This is really fun! Lots of potential here.
My favorite bits:
- Super polished. The little UI touches like the burst FX when you click are 🤌
- Good amount of variety! Things like upgrades helped add some depth of strategy and prevent it from getting stale too quickly
- There’s a ton of gameplay systems at work here considering this is just a jam game! Everything feels pretty well balanced and the combos and upgrades interact nicely.
- Satisfying gamefeel. The SFX and little UI touches really feel impactful (I like the “Play selection/queue” SFX
A few notes:
- It could be fun to be a bit more generous with currency and upgrades. Since there’s so much luck in the game anyway, it’s nice to be rewarded just for surviving a round. I found myself struggling to make it further than ~10 levels - which may be intended - but that also meant I was less willing to take risks on buying expensive upgrades to try new strategies.
- The font is super hard to read. It matches the pixel-y Balatro style nicely, but (for example) the word “Common” on the upgrade panels doesn’t even look like text.
- 29 steps is a LOT for a tutorial. Each panel is short, which is nice, but I start sweating whenever I see “Part 1 of 29” on any game’s tutorial. That said, it moves quickly and generally makes sense!
- The tutorial can get a bit “dev-speak” at times. Like when it explains wildcard combos, it says something about “ 9 8 * 6 is unambiguously 9 8 7 6 so it’s worth X points”. While grammatically correct, it’s usually good to keep tutorial language as simple as possible since the people who need the most help playing are also the ones who may struggle to understand more complex descriptions.
- Scoring was a bit complicated. I never quite wrapped my head around how it works. It’s nice to have it auto-calculated for you on the side panel, but I wasn’t able to plan my moves super well, because I was never quite sure how the scoring was going to shake out once I hit Play. For example: it isn’t made super clear that your score is 1pt for the first card in your queue, +2 for the second card, +3 for the third card, and so on. There’s a line touching on it in the tutorial - but I had to re-read it a couple of times to really understand what it meant.
Hopefully some of this is helpful. Nice game, and I hope you keep working on it!