Pretty cool when I figured out how to play, had some issues with them accepting only one or two cards early on but later they accepted 3 or more I think. Also the card design was cool functionally. Thank you
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Guardians of Decay's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Polish | #5 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Gameplay | #7 | 3.765 | 3.765 |
| Overall | #11 | 3.814 | 3.814 |
| Sound | #16 | 3.706 | 3.706 |
| Atmosphere | #19 | 4.059 | 4.059 |
| Art | #23 | 4.059 | 4.059 |
| Theme | #39 | 3.294 | 3.294 |
Ranked from 17 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
We’ve finally got round to playing this game. The visual style caught my eye back on Discord.
It’s a well-polished game. The mechanics are straightforward, but there’s not quite enough in-game tutorial. To me, it felt very short and rather simple in terms of gameplay. I’d have liked to play for longer; it’s got good potential.
Great work
I was definitely a little bit lost in the beginning but once it clicked I had a great time. I thought sacrificing a card at the end of each round was a great decision to include. Also the artwork is awesome and the sound is very supportive to the horror feel. Great job!
Great game, easy to grasp the core game mechanic by just playing the game and reading what's on the cards. Amazing art with only purple colour palette.
Thank you so much! For the color palette I used the https://lospec.com/palette-list/violet-voyage palette from Lospec.com. I find it way easier to just accept a super limited palette and proceed with that for game jams - makes all the art be less work.
You don't need me to tell you you knocked it out of the park with this one! if i have any critique, the ui doesn't quite explain some of the card effects, and a lot of the strategy of the game was lost on me (just add power to cards forever instead of interacting with exile or discard or destroy), other than that you've encapsulated the theme and atmosphere impeccably! fantastic work! c:
Really? Thank you! I wasn't sure I did knock it out of the park. I appreciate hearing that though. The strategies would need another week to put together. I don't know if the game would be fun for a long time with great balancing, synergies with draw and discard, etc but maybe someday I'll find out. It's great to hear that you like it though! Thank you
your visual style was really unique and well put together, the card game was fun to play, the atmosphere was solid and spooky. i don't think the game needs anything else, you built perfectly for the jam, the critiques are just for future development should you decide to take it c: great work~ this one was played on stream today if you wanted to see gameplay from my perspective, link is in the advertise channel in the discord. thanks for the experience c:
Incredible art, loved the style. I usually don´t like card games at all but I was kind of engaged on this one
Awesome art, awesome mood. I didn't get what happened at all.
Cards kept changing their power seemingly without any reason. The randomized encounters can border on impossible - starting with guys wanting 8 and 11 points looked crazy to me.
There's a bit of of learning curve to it, but overall i like the concept. Trying to decide what area should be taken depending the card I'll receive or the rules I'll have to contend with is really engaging. Although if you ever plan to expand upon this any further, you might need a tutorial or a guidebook or something to make this easier to learn.
Thank you for the kind words. I completely agree - this game is pretty tricky to learn. Just "throw people into the deep end." I'm always amazed when people figure out how to build games with good onboarding in game jams - it was all I could do just to finish the core mechanics and art. Great to hear that the core loop worked for you though. That makes me very happy to hear!
It took my a few rounds of my first run to grasp the rules and such but afterwards I found it incredibly enjoyable!~ My second run was easily one with Shepard of the Stars and two copies of "the void" to stack power and just crushed the rounds once that got going.
I stumbled across the dev menu accidentally but I liked how it made the hands, rules, and cards played very readable at a glance.
Loved it overall as a fan of roguelike deckbuilders! The gameplay and presentation were really well done~
Thank you so much! I appreciate the feedback. Usually I turn of dev menus but I figured if nobody can figure out how to play this I'll just tell them about it on the itch page, but it seems most people figure it out after a little bit of playing.
Shepherd of the Stars is an interesting one. I didn't know if it would be good late game but I suspect the game isn't super hard late game? Not sure. The Void, on the other hand, is OP as hell :). Play balance has been tricky for me in game jams because I don't get much time for playtest feedback.
yeah that's fair, the 2 cards Shepard of Stars makes copy its power, and can be used as discard fodder when you move on to the next encounter, I do get that game balance in such a short time can be really tricky, +2 looks so unassuming until it clicks that it's +2 permanently, which just makes SoS's clones that much better, I had them at 11 power / clone at the final round!
Great game with a strong atmosphere. The sound effects are excellent. It’s a bit confusing at first, but I quickly understood it. The game feels immersive and has a lot of potential as a deckbuilding game.
Note: Accidentally posted this on the game's site, so repost here
Looks pretty neat overall, but the artwork could be a bit more cohesive.
Music and atmosphere were really well made and I found the SFX super satisfying.
I also loved that there was an actual trade-off and strategy involved in which cards to play where and when. I could see this expanded with more effects and artwork!
One thing I really missed was an explanation to what each rule actually means. I know, adding an actual tutorial takes time from the whole dev process, so maybe you can just add that to the page description as a glossary.
Overall a really cool little game, tho! Would ove to see the entities fleshed out a bit more, maybe with some commentary on what you played, etc., to make them feel more diegetic!
Thank you for playing and for the writeup!
I'm so glad to hear you felt there was strategy. I was really unsure if people would feel this way. I did but the mechanics were very not obvious which you picked up on. Adding mechanics to the itch page is a fantastic idea, I might do that if I find time. As for fleshing out entities and give the player some feedback after they did stuff - 100% agree. I find game feedback is very time consuming to write so I skipped it but honestly for this game I think it would be fine to just throw text on the screen. I should have done that. I figured it would hurt the atmosphere but honestly it probably would have just made the game better. So you're right :)
Thanks again for the feedback.
Honestly super solid for a card game like this. Actually think this would be great expanded even further! Fun animations and more sounds would be great polish too.
The game is great fun once it gets going. I really like the gameplay loop, very engaging and layered, had tons of fun. The game has too much to grasp on the first load tho. The eye rules, card powers, satisfaction threshold, and reward power confused me for a few turns. Could really benefit from presenting either eye rules a turn after, or having tooltips on the first turn. The sound and atmosphere are creepy too, set the vibes nicely!
Thank you for playing! Your feedback is appreciated - I 100% agree with you the onboarding is pretty brutal. I had enough of the game together and asked myself "do I want to make first time players have a better experience or do I want to add some polish and fix the balance issues" and I went with the latter. Honestly I probably could have done both with a couple better tooltip popups like you said or introducing the mechanics more slowly. Maybe next time! I'm just amazed I got a deck builder together in a week that didn't look or play like crap.
I love that you like the audio! The whole game was "I dunno if this is coming together or not" right until the audio. Then BAM I was like "this feels good"
Nice atmosphere, especially the sound added some tension, I liked it!




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