itch.io

Balancing and hand management and also incomplete explanations are for sure the most obvious issues that are still in the game. They also take a lot of time to test and implement, so we had to make some compromises.

As a short explanation of the "A = B" cards: It basically means get "A scaling with amount of B". For example, Adrenalin Rush does 1 damage at 50 Heartbeat and 4 above 125 Heartbeat.

There are a few mechanics that are pretty under-explained, but that just was necessary because of the time constraint. We finished working on this less than 10 mins before the deadline.
Luckily, the game is still pretty playable even if you don't quite understand every interaction.

Balancing is the aspect of the game that was left for the very end of our time limit, so in result the game is not that balanced.

Yes, fleeing is intended. It gives no new cards, while actually defeating an enemy is often a big source of new ones and is supposed to take more effort and risk.

It's also very easy to farm early enemies for cards, overfill the hand and never run out of resources after. We thought about a couple ways to fix this.
Either there could be a time penalty that prevents this, so the longer you take for your descent, the harder the game gets. Otherwise, we could always just find a way to implement a hand limit.

Yea I'm really proud of this too still. Kind of a shame I didn't post this earlier.
I made this a long time ago just for learning and lost some files, so I didn't bother to fix it up for release. But when I just recently cleaned up my itch page, I thought it would be sad if I never shared it at all^^

Yea I agree. The issue is that this is a pico game, which means it has limited space on the cartridge. The code for everything in the game fills it up completely, mostly because I probably wrote it very badly back then. I would need to refactor a lot of it to fit sounds at all^^

Anyways, glad you are having fun with it regadless. :)

Yes the wand wiggling is the intended solution to gain some control of this magic. I'm glad people seem to figure that out naturally. :D

Also leveling up means that you progressed in the difficulty level. There are different sets and quantities of enemies that spawn for each one and you heal one hp just to make it a little easier.