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A.C.E: All Cards Engage!'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Sensory | #9 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
| Overall | #11 | 3.573 | 3.573 |
| Creativity | #12 | 3.680 | 3.680 |
| Gameplay Polish | #13 | 3.360 | 3.360 |
| Enjoyment | #15 | 3.480 | 3.480 |
| Relevance to the chosen theme(s) | #16 | 3.600 | 3.600 |
| Genre Interpretation | #16 | 3.720 | 3.720 |
Ranked from 25 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit either (or both) genres?
Magical Girl genre.
Chosen theme(s) and relevant explanations
We have a giant python snake, our story revolves union of magical girls and the power of friendship. There is also a magical pearl that the player is trying to retrieve in the story.
Team/Developer
Kingdom Pots et al.
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Comments
I found your profile after Ren mentioned Where is Mabel? and since I took part to the Metroidvania x MGGJ I was also curious about this one. I didn’t have time to play it during the rating phase, so just posting my late comment here.
Battle
A lot of work on the monster battle game, and cool presentation! Dragging the creatures on their slots and then effect cards on the creatures felt natural.
I could also click on a creature to highlight it but it did nothing.
About mana cost: I thought it was just hardcoded to 2, and only now after playing, I realize that the two “water” drops in the top-left corner actually represent 2 mana points and that the “water” is actually the same as the “spirit” icon in the top-left HUD.
Because all illustrations are animals, I also thought every card was a creature, then noticed the creature icon. Well, some Magic the Gathering cards have the same issue with illustrations, and you need to read card metadata to know their nature anyway, and the descriptions make it clear too, so I guess it’s okay.
I realized you could draw by clicking several times on the deck. I thought it was just to show the next card preview. It’s odd that we have to do this manually, unless there is some tactical reason (that is, always drawing full hand is not the optimal move sometimes?). Or is it just to give the “material feeling” or drawing?
Generally speaking, I think action flow and feedback could be improved. I wasn’t too sure how the battle damages were applied. I managed to get a total of 7 attack points in one turn but attacking the opponent at 10HP would do no damage at all instead of reducing their HP to 3. Is there some summoning sickness to prevent dealing damage too fast? Also unsure how defense works when creatures attack each other, is it stamina that recovers at the end of the turn as in Magic?
I think there should be more interesting decisions. For now, I see that the main decision what whether to increase attack instead of defense at the risk of losing a unit next turn if opponent attacks with their own creature (in which case it’s very important to know if summoning sickness is applied or not).
This could be helped with cards having more varied (but balanced) attributes, such as a big creature that costs 3-4 mana but is much stronger than the others. Looks like max mana increases by steps of 2 every turn with full refill, so that’s an opportunity to have cards with higher cost, otherwise you end up throwing a bunch of weak cards at the end, which is cool for stacking but a bit monotonous.
Bug: after opponent creature dies, stats remain
Bug: I spammed Space to quickly play advancing turns, but without monsters I got defeated. Then the game froze.
(I know, fixing bugs late like this is not funny… Well, I’m still fixing the level for my own entry, so nothing is impossible)
Art
Cool design based on cards. A funny twist is that the Magical Girl of Heart is definitely not the “heartiest” character. The heart and diamond costumes unfortunately both overlap on pink/red but that’s how the card symbols are done… They still differ in shapes, with roundy vs diamond shapes, so it’s OK.
Music
It’s cool!
Visual novel
It’s not super clear what happens between battle phases. Between phase 1 and phase 2, the character’s max mana suddenly drops to 2. I suppose it’s just a technical reason as the fight restarts, but it gives the impression that character has weakened and we don’t really know why. Generally speaking, I think the lack of animation and narration makes it hard to understand when the opponent takes an advantage, and it often desyncs with what you see in battle (the characters keep talking about “how can he survive” but to me I just reduced their HP and I was in a good shape, etc.)
Voice acting: Unfortunately, apart from the antagonist, the voices seem to have low bandwidth or even saturate when characters are shouting. I understand the importance of mic and recording quality now.
The antagonist’s voice is really good. But… he laughs a lot. He laughs when the script shows laughter. And he even laughs when there is no laughter in text. And he laughs for a looong time before his huge attack, I thought the voice files were mixed up and I skipped the text short after the end of the laughter, only to notice that he actually started saying the attack’s name and accidentally cut it. Apart from that, I made a point of playing the full voice audio anyway, which led me to sit in front of my screen hearing incessant laughter, and people around me wondering what I was watching. But it made me smile.
To sum up:
Thanks for the deep review!
As of now this game is not being actively worked on due to a backlog of projects, one of those being Where is Mabel.
Pretty neat game! I don't know anything about card games, but I clicked on some funny animals and won somehow!
I actually wished there'd been more of the card game compared to the VN, since it worked well and seemed fun. It'd have been cool if the other magical girls introduced new cards, too, or if there were new mechanics for having two characters on your side of the field. Since, as far as I could tell, it was essentially just the same battle and the same deck three times (other than one of the cards being gold and having buffed stats).
That said, the artwork for the characters and cards was very nice! The story and villain were fairly generic for a magical girl setting, but I guess that was probably the goal here. Though, I have to admit I started clicking through the dialogue after a while. On the other hand, having voice acting in a gamejam is always impressive!
Overall, good job!
Awesome game! I was happy to see a card game as an entry. Since I played Yu-Gi-Oh! before, I was able to infer how the card game worked without looking at the instructions. The detailed cards and voice acting and the storyline made it feel very polished. The magical girl designs were also very cool!
Game starting without a tutorial was definitely a choice, considering the gameplay is not the simplest thing ever.
The cards were honestly not very clear on what each was supposed to do, i definitely felt like i was just guessing game.
I beat the game, for some reason, i guess, i don’t know why i was winning, why sometimes i took damage, why i was doing damage, were the buff cards buff cards? Was i healing? At no point on my time playing this game i had a single idea if anything i was doing… was doing anything.
This game is a concept of a game that they forgot they had to convey.
We didn't forget, time ran out. Instead, we have instructions in the game description and the back of the cards on hover.
Cool magical girl team! Where is spades though? ;)
Creative battle system. It is difficult to design something turn based with any level of complexity in such a short time. Still, I was a bit confused with how to play at the start even after reading the instructions on the itch page. Maybe the reinforcement cards should be visually distinguished more from the creature cards
Music and designs were pretty nice!
I thought it was good, surprised you guys got voice acting and everything, makes the story way more engaging! My main critique of the game is of the way the mechanics are communicated. I understood cards had attack and defense stats, and that some cards boosted the stats of others and attack on the end of the turn. I did not get, however, what was the advantage of discarding cards, or in what moments should I be pulling more cards from the deck(like should i pull one card every turn to be optimal, or is there a disadvantage to doing this?). Another thing I didn't totally get was what my monsters were attacking, in the sense i wasn't sure when my cards tdecided to attack the enemy monster or when they decided to attack the wild card character :S
Visually i think you guys really nailed it, i loved the designs of the characters being based on card symbols, and i liked how the monster sprites looked in field. The style of the cards on hand i think it clashes a bit with the aesthetic of the game, but I do think the drawings themselves look good. I also liked the feel of putting the cards on field, the animation and sound effects you used really give it that humpf to the thing, it's nice. The animation of the card flipping to show what it does i think it also looks good, I do think it could be faster tho, like trigger instantly.
Overall, it was very nice, I liked it, good job!
The music is fantastic and the voice acting is generally really good as well but i noticed some peaking early on in the game but thankfully not very much! I really love card games so seeing one here is a very nice lol!!
my only complaint with the gameplay is I wish it was a bit more complex and more of it!! like with different types of cards, but the foundation found here is pretty good!! would be nice to see more enemies too.
the artwork on the cards is amazing and I think it's a cute idea to have the magical girls themed after cards as well, I think use of mixed media photo backgrounds is interesting as well and would've liked if there was also a photo background used for the gameplay as well. Good Stuff!
I loved the art style and was beyond impressed by the number of animated art assets. Gameplay was satisfying and I was able to figure out the mechanics during my first playthrough, but it would still benefit from a tutorial or at least a table of card symbols and their meanings displayed on-screen.
I LOVE THE ART AND CUTSCENES IN THIS GAME WTF HOW DID YOU HAVE THE TIME TO HAVE VOICE ACTING!!!!!!!, THE FRICKING DBZ DEFEAT CUTSCENE OF WILDCARD WAS AAA, the combat system was really cool too!, i love superbuffing one creature!!!!! honestly i dont have any complaints i really like this (also yuri??? :3)
We wrote up the full dialogue by the end of the first week allowing voice acting sessions to take place earlier. That and tasks delegations helped a lot.
The Dialogic plugin itself carried a lot of the work too, we didn't need to fight too much with the system since they just worked. I see your game uses it too judging by the interface, it really is good stuff with all the essentials built-in.
This game is a blast! The art style is adorable and the plot is really deep.
The design of characters and cards are amazing( loved the mix of snakes and jester hat of the villain ) also the UI that was easy to read and understand what was happening.
The fact that the game is completely voice acted was a blast and a surprise that i didn't saw coming and really added a new layer of enjoyment to the game.
I'm really quite amazed that the whole thing is voice acted. Mr Snake Wildcard was really selling the performance with that maniacal laugh. Wonderful character design. From the people to the cards to the creatures we summon. The animations and poses were really great too! Love that one unhinged girl that looks like they'd do some crimes. Really curious what Spade Magical Girl looks like! It's a simple fun card battler experience. I'm going to call it that the dog with 3 ATK is meta. Overall had a lot of fun playing through this! I wish it was longer, but regardless, great job with the game. Thank you for making this!
Fun short game. Can definitely see the potential in this for a future update! The voice acting was a nice surprise that I felt really added a lot of charm to an already charming game. Also during the end (as he is being defeated) against the boss there is zero music for me. Was that intentional? To me it felt like it would have been really cool if there was some music to add to the voice acting as well! Overall: Good game!
This is a really excellent short experience with fantastic presentation. Voice acting really stands out in jams. The music is fantastic and I love the art style. Having a few frames of movement on the character sprites really brings it to life, and the card art art is great. You also have fantastic audio and visual feedback on player actions as well.
The only real feedback I have is an in game tutorial would have gone a long way, however the game is simple enough that if you have card game experience you can figure it out pretty quick.
Excellent job!
Great job! Lots of potential in this JRPG X Card system! It was a pleasure to have a small role in this
This is a really cool concept, I love the character designs and the theme especially. All Cards Engage seems like exactly the kind of cheesy pun title that a magical girl series might have. And it’s got voice acting too, wow!
While I like card games, I didn’t find the actual card-based gameplay all that engaging, I wasn’t really making decisions, I was just kinda playing cards and it all worked out. But designing a card game, especially with a small scope, is really hard, so this is understandable.
Very charming little game though, made me want to see more!
Oh, this was so fun! The voices were a nice touch, but my favorite part were the character designs. A faction of sailor scouts themed after card suits is ingenius, I loved it!! The music was so pleasant, as was the foundation of the card system. A real home run of an idea if you ever flesh it out beyond a game jam. :)
Thanks a ton! I’m thrilled you loved the character designs and card suit concept 😄 The voices and music were a blast to add, and we’re glad it made the game fun!
Very cool game, bravo!
Thanks! Really happy you liked it!
Nice a
Thanks so much! Glad you enjoyed it!
art style is simple but effective. I liked how cards flips, and that Anubis looking creature summons dog lol. But card game is quite simple. Second combat I just dropped creatures and clicked attack till the end to hope to see something new in next combat, but game is ended. Good work
Haha thanks! You actually didn’t see the 3rd phase yet, hang on until the cinematic drama ends 😄
wait what. you mean you gonna update? or is there something else i missed. for me game ended after second combat and sent me to main menu.
Ah, I see! There’s still a 3rd phase, but it starts after the cinematic at the end of the second fight. That’s probably why it felt like it ended.