometimes great entries just don't get the visibility they deserve. What does matter is that you made something creative, polished, and genuinely fun — and people who do find it are enjoying it.
Game jams really are chaotic and most of the times winning is just luck. Having the most ratings doesn't mean you will place higher than other people too. An example in my first game jam I joined in was that I had 71 ratings and was one of the jams most rated games. I thought for sure I was going to get an extremely high placement like top 10 or something. Then when results came in I was surprised to see games with 20 ish ratings at the top. You should be really proud of whatever you build, no matter how many ratings it gets.
Yeah I just would have liked some more feedback and engagement, try to get eyes on the project as I try to work on post-jam versions. But I know my mistake, too...as usual, I saved absolutely no energy during the 'make the game' phase for the 'ratings period/interacting with people/networking' phase. I always do this, lol, self-inflicted crunch then pass the hell out once it's uploaded.
Anyway, thanks man!! What you said about the game here is very kind!
I play a lot of modern board games and I love to see board/card games in the wild, especially digital one like this. I don't play TCGs/CCGs or card battlers like this, but I gave it a shot.
Your game is probably the most complex game of the gamejam. (I would hope mine is the 2nd, but don't know) That is clearly the biggest hurdle. I had to mute the cool BGM to be able to focus.
I did manage to beat both Casual and Normal, but I definitely don't understand the game fully. It took me a bit to realize that the bottom-right is all your resources - It looks a bit like the background. If you do end up continuing this, I would definitely recommend a bigger resolution, more tooltips, more instructions, etc.
Also having the Flavor Text clearly separate from the Mechanical Text would be huge. The setting is very complex and that leaks into making the game more complex too.
Things I partially understand:
Things I have no idea still:
I haven't gotten to think about strategy or anything deeper yet because I was still stuck in the learning phase, as I assume most players were.
Edit: I tried Hard a few times, but it seems to softlock near the middle/end everytime. It happens during the Intruder Phase, so I assume it has to do with some Intruder card.
Thank you, this is the most in-depth feedback I've gotten and I really, really appreciate it. I'm sorry I missed the voting period but I'll get to your game because "complex" excites me. I've been working on the UI. This is what the new gameboard looks like. Also working on much better tutorializing and player onboarding.
Your cash ($$) and AP yield are determined by the operations and operatives you have installed. The cash yield is the number in the top left of an op card, and the AP yield is in the top right.
Yes, an operative sortie is your only option to attack directly. And yes, the most common reason not to sortie if it would get an operative killed, but you can get more tactical than that, sortieing only on the turns the operative has a 'good target' and saving their secrecy by not sortieing on some turns. You can theoretically win by killing the enemy, by the way, when you sortie you can click on the OpFor HP, but enemies in the back row will 'block' your operative, like MTG. Occasioanlly, though, the timing of spawns and advances means there's no intruders on the back row to block and you can get through to damage OpFor directly. I uh, don't think it's actually possible to win this way in the jam build, though. I was aiming for "very difficult to get this alternate win condition" but landed on impossible.
AP is spent to cast certain orders. Some orders cost cash, some cost AP, some cost both, for instance 'Engineered Commodification', the 'print moeny' card, costs only AP to cast. The AP cost of an Order card is the number in the purple box at top right.
A CM is a countermeasure, the orange cards you install in board slots. Any permanent that's not purple is a CM. Most intruders have 'summoning sickness', but intruders with 'RAPID' start coming at you as soon as you spwan. Other than that it seems like you mostly get it? The only tricky thing is that cost is upper left for all non-operative cards, whereas for operatives, top left is cash yield, and top right is ap yield. So they're in the same places on the card as an Order card, but they generate resources, they don't cost them.
Thank you so much for playing my card game (I put a lot of work into polishing it to look slick and sound good that probably would have been betterr spent tutorializing) and giving such in-depth feedback. "What is clear to a TCG/deckbuilder player and what isn't" is one of the most valuable kinds of feedback I can get!
Very cool lore, great music, and fantastic ideas here. I've played plenty of LCG/TCG-style card games so I was able to intuit some things about how this worked, but it was definitely an uphill battle to figure out what was going on/what I was supposed to do. The how to play section was extremely hard to read (I had to copy/paste it into Notepad because the green on black in that font is super tough on the eyes) and the writing was quite difficult to understand. That's coming from a person who reads card and board game rulebooks for fun. Images of the cards/diagrams of what you're talking about would go a loooong way towards making this more approachable to learn. My time spent with this was probably 80% reading the rules and cross-referencing what I was reading with the cards on screen, and about 20% playing.
While the game looks really cool, those visuals also make it super hard to read the text/numbers on the cards, to see which cards are which colors, and so on. I appreciate that you highlight the places the cards can go when you click on them, but, again, tough to see the transparent green amidst the busy background. Fullscreen is 100% necessary, but also doesn't really help! It's all still so small and visually busy. I wasn't really able to get into this because it was so frustrating trying to interface with it. I get that the style you're going for leans chaotic, but you still have to balance that chaos with readability (and by that I mean actually reading text, but also "reading" the state of the game by looking at the board) to get a playable game. That is critical in board/card game design and even more critical in a video game where you don't have full control over how closely to look at the cards or how to rearrange them in hand. I played a few rounds so I could see the basics and make sure I understood the mechanics of how to play, but now my eyes are sore so I doubt I'll play more of this in its current form.
I really hope this is helpful feedback for you--I love card games and the cyberpunk aesthetic, so I do hope you keep working on this. I think it could become a great game. Even if you don't keep working at this one, I hope you approach all the other games you make with as much creativity and zeal as you created this one with! :)
TYVM for the in-depth feedback. Absolutely, if I had more than a week, this would have been better tutorialized with a proper in-game tutorial that it sorely needed. Lesson learned is that the time I spent making the game look and sound super slick should have been spent better onboarding the player. I can see the text on the itch page perfectly clearly with no issues...but I guess my eyes are just built different, lol. I will continue tweaking the page so other, less genetically superior eyes (kidding, obviously) can read it without issue. Is it any light text on an opaque black background htat's difficult for people to read, or just highly saturated colors? Might try to change it to white on black.
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback! This project will definitely conitnue in some form,. I'm way too hooked on developing it to stop, so keep an eye out for the real game's itch page to pop up some time this week.
It is very cool, it reminds me to the yugi oh cards game, i didn't get how to play tbh but it was very nice, GREAT WORK,
can you try my game and give it a feedback!
Thank you very much. I'm working on the "I didn't get how to play" issue--a LOT of people had it, lol--for the real build. Sorry I didn't get to your game in time (I just saw this now), but you've got 28 ratings to my 10, so I think you'll be fine!
Super cool art! Can be a bit confusing on what's happening to the point where it is kind of overwhelming, but it super fun nonetheless!
The combination of a tower defense and a card game is pretty cool, especially for one week!
Thanks! I hope I executed it with a reasonable degree of functionality and polish within the time frame. Were you able to beat it?
Interesting game and I liked the combination of a tower defense and a card game, but it needs to be explained better. I was able to win but I was confused for most of my playthrough. The cards are too small so its hard to read and the various bright colours used can be a bit jarring (I recommend using a colour pallet to fix this issue). There was also a glitch the first time I played where my money and alibi points were nan and I couldn't win. In short I feel like this game has potential but a detailed tutorial at the start is definitely needed.
Yeah, in-game tutorialization is definitely a thing that would have existed had I not run out of time. I actually really like my color scheme, going for a 1990s neo cyberpunk arcade cabinet kind of deal, Out of curiosity were you playing on fullscreen? I find the cards perfectly legible, or at least the tooltips that you get on hover fully legibile but that doesn't really mean anythingb ecause i already know in advance what the words say and what the cards do. I wasn't 100% satisifed with the UI obviously and I will see, if I conitnue this post-jam, what I can move around to make the cards more legible while sitll trying to keep enough screen real estate that the player can track everything that happened.
Thanks for your feedback!
That's incredible for a one week game jam game! Although i don't play similar card games I enjoyed it.
Thank you! Happy to hear it! Actually I don't play this kind of game either, weirdly enough, at least not as a videogame but as tabletop physical games, that's a different story. I've been a recovering/relapsing MTG addict most of my life, though, and fond memories of Android: Netrunner are the primary thing that inspired this game, I think.
cool concept!
thanks!
I couldn't read then instructions, the game looked way too complicated to play in a 10 minute span. The colors need a lot of work, so does your itch page. I am sure there was something in there but for a game jam it is way too intricate
Well, for the itch page, I can try to make the fonts more readable, so that's actionable feedback. Totally unsure what "the colors need a lot of work" means in the context of the actual game. I mean it actually sounds a lot like you didn't even try the game! Also I'm not sure "too ambitious" is really a bad thing for a jam entry. I wasn't aware "playable in a ten minute span" was a requirement for the jam, but you're tehcnically correct, the best kind of correct--it takes me closer to fifteen minutes to finish a match on Normal difficulty. Not exaclty a 30 hour campaign.
I meant no disrespect, but the colors clashed with each other, the cards and the text were blurred to the point where I could not read them. As for 'too ambitious' I have done a lot of jams. Most developers only have a very limited time to play the game because they are trying to get to others games. Jam games are not like production games. You make it extremely simple, quick to get interested and expect a 10 minute play tops. I am sure your game has potential but for a game jam it was way too compliocated.
You said a round took you closer to 15 minutes to play. Now, you wrote the game and it still took you 15 minutes. Take that number and triple it for someone coming from the outside having no idea what your game does. Now that have to wade through tons of text, then the game itself is not easily evident how to play.
This is not meant to be harsh, but the reality is once I saw all the text in neon green all bunched up and unreadable I knew this was going to be work, and work is not why people play games.
I just disagree with most points you made. I'm not going to enact the effort of explaining why for the most part.It's fine. I've been doing this a very long time. Apparently, so have you. I think we're both veterans, and we can agree to disagree as to a philosophy towards this kind of thing. I mean I see you've done 7DRL, that almost by default means that you have assembled something even more intricate in the same timeframe: roguelikes are fucking complicated. And I'm extremely proud of what I made here, I put in over 60 hours over the course of the week we had (it's not so much I have too much free time as that I'm unemployed/disabled which means all of my time simultaneously is and is not free time).
The poor contrast text on the itch page combined with a background that wasn't fully opaque and a background image that was also text-heavy, that was a genuine rookie mistake that I should have known better and I fixed within one minute of you pointing it out, so again, thank you for that was useful feedback. As for the cards inside the actual game, I'll continue tweaking the UI, everything is perfectly clear to my eyes while playing, at least fullscreened, but I should be able to get a variety of feedback from a variety of people on that over the course of the jam.
But also, idk, "I must play as many of these 47 games as possible" also just isn't my personal approach as a dev participating in a jam. It's a borderline Sisyphean task to try and play eveyrthing especially once you've just gone all out to get your game in on time. Generally, I prefer to pick 6-10 games that look right up my alley and try to give each one the time it deserves, whether that's 20 minutes or an hour. *shrug* We can agree to disagree on all this stuff, man.
I am going back to play your game again. Look at your itch page, and then try to play the game again.
As developers, and creators we are going to be inherently sensitive to our work. I certainly understand that.
Hopefully this time through I will see things I may have missed before.