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Cardinal Spin's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay | #27 | 4.065 | 4.065 |
| Innovation | #51 | 3.968 | 3.968 |
| Theme | #62 | 4.097 | 4.097 |
| Enjoyment | #66 | 4.097 | 4.097 |
| Overall | #75 | 3.855 | 3.855 |
| Audio | #430 | 3.323 | 3.323 |
| Visuals | #629 | 3.581 | 3.581 |
Ranked from 31 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does the game fit the theme?
In Cardinal Spin, every action the player takes spins a wheel to determine its outcome.
Unlike other card battlers, this game uses no energy system. Instead, you accumulate 'corruption', which increases the odds of a negative outcome when you spin the wheel.
You will need to carefully judge the risk of playing additional cards and gamble on avoiding corruption.
To upgrade and receive powerful cards, you must sacrifice a card in your deck. The more you have used the sacrificed card, the better the chance of receiving a powerful card in its place. Although failure will cost you your prized card for the rest of the run, the greater the risk, the greater the reward.
What code and assets did you not make from scratch during the jam (if any)?
Art:
- https://leipea.itch.io/psx-blood-font
- https://flakdeau19.itch.io/pixel-art-texture-pack-256x256
- https://leipea.itch.io/eyeball-psx
- https://retro-spud.itch.io/psx-elk-demon-npc-monster
- https://puszke.itch.io/low-poly-ps1-forest-animals
Audio:
- https://mixkit.co
- https://pixabay.com
Fonts:
- Pixelify Sans by Stefie Justprince
- Jersey 10 by Sarah Cadigan-Fried
How many people worked on the game?2
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Comments
I LOVE THIS GAME, I hope you plan in expanding it cause its a really really great idea!
Thank you for the kind message!
Fun game with lots of choices. Fits the theme very well. Good Job
This is absolutely fantastic! Love the concept and how it was executed. The strategy of taking turns off to remove your corruption adds a cool layer of strategy to the whole thing. I did very badly, but had fun along the way :D
As a player who don't rally enjoy deck building and luck games, I think this is actually quite nicely done! I guess it's down to the simplicity of the cards and the ingenious of the wheel corruption mechanics. It is a nice visual representation of how luck works in the game, and tides in nicely with other elements together in a cohesive package. The pacing is really nice, not much downtime yet everything is nicely conveyed, making a run goes really fast and reduces the frustration of retrying after bad luck. The art style and music also fit together nicely too. Well done.
I do have a minor suggestion that it would be nice to have some sort of tooltip when the mouse hovers over any ui elements. It would serve better than the help menu currently in the game, and make the ui more compact. But other than that, I think this is a very well-made and polished game! Well done!
Thanks for the feedback! A tooltip would definitely go a long way. Good suggestion.
I was hooked! Though I couldn't even beat the deer boss... The RNG is brutal that is both fun and a little frustrating. Most of the time even hitting a simple attack took a few turns and others I would breeze through and reach the deer boss in no time. Maybe a few ways to increase your crit chance or reduce corruption before ending the turn would be great. Great job regardless can't wait to see where this project goes!
Fun game and great concept. The gameplay loop is great and has so much potential. I think you could reduce the difficulty a bit, if you have a few RNGs go against you it is very hard to recover.
Visual and sound effects are great. The core gameplay is already solid as well, though right now it's pretty tough and you have to RNG a lot to make it far in the game. The mechanic is already unique enough to distinguish its from its inspiration. I guess tweaking things can be tricky in the time limit of a jam since limited playtest.
More tweaks and balance and it should be able to stand on its own, though there are maybe enough people who really like punishing rng out there who are really into it.
Awesome game
innovative gameplay, great aesthetic and matches theme perfectly.
but it was pretty hard, I hardly made it past half, to level 8
Nevertheless awesome game.
As someone who has spent countless hours on Slay the Spire and similar card games, this one immediately caught my attention and I have to say, it has a very solid gameplay loop. The risk factor is integrated into the gameplay beautifully.
With stronger visuals and more feedback, plus added depth to the mechanics, this could become an excellent card roguelike/lite. It’s definitely one of the games I’ve added to my list to follow after the jam. Congrats!
A really polished game! I had tons of fun playing it, despite my luck being the absolute worst xD
Feels extremely polished for a 7 day project, the ost and sounds fit the graphics so well!
I get what the game is trying to do and I do like the idea. There is this dilemma between taking risk and take some health damage to make things smooth. I do think corruption ramps up way too quickly if you want to just use some cards. I would recommending adding some weak cards with no drawbacks as fillers just in case when luck is really not on your side.
I love the idea and it is really well executed. Can see this as a full game if there where more different cards and enemy types :)
It's a really neat little deckbuilder, very easy to pick up and play. The presentation is particularly impressive - I love the old school 3D vibe!
I think a few people below have mentioned that it feels too luck-based, and I have to agree. Most of the damage I took was self-inflicted, which doesn't feel great as a player 😭 A quick fix would be to make the corruption chance ramp up more slowly, but the fundamental issue is with random chance - every card has an increasing chance of actively hindering you! If you take a look at Pokémon for example, Fire blast/Hydro pump/Thunder/etc are all used less because of their negative effect. This is now every attack in the game!
I don't think it's necessarily a bad mechanic, I just want it to be explored further - I am imagining self harm builds that give massive buffs when you're corrupted! High risk, high reward type stuff. Or other builds that mitigate it - I want more control over that chance, then I think it will feel better.
Hi Dom, thanks for the feedback, really astute observations! It's been great to get so much insight from these jam comments. We will definitely be reapproaching tuning if we go back to this project in the future. We have lots of ideas, some quite similar to what you describe, on ways to manage corruption and make actions a little more deterministic. I didn't know that about Pokémon, very fascinating. Thanks for reviewing!
The gameplay is simple, easy to understand, and fun. I think it would be better if there was a ‘How to Play’ shown when entering the game, or maybe a button to go back to the menu. The first time I didn’t notice the ‘How to Play’ button and pressed Start right away, so I had to reload to read them.
This game was nice and fun, I hit play being reading the instructions but I soon figured out how corruption worked haha. I had fun but I didn't make it very far, overall nice job! The animations and art were nice, I especially like the dial in the hand.
peak
Really cool concept! I was sold by your ad on the discord :) I do feel its very luck oriented with no way to balance at this stage and most of the damage was self inflicted. It has a lot of potential!
Really awesome game, art style is awesome the 3D models, textures, environment and just everything has a very coherent and well thought out feel. Now I do think the gameplay is really cool, and I could easily spend hours into this game if it had a full release, but luck is never on my side with these kind of games sadly, and I could only get around half way through before, burning and stabbing myself to death. I do really love the mechanic though I just think a counterweight of sorts is needed, some sort of way to increase your luck maybe, if you've seen the recent game by "Landfall" called "Peak" which is a climbing game I really like the way they handle status effects and I think it could work really well here, maybe instead of having just a bad and a good slot on the wheel you could have a huge amount of effects that do different things but you can slightly alter the sizes of effects to get the ones you want more. (this is just me yapping about potential ideas though, maybe they seem interesting to you or maybe they're dumb lol) Really awesome job, love it!
This is a really fun game to play, the controls and mechanics are very intuitive and the mood is great.
I wish blocked attacks blocked the fire debuff too, that felt a bit harsh and out of my control. The "not deer" flambé'd me early and I simply didn't have enough turns to do anything from then on despite arriving with near full health and managing my corruption.
Fantastic game! A bit unlucky with corruption and sacrifice but I had a lot of fun.