Play card game
Dream of Ar-card-ia ~ Dreaming of the Perfect Deck's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Concept | #15 | 4.064 | 4.250 |
| Challenge | #15 | 3.526 | 3.688 |
| Gameplay | #17 | 3.466 | 3.625 |
| Story / Writing | #22 | 2.928 | 3.063 |
| Overall | #24 | 3.436 | 3.594 |
| Use of Theme | #25 | 3.347 | 3.500 |
| Audio | #26 | 3.197 | 3.344 |
| Visuals | #41 | 2.988 | 3.125 |
Ranked from 32 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Really cool deck builder, with a unique concept of needing to avoid enemies at all costs while waiting for a chance to strike! Maribel was a great pick there, as someone who potentially has power...just not all the time.
Only letdown for me (and this is an issue I have with all deckbuilders, really, so it's more a me thing) is that since attacking greatly relies on what cards you draw, I felt that success was more based on what RNG I'd get rather than how I built the deck necessarily. I'm sure I could mitigate that with better planning, but even when I was stacking my deck with attacking cards they just weren't showing up when I needed them, which started me back to square one a lot in ways that didn't quite feel in my control. Them's the heart of the cards, though!
In all, a lovely concept that I think has some real potential, my own hangups with the genre aside. Thank you for making!
Since the number of attacks are so limited, I mostly just stalled for more enemies to spawn so I could take them all out with Stampedes and/or Dream Marisas. Dream Marisa and Dream Joon are great, strictly better than most other cards since you can always waste cards you don't need to be able to draw more with Joon. I had like one close call, but otherwise was able to clear it no problems. I could see it being RNG dependent, though.
Nice game.
I think the biggest obstacle in this game is the RNG (I had trouble getting very far), but I like the card playing mechanic and some of those special character-named card effects are really creative. Always nice to have some ZUN-style story panels to give some background too.
DISCLAIMER; While I try to fully complete games before rating & commenting them, I was unable to get past level 5 (out of 7) after many tries, and decided to write this review anyway.
First things first, I love the concept of this game both story and gameplay-wise. Doremy and Maribel working together is a new idea, and a roguelite card game definitely is a fun route to take.
The gameplay has a lot of potential to be fun and engaging with a sprinkle of luck needed. In particular, some of the cards can be extremely satisfying to pull off - I managed to take out six enemies in a row with Stampede once! Unfortunately, said gameplay failed to reach its potential fully because of the card categorizations and how the randomization works.
Even looking at the separate types, it's clear that the number of attack cards is significantly lower than movement cards. Not only that, most of the "special"/Dream Self cards lean towards either pushing you further in the randomization wheel (I get Sanae's card being that at least) or giving you even more movement cards. It's very easy to be pushed into an unfair losing state where you get only movement cards in multiple turns in succession and there are 5-6 enemies pushing you.
To alleviate this, I suggest making more attack/defensive-centric cards (like a more powerful Sheep card that tanks 2 hits), as well as ensuring that you always will have at least one attack card in your hand to escape troublesome situations (for example, having an attack card always appear after a set amount of turns without one, or after the screen gets filled with a lot of enemies). RNG still plays a role as is with these kinds of games, but you should always be given a chance to turn things around.
Finally, the biggest problem about the game: there are no checkpoints. With how long the game can (potentially) get (7 levels with increasing difficulties), I highly, highly recommend putting checkpoints after each level, or at least every 2-3 levels. It'd save a lot of time and motivate more people to actually finish the game.
Overall, the game provides an interesting concept that can be worked much, much more on. I hope to see your team improve on it!
Thank you very much for your review! Creating an updated, post-jam version of this is absolutely something I'm interested in doing, I have a lot of plans for additions and changes but I don't yet know when (or how) I'm going to do that (right now I'm tied up trying to review other games from the jam before the deadline...)
I wouldn't worry much about not completing it, there isn't an epic ending you're missing out on
just a very brutal final level.However, no checkpoints is very much an intentional choice, as checkpoints would not be compatible with the gameplay formula - the whole thing revolves around getting random new cards to add to your deck at the end of each stage, and making the most out of what you have on a given run - with checkpoints, this wouldn't matter much anymore so you can always keep trying a stage until you get the right draws anyway. Going back to the start is kind of the point of a roguelike.
I'm not sure what you mean about dream cards giving you even more movement? Aya's should be the only one that does that.
But I am well aware that the game needs more balancing in areas - something that I have several plans to address. I also appreciate your point about having more defensive cards - unfortunately card design is limited quite a bit by the shoddy way I programmed this game, but I'm sure there are still possibilities I can come up with - for example, one card idea that was cut due to time restraints is a card that creates a decoy Maribel that enemies pursue instead.
Thank you for replying!
I'm still a bit iffy on no checkpoints but your explanation makes perfect sense! If you were to add more attack & defense cards (particularly the former as that is how you kill enemies) and make balancing changes, the game would be more fun and the gameplay formula would be received significantly better. You're definitely on the right track for the update!
(I guess I misremembered some of the Dream Self cards, haha. I remember always getting Movement cards from them so much, and barely any Attack cards...)
This is a great concept, and I really want to take my time and figure this out. Some others have stated the balancing could use some work and I would agree, but it is overall a very nice game which I want to explore in full, especially with more plot elements involved.
I really took my time playing this one. It was pretty enjoyable trying to figure out what to do next, frequently riding very close to a loss, and sometimes having a satisfying set of cards to play together over one or two turns.
Like others say, attack cards are really sparse, and how often they come up can sometimes make the rounds fast and trivial or very slow and hopeless. Still, for a jam game, this was pretty well balanced and I wouldn't mind giving it some more tries to get past stage 5.
I really love this concept! That said, there's definitely some things with regards to the execution which hold that concept back. I'm sure you're aware since you've played your own game more than anyone else has, but just to get it out on the table:
As this is a roguelike, RNG and random loadouts are standard things. Sometimes you will simply have to play around the fact that you have a lot of movement cards, but not much attack cards. I think this is fine in theory. Particularly if there are cards that hit multiple enemies.
To highlight this, here's a moment that genuinely made me pop-off and made my day: I had four enemies coming at me. My only attack card was the one that can chain-kill adjacent enemies. And I spent multiple turns trying to get the enemies to move in such a way to line them all up and kill them at once! It felt really great. I think the potential to bring about those kinds of moments really shows how cool this idea is. Moments like that are really the highlights of roguelikes in general...probably. (I don't play rogouelikes, so I can't say lol)
However, this moment was the exception. More than a handful of times I simply lost because I drew no attack cards. Or I drew 1 or 2, but could only kill 1 or 2 enemies while there were 3 or more coming after me. This is due in large part to the fact that the card count is skewed pretty significantly towards movement, which makes sense, but it's probably skewed too far. This has a knock-on effect of making the character cards which don't give you more/different cards or kill enemies feel much less valuable.
That said, I think it would be pretty easy to go too far in the opposite direction. That is, too easy to make enemies too consistent to beat. Otherwise moments like the one I described before become rarer and rarer. I can think of multiple things to change up the balance. Obviously having more attack cards. Or what was suggested below about having the ability to always at least be able to move to an adjacent tile. Perhaps stuff like this was considered, which wouldn't surprise me, but game jam time limit and what not. The more changes, the more balance testing would need to be done and that takes valuable time.
Anyway, I just wanted to stress how fun I think the concept is on paper, even if the execution in terms of balance could've been better. Perhaps stuff can be learned from the other card game rougelikes that are out there.
Also, the pencil line art opening pictures were very cute. I don't know to what degree it was an artistic choice vs. time constraints choice, but I thought it was pretty adorable and set a fun tone.
Good job!
Hello, and thank you for your very detailed response! Since you wrote out so much for me, I feel it's only fair I send you a response back!
First of all, I'm happy you at least partially enjoyed our game! This is the first time I've made a card game, so there was a lot of learning going on in this jam, and not as much time for testing, haha. Understandably, there's a lot of things in this game that are rough around the edges (both from the viewpoint of you, the end user, and me, the programmer). Having the deck more skewed towards movement than attacking is definitely something I was aware could be a problem, but I couldn't fully tell how serious it was without more testing from other people (like you!). I appreciate you have the same mindset I had, that having too many attack cards would make defeating enemies too easy, and I also wanted to include multiple copies of the move cards to ensure the player could actually have decent manoeuvrability around the board and not feel "stuck", but in retrospect, there are not that many attack cards starting in the deck, which makes them show up infrequently. The initial justification for this was that you'd add more attack cards to your deck throughout the game to even out the balance, but of course this devalues the cards which don't either attack things or draw deeper into your deck.
Balancing all the cards was also not exactly something I had a lot of time to consider, particularly for the character cards... (see: Marisa. She originally didn't even discard anything LOL. The discard thing was sort of just thrown on last minute when I noticed that she objectively did the job of nearly every card but better.) The character cards are all meant to have really crazy effects so they can't truly be balanced against each other or the overall game, but there are certainly some outliers in terms of especially strong and especially weak.
Did you get to the last level (7)? Because that one had almost no time for testing and is honestly brutal.
Our composer managed to beat the whole game though, so it must be possible...The pencil line art was indeed a stylistic choice on the part of our artist, meant to evoke the ending panels from mainline Touhou games.
Thank you very much for your kind comment!
(Also I don't play roguelikes either, I just like card games lol)
Funny that you say that you like card games. While I was playing this my YuGiOh brain was going off lol
It's cool to hear the thoughts that were behind the scenes, so thanks for the reply.
Unfortunately, I think the last level I was able to get to was the one where you have no starting hand (level 5 I believe?). Turning a top-deck war into a level was funny, albeit even more luck dependent than it already is. (I don't know if this joke will mean anything to you, but I wasn't expecting to Chaos Emperor Dragon'd in a Touhou fan game, so I thought it was funny even though I lost because I didn't draw enough attack cards lol)
I don't think it's necessarily a problem that the character cards aren't super balanced. (Though things shouldn't be so incredibly under or overpowered still, like Marisa.) Due to the nature of the game, you simply aren't always going to have the opportunity to get the best things. Which is fine because these kinds of games are meant to be played multiple times and give varying experiences. While I haven't played it myself, what I do know about games like Binding of Isaac is that, because the weapons/items you get are random, you'll sometimes have to make due with stuff that you wouldn't normally use. Which can create novel gameplay scenarios.
For example, there was one point where I felt that the best character card to pick from early on was Youmu. Which was an interesting ability to try and plan around using.
I definitely felt the inspiration from the Touhou endings. It was a good touch!
IMPORTANT UPDATE: I've now added a new version which fixes a bug that could randomly crash the game. Please use the new fixed version to avoid game crash.
i could not get past stage three, it seemed like there was nothing i could do except hope i drew the marisa card. if there was at least one action i could reliably perform without having to rely on luck, maybe just move one tile in a cardinal direction per turn, i think it would be a lot easier to manage. could also be that you have a move deck and an attack deck and you choose which to draw from. cool concept though i like maeriberi
I've found it quite irritating to contantly draw movements when you want to attack, but very interesting idea
Made it all the way to stage 5; fun game. was neat how you could build decks around different types of playstyles (like playing evasion if you get the Marisa card).
Our team: Myself (buskerdog), NeedleMouse and Cassare.
Yes it me. My artyist for gaem