I really like the artstyle of Death, looks really cute!
I think the game is a bit slow, getting a correct answer does a tiny dent in the blood pressure bar. It’s also annoying that you don’t always have a card in your hand that works on the current calamity, which contributes to the game feeling slow.
Music feels like it’s just right for the gameplay. I think it fits the art as well. Great work putting something together!
I really depends on the difficulty of answering correctly to a calamity. The way I’d structure it would be to split up the game into rounds, with more calamities (and remedies) getting unlocked each round. Then maybe each round would be 8 total turns (maybe 5 successful turns). But that’s really only an out of the arse guess.
What matters more is the process. The way I’d actually would go about implementing it would be to set up the system for turns, then shove in the numbers (how many new calamities to add to each round, how many successful turns are needed, how many turns do you have before dying). Then I’d sit down and play the game, observe how the game feels (“this feels slow” “now there is an overwhelming amount of new stuff”) and tweak the numbers based on that.
When it comes to making the systems I usually spend more time programming than playing, but when I’ve made my systems I usually play the game more than I work in the engine. So I try the game, take two seconds to change a number, play the game again and so on.
Thanks a ton for such sincere and solid feedback!
Your idea about unlocking calamities in round-based waves is super neat—it actually mirrors my original design almost completely!
I actually split Death's calamity deck into different tiers (high-tier calamities like Amnesia force players to discard their hands). I also added counterplay mechanics where both Death and the player use perks and items to basically "cheat" against each other.
Also, spot on with the playtesting workflow. Since Death is currently the sole enemy, I actually wrote a python script to simulate game loops and dial in the length. It spat out an average of 33–44 rounds per game, which hit my target duration pretty well—though that was before I cut the perk system due to the jam's time limit. But as you said, nothing beats that rapid "tweak a number in two seconds and playtest" loop in a jam setting!
Thanks again for the great dev-to-dev insights!
