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(+2)

Looks, sounds, and feels great.  I like the concept and it's good to see in the comments that you may be continuing development on it.

So.. some feedback for you, if you want it.

The UI is generally quite intuitive but I was a little confused at first. Beyond tutorialisation, I think a few small changes could help with this a lot:

  • Icons instead of coloured boxes for attack, defense and number of rounds, and specific tooltips to help identify these elements, could make their meaning much clearer.
  • Simple animations when picking up a resource of them zipping across to their respective counter in the UI would make the cards effects on resources easier to understand (particularly for monsters giving gold).
  • Adding icons alongside any textual references to resources to help make clear which resource the text is referring to. For example when text mentions "coins" it could be written as "coins (🪙)" using your icon.

Given this is a jam game though, the current state is very impressive.

My decisions in the game often felt a little shallow, but I can see a lot of potential for strategic depth.

On my first run I felt I didn't have enough information to make meaningful decisions, but on the second I enjoyed weighing up the merits of each weapon and against saving resources. My decision making elsewhere quickly fell into a pattern. I would generally flip every card unless I thought it was likely I'd found all the resources early on a floor or really needed gold. When a monster appeared I just chose the most efficient weapon I had against that monster. I almost always killed monsters immediatlely, as it always seemed unwise to reveal further cards with a monster present. Similarly, I always took resources immediately as there was no reason not to. The two sets of resources (gold and hearts; and wood, iron and weapons) also felt very isolated from each other - weapons do ultimately gain gold and preserve hearts, and hearts allow you to reveal more cards to gain more resources, but I would have liked to see more crossover in other effects, such as cards like the coin-for-potion card which essentially allow opportunistic resource trading. Because these would still rely on opportunity, each set of resources could still feel distinct whilst having more interaction. I'm guessing traps primarily exist to force players to consider the risk-reward of turning over more cards, but they stood out as the only negative cards which do not give you a chance to respond. I imagine dying to them would feel cheap. Perhaps a little bit of Spidey sense "this floor looks trapped" or a more narrative version "these tracks are human... humans make traps..." on entering a floor with traps would make them feel fairer and double down on highlighting the risk-reward of flipping cards. If rooms became more dangerous for each round spent in them, for example if every other round all monsters on the floor gain 1 attack strength (and the player knows this), this would force the player not only to consider how many cards to flip, but also which to take. I think it's possible a mechanic like that could address several of the points I'm trying to describe here (it essentially makes turns spent on a floor into another resource to manage).

You may be planning this anyway, but I'd love to see a little narrative/world building baked into the cards. Just having a few different images and maybe titles for the wood cards could tell a lot about the world (as long as they are still at-a-glance identifiable as wood cards) - maybe you're scavenging ornate table legs from broken, ash-covered tables; maybe this dead mage's staff is nothing but a big sturdy stick to you; or maybe you sometimes find a 3ft long toothpick that some giant discarded. Cards with reward options could offer atypical choices as well. "Rusted Peacekeeper's Sword" could let the player choose either 1 iron, or a 2-use 2-hit sword - a small but interesting choice.

Anyway, please don't take these comments as overly critical. I'm only taking the time to write them because I think you've got a cool concept and these are the things that I felt needed work. I'm sure there are many ways to handle all of them and I'll be interested to see how you do it. Good luck!

(+1)

First of all, thank you so much for taking the time to provide us with your feedback!

Regarding the UI, we’re definitely planning to improve it even more, adding additional tutorials, effects, and features to help players better understand what's going on during the game.

As the level designer, I totally get the issue of resources not being closely linked together. Honestly, I’d love to have more resources at my disposal to design even deeper and more engaging levels. In the current version, I’ve done my best to balance the resources, so players have a fair chance to progress through all the levels without feeling overwhelmed by too many decisions. That’s why it might seem like there’s not too much thinking involved to get through each level.

I’ve taken note of the points you’ve mentioned regarding level design, and we’re definitely going to work on making things more exciting in future updates! Thanks again for checking out the game!

(+1)

I'll look forward to seeing how the game develops. Congrats again on the jam 

(+2)

Thank you so much for the detailed and thoughtful feedback! It's incredibly helpful to get such a thorough breakdown, and we really appreciate you taking the time to write it. We're very glad you enjoyed the core concept.

We've read through all your points and think they're fantastic suggestions for expanding on the game's potential. We agree completely on the UI and clarity issues; we made some quick decisions for the jam that we definitely want to polish. Your idea of adding animations for resource collection and icons alongside text is a great, simple way to make the game much clearer.

Your suggestions for strategic depth are particularly insightful. We're excited by the idea of making turns a resource to manage, and adding narrative clues for traps is an excellent way to make them feel fairer. We've already been thinking about how to create more meaningful choices, and your ideas provide a lot of great starting points. We especially love the idea of adding small narrative details to the cards themselves to build out the world.

Thanks again for your support and great ideas!

You're very welcome. It sounds like a lot of these things were already in your minds, but I'm glad my feedback could be useful to you. I've followed you and kinatraa but let me know if there's a better way to get notified about any future releases of this, I'm sure I'll want to play them.