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A jam submission

Sylvanna's TrialView game page

Shoot'em up Card Game
Submitted by Cedric Quilal-lan — 3 days, 6 hours before the deadline
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Sylvanna's Trial's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Originality/Creativity#43.9293.929
Polish#83.5713.571
Overall#113.5103.510
Audio#113.4293.429
Graphics#113.8573.857
Engagement/Fun#123.1433.143
Genre Mashup Incorporation#143.2863.286
Magical Girl Concept#153.3573.357

Ranked from 14 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the Magical Girl Genre?
Sylvanna is a paid bounty hunter/hero, she does everything for money, she has 10 different Magical Powers, Vapor, Dash Staff, Single Tear, Winged Hills, Vaporize, Phase Shift, Triporize, Madness, Wrath and Helen's Dagger.

Which genres from categories A and B did you choose?
Shooter and Card genre

How does your game mash those genres?
A wizard cating different shot for each card

Were the graphics/audio assets for your game made during the jam?
All the Graphics and Sfx is made by me, the BGM's are free and is credited on the GamePage

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Comments

Really nice polish with good progression in the design over time. Pretty tough to wrap my head around, but I eventually got a hang of it. I like it best when I realized ways I could use the mobility spells in combination with other movements and attacks. A little frustrating that the vertical attacks seemed useless against the final boss resulting in several repeatedly useless hands. Great work!

I didn't even make it past the tutorial...

I found this game way too hard. Part of this is probably just me, but other parts of it just felt unfair. The "maybe just me" part is that I found it difficult to keep track of which cards I had and select the right ones while also avoiding enemy attack. The "just felt unfair" parts, well, it's probably better to just list them out:

  • When you're hit, there's a LONG cooldown period where you can't use any cards, including defensive/evasive cards that would help you get out of a sticky situation. This makes those cards feel almost useless.
  • Whether you have the right card for the moment or not is up to RNG. You can redraw, but that takes time, and might not get you what you need either.
  • Enemies are massive bullet sponges, and you don't get a lot of offensive cards (at least in the part of the game I played). It was suggested I try to combo for more damage, but I rarely got more than one offensive card to combo with.
  • There are just a ton of enemies, and not a lot of room to evade them all.

I was also confused about the health bars; I thought the one on top was for Sylvanna, but it seems to be for something else, and the one on the bottom is Sylvanna's health.

I'm not sure if "save system implemented for non-gamers" is a backhanded insult or just an odd choice of wording.

Gameplay aside, I liked the premise and humourous intro a lot, though I'm not sure how much narrative is in the game itself. The art is very nice, it has a great high-quality indie look to it. The sound effects work well, and the music may not be original but is well-chosen.

There's clearly a ton of work put into this game, and a lot of it is quality, but it just didn't click for me.

Submitted

Interesting concept. I didn't like not knowing what cards you're going to get, often you get ones that are completely useless in the situation. This goes especially for the final boss, which is pretty unfair. Of your offensive spells, 2 are basically impossible to hit the boss with, 2 of them only do a tiny amount of damage, 1 does slightly more, and 1 actually does some decent damage... but that strategy involves you taking at least 5 points of damage in the process... Also hitboxes are too unforgiving. Other than that I think this could be very fun if you were more likely to roll a useful hand.

Submitted

This is a cool concept, and with a little polishing/iterating I think it could be really great!

The pixel art is good, and the audio all works well. While it doesn't seem super deep, I appreciate having the short intro story to set the stage! That always works better for me than just a "start" button and then fighting. I especially liked the "comic-style" presentation.

The gameplay itself is pretty hard. i had trouble keeping track of my spells and shuffling fast enough, especially when dodging/avoiding got more complicated. That said, some of this may be on me. I'll probably give it a few more rounds later and see if I can't push further. But I do think the gameplay feels like it needs just a little something else as it currently stands... I'm not exactly sure what, but something to smooth out the main loop of avoid/attack.

I encountered a bug that tripped me up on the third battle screen (i had gotten the "jump" card"). An enemy knocked me into the next screen, with the save-point. They then followed me onto that screen. I could walk back to the previous screen, but then I was stuck there, and the enemies didn't follow this time. I could no longer progress and had to restart.

Overall, I think this game has a lot of potential! What's here is already great work, and with some more dev time it could really stand out! Yet another Construct user too! I'm a big fan of Construct :)

Really enjoyed this game! It is not easy to play with a keyboard, but much smoother with a gamepad. Honestly keeping everything in check is quite hard, but imo the generous hitpoints and checkpoints make it up.  I liked the idea of having randomized-ish attacks in this type of game, even though it falls a bit when the player  gets a hand full of spells they don't need right now (like three double jumps), but as we can easily reshuffle our hand it stays easily manageable. Anyway, liked it a lot, thank you!

Submitted

the mechanic is very creative and fun. but as other say, it may need some fine tune. I indeed die a lot  during the game. Luckily there is checkpoint.

for the final boss, it's frustrating but i defeat the boss with a strategy . 1. focus on dodging and shuffle until there is invincible. 2. if there is invincible and attack, trigger invincible and attack at point blank  3. if only invincible, trigger invincible and shuffle .

clearly I didn't play this game long enough (based on the other comments) ... I was just frustrated with the controls and lack of motivation (story, art or other) ...

Overall the game played well but I think the design attempt here just doesn't work well, but it was a good experiment.

Submitted

This game has a really cool concept and really good art, but some of the elocution of mechanics and gamefeel leave a few thins to be desired.

For example, if you think of the basic gameplay loop of an action platformer as  a cycle of avoiding enemies and their attacks while looking for an opening to hit back, and executing the strike upon finding it there's an important difference between the split second reaction incorporated into avoiding damage and attacking, which is generally more planned out and initiated by the player. This is to say for surviving to feel good your tools need to be readily available, easy and quick to execute, while attacks can be more involved and complicated. 

This being said having important tools for avoiding enemies, such as double jump and dash, bound to random keys by the card system, made them a somewhere between awkward and unusable for split second reactions. This issue was compounded as more cards were unlocked and it became increasingly likely to not have an attack when you wanted to deal damage, or a movement option when you needed one.

I'm not sure what might be good options for addressing any of these, but I thought they were at least points worth considering.


on a more basic scale the game was fun and easy to learn and get into with minimal explanations required, which is always a plus.

The character did feel a bit clunky do to a lack of control over the jump height and feeling oddly heavy with how quickly she fell.

Still a really groundwork with awesome art.

Submitted (1 edit) (+2)

First of all, this game is not a shoot-em-up as mentioned in the submission details, but more of a beat-em-up which is in the same category as card. However, it does have a platformer feel with the double jump and dashing spells needed to traverse around enemies, so I’ll treat it as such.

Sylvanna’s Trial is a pretty fun and polished game. All of the cards can combo into one another seamlessly which is amazing and feels very good to control. In terms of solid controls, this is a 10/10. Gameplay-wise, the difficulty curve is quite skewed. It starts off okay, then it gets difficult because the movement spells get in the way of attack spells, then it gets easy because stronger spells get introduced, then it gets insanely hard with a bullet spongy boss (with a shield that damages you and not much room to maneuver) because there’s so much randomness in the 10 different cards that you don’t know you’re gonna get - one of which: Single Tear is useless because the shield reaches above to block it. With such powerful movement spells, it feels claustrophobic with so little room to maneuver. I feel like I’m being forced into a single playstyle, there’s only one way to beat the boss and that’s to reload until I get movement to switch sides, and reload until I get attack (not Single Tear please) to perform a hit - do anything else and I get my face bashed in, which is a terrible feeling. The combo system oozes freedom of player expression, yet the difficulty design limits player freedom in many of such ways. There really should be a weighted randomness system, where the player has a high chance to get at least 1 attack and 1 movement, and only occasionally get 3 movements.

To add to Single Tear, it is quite an underpowered spell whose purpose is solely anti-air (and for armor but there are ways around it). It’s too specific to leave it up to a random draw, lacks any range, and requires you to face in the direction you want to drop it. I suggest buffing it to auto-target the nearest enemy instead, since there’s not a single “magic missle” guaranteed hit spell in the game. It didn’t feel right that the Dash Staff has no invincibility, or if it does then the timing is so tight that it is very easy to miss. Every time I use Dash Staff, I have to remind myself to jump first which diminishes its purpose if I have Winged Hills (double jump buys me time), Phase Shift or Helen’s Dagger. It’s underwhelming to the point that I’ll just reload for another movement card because that’s 3 cards out of the 10, which is a good chance.

In terms of UI, the reload hotkey ‘V’ for some reason actually distracted me the first few times because of how close it is to C in both shape and position. Of course, if we just look directly at it, it’s obvious that they’re different, and you might think I’m crazy, but when I was focused on the character, it confused my peripheral vision to treat it as the C spell somehow. I suggest moving the ‘V’ to the bottom right of the reload icon so that it is not in the same row as the ZXC key legends.

Despite the serious balancing issues, this game feels really good to play and I quite enjoyed my time with it. Graphics are good and sounds are meaty and impactful. Great job!

Developer

first of, damn this is really lengthy! I really appreciate the feedback, this is better than my essays😂, and yeah, probably this is a beat em up genre too, ( I just searched it, "what makes a beat em up game", it just says that you need to be cornered with multiple enemies, but.... the girl shoots projectile so it's a shmup ), I was thnking about the randomness too, I was about to make an algorithm about it but I was afraid I'm gonna ruin the whole code, so I skipped it, The single tear was just a filler😅 but your suggestion about it is kinda good, I'll see what I can do about it, the staff dash was more of a skill based and calculated card, sorry if I can buff it even more, ( it's a Dota 2 reference,  "Force Staff" it isn't meant to be invulnerable when active I just made it a bit so, so there's a fraction of chance to not get damaged, Tip: you can only dash/evade 1 enemy if they aren't stacked), the "shuffle card" Ui bugs me too, I'll clean it after the jam,

Again, Thank You so Much for the Feedback!😊