Hi there. This is Dragos, your Cohort Mentor. I've written out some feedback for you, split into the categories that the sprint was being judged on. Feel free to reach out if you think i've misunderstood anything, or want to chat further through some of these points.
Playability
- The provided video is a good showcase of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) mechanics you will need for your game. That being said, there is a slight lack of a proof of conceptual mechanics, such as what the balance of each type of card is/ how the interact and how the cost of each card could affect runtime of the game. Worth keeping in mind, that a lot of development time will have to be spent on figuring out how to structure each deck you have.
Promising Idea
- A card game is certainly a viable and good idea for a game, with some long lasting resources in the genres to inspire you. You already jumped the hurdle of programming the grid and placement, as well as the sound design and theming. That's great. I would recommend you find your unique angle on "the card game" to stand out even more in the future
Use of themes
- At the moment, the themes are almost entirely represented by the disaster deck. This is still quite abstract, so I would recommend you guys spend some time to ideate more than the veneer of the disaster deck removing some of your cards. For instance, the "civilian count" sounds to me, so far, like it is just a health pool for when the game ends. This isn't particularly well linked to an environmental aware theme, since if civilian counts are declining, the world is beyond saving. You could investigate such mechanics as an allocation of civilian count towards different types of building - renewable or fossil fuel energy plants for example. This would then give your game more of a sense of resource allocation towards a varied and salient choice about environmental dynamics, rather than simply using the population count as another healthbar.
Call to Action
- Related to previous point, at the moment the game does not seem to have any reason to not constantly avoid disasters. Pointing back at last year's card game, (https://itch.io/jam/climate-jam-2024/rate/2838792) the call to action was in referencing and balancing one's own environmental impact when playing against AI, who could attempt to burn the world to the ground. At the moment, I can only see a binary choice for your players at every turn in the game, which is "Will this wipe me out? No, - get more victory points." Consider what message you want people to walk away with, and try to represent that in a playstyle or mechanic.
Reasonable Scope / Well Planned Production
- Prototyping a card game requires a fair bit of iteration to get the balance right. Disasters could wipe you out too soon, or they might not feel impactful enough. The only way to find out is to quickly shuffle through drafts of the game. The best method I know for this is to try and make a paper version of it, or in something like TableTop Sim/ (any other free online card simulator). This would allow you to test mechanics and deck balances before committing large amounts of time into the engine, only to find out that the game doesn't play how you expected it.