We're glad you enjoyed! "Legally distinct Balatro" is now my go-to when introducing this game to someone new.
Viewing post in Gradient Descent jam comments
It’s me, the husband! Your game has so much juice and feels great to play. I think I ran into a bug but I can’t prove it. In this screenshot I think the only valid move is to put the 6 on the other 6, but I’m 99% sure I tried that and it didn’t accept it.
Other than that though, this game was fantastic. I wish you could drag the upgrades onto the cards but other than that (and the maybe-bug) no notes.
One thing that was kind of funny is in my opinion some of the upgrades actually made the game harder. In particular, with the +-1 upgrade, I kept on not realizing I had a valid move. Suddenly the math became harder than just counting, lol
Edit to add: Oh, one more thing. If you decide to work more on this after the jam, you should double-check how your game and UIs scale with different aspect ratios. I think it was fine for most of the game, but the tutorial highlight regions didn’t quite match the things they were highlighting on a 21x9 monitor. Also, the boss that made the cards get whisked away also froze the card I was dragging in place, which detracted from an otherwise extremely smooth user experience.
Thank you so much for your compliments and thoughtful feedback. Dragging upgrades onto cards would definitely be an intuitive mechanic, and tutorial highlight regions being misaligned and cards freezing during the Overflow boss are known issues.
As for your screenshot, I understand the confusion. Based on its current description, the Flexible modifier seems like it allows playing against the same rank (e.g., a flexible 6 "also counts as a 5 and a 7", so it seems like it can play against a 6), when in fact, it doesn't. We intentionally reserved that behaviour for the Allow Doubles active ability, which may be found after each boss round. So a more accurate Flexible description would be "Enables playing against cards with gaps of 1 rank". That being said the valid move in your screenshot is playing the queen on the flexible 10 :)
Between devs, we've also had the same struggle where Flexible makes the game feel more difficult. We've certainly debated its usefulness. It gets even more complicated when you consider mixing it with other modifiers (minus Wildcard lol). We hope you continue to discover what our game has to offer!
Y’know what, I didn’t realize the flexible worked both while playing it and while playing onto it. I think because the wildcards resolve into the card that they are after you play them, I thought the flexible cards worked the same way, but looking at the screenshot with fresh eyes, the fact that the +-1 token is still on the card when it’s on the pile makes that fairly obvious, lol.
In general, I struggled a bit with the 10/J boundary, and the K/A/2 boundaries. To be clear, that is not a criticism, I think that’s part of what makes your game great, since it’s not just comparing numbers. But yeah, that issue coupled with my confusion on the +-1 and it literally never occurred to me that Q on a flexible 10 was an option.
On my next run, I only ever bought autoplay upgrades, and I went a lot further since I didn’t have to do harder “math”. I got a 35x combo at a couple points, which felt great!