Excellent work on the game! Some notes:
- Obviously, all the art is phenomenal. The shading is on point, the texture of the table is great, the background is flawless, and of course all the cards (but especially the cards with characters) are phenomenal. The visual effects are also solid, like the movements of the cards. My only note is that the animation of the opponent feels... incomplete? The jump back to them having a cigarette in their mouth and the drink jumping from their mouth to back on the table was a bit jarring, but the fact that you animated the opponent at all is already massive.
- The music is also flawless, and the sound effects that are there are all great - I just think that it would have been really nice to have more sound effects, like one for boosting stats, or one for dealing damage (the cat-fighting sound playing even when nobody took damage seemed odd, too). A victory or defeat jingle would have also been nice.
- I really like the core mechanics of the card game! They're simple and easy to pick up, but still provide a lot of options for mechanics - I assume that there were a lot of neat cards I just never got to, but even with a basic deck the game was fun. I'm almost jealous I didn't think of it myself. I love how the dice played stack up over time, and not knowing exactly how much damage you'll be doing or avoiding with each die makes each play feel risky, even if there's generally one obvious play to make. The dice manipulation cards were also very fun to play around with, though in the case of the rerolling ones they didn't seem all that valuable unless you just didn't have another card to play another die of that type. I really appreciated the 1d4 damage and healing cards, too - less risk at the cost of less reward is a fun way to handle things, and the direct damage made handling high defense possible and kept the pace of the game from crawling to zero.
- That being said, though, the lack of... anything leading up to the first match itself was really jarring. Not even a placeholder title screen, no options, and most importantly nothing explaining how to play or the rules of the game. I think I was able to mostly figure it out eventually, but it took me a good while before I actually really understood what I was doing, and that was a bit frustrating.
- The UI is generally solid, and I especially like the little totals for attack and defense off to the side, but I do think the Pass button and the Actions counter could be better positioned and pop out a bit more.
- I do have to wonder why three turns specifically, when I only ever had two energy and all cards seemed to cost one energy each (without even an indicator for energy cost, at that). I'm assuming the plan was to implement different energy costs, or perhaps there are more expensive cards/energy bonuses available after I stopped playing? Either way,it did feel weird to have a turn that just involved passing.
- While it took me a bit to figure out what was going on, the fact that the dice and hands reset every three rounds is a real nice touch, to prevent one player's dice from getting out of control. That said, I did still notice that one particular enemy gave me a really annoying time by just constantly playing defense-boosting dice, which kind of made dealing any damage past the first turn impossible. The1d4 damage card thankfully helped out with that somewhat, but it was still a bit frustrating and made the match drag on for ages. I assume there are other cards later that help with that, though.
- I do feel like you could have definitely pushed the "risk" element a bit further - perhaps betting something like giving up one of your turns in exchange for bonus damage dealt and/or taken (essentially declaring, "I think my dice are so good that there's no way my opponent could block my attack or breach my defenses with their next roll"), or some mechanic like that? The dice determining your attack/defense gain is good for sure, it's just that at some point, your rolls can get a bit too good to overcome.
- The pace of the game itself was really good, in terms of how long the effects and calculations took - I never felt like i was just sitting around waiting for things to resolve, and things never dragged on. This is something I've noticed other turn-based games struggle with, so I wanted to point it out and thank you for that!
- The pace of each match did feel a bit slow, since there's not really any rise in tension as the game goes on since the board resets after every few turns, though maybe that's just because I was never really in any dangerof losing to the first few opponents.
- Obviously creating any more art than this for a one-week game jam would be asking a lot, so I'm not going to complain about the fact that every enemy and background was the same, but it did make each match blend together just a bit. I think some sort of an intro to the match itself would help.
- The roguelike aspect of the game (from what I played) was basic but overall entertaining -an extra card is a nice reward, though I still didn't feel like I was "progressing" much, either - again, perhaps because of how the player just jumps into the next match.
- I do think the fact that the player's health resets at the start of each new match is a bit of a missed opportunity, since it meant I could play as risky as I wanted to during each match without having to worry about the consequences. Maybe later matches are tough enough that full health isn't enough, but this does still make the early matches feel a bit pointless, I assume even more so on a new run.
All in all, I really enjoyed this game conceptually! I think there's also a lot of room to expand it into something even better. The main issues I had with the game were all things that I assume were caused by it just being a game jam demo, so I'm really excited to see where you take it from here!