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Fate of a Dying Star's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Mechanics | #213 | 3.373 | 3.373 |
Music | #226 | 3.339 | 3.339 |
Story | #278 | 2.661 | 2.661 |
Aesthetics | #347 | 3.322 | 3.322 |
Fun | #431 | 2.814 | 2.814 |
Theme | #491 | 2.593 | 2.593 |
Sound | #497 | 2.119 | 2.119 |
Ranked from 59 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How many people worked on this game total?
2
Did you use any existing assets? If so, list them below.
Listed in a text file in the GameJamTV download on the itch.io page.
Link to your source?
Links are in the Credits.txt file.
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Comments
The game was pretty dang cool. You two did a great job. I see in the comments some people had trouble understanding, but I felt it was fairly simple to understand. The card designs were well detailed. The mechanics in place were well made. Thanks for submitting!
Thank you for the really positive feedback. I am glad you were able to figure it out and play it. I really appreciate you taking the time to let me know and play the game.
Sorry for your loss. I think there's definitely potential here and you should develop it further. You got a bunch of solid mechanics and systems into the game, which is always the hardest gamedev slog (in my opinion at least).
I'm not experienced with card games, but I got the hang of it. My bad luck meant no planets showed for about 10 draws, so I thought I was doing something wrong but eventually some showed (naughty RNG). Some thoughts for improvements: maybe highlight where you can drop cards. And maybe you could hack the randomness a bit by making sure a planet appears in the first x cards... Always a tricky thing to balance randomness + helping out the player.
Good job :)
Thank you for the concerns and the feedback. I agree, I had hoped to have a better balance and hand draw mechanic in there to make sure the RNG did not punish a person to bad. I unfortunately did not have enough time to get to that. I think that card placement highlights would be a very good addition. I am happy to hear you were able to get the hang of it and were able to play a few rounds.
I think this game should come with an instructional video. Card games are challenging enough as is attempting one for a game-jam is ambitious. Well done on completing it.
Ya I had to submit the game 3 days early due to a unexpected issue that came up. It does need a tutorial video, I tried to get some instruction into the game in the tutorial wall of text and the itch.io page has some good info there. I understand though that is a lot to have people do. Thank you for the feedback, I value all of it.
In full-screen mode there is some border areay that doesn't fut on my screen...
On my first play I actually managed to Ascend to level 2, but despite having a civ level of 4 several times, at no time did I get any ascension again...
Eventually I understood one thing about the ruls (not spoiling it here) and (wich a good amount of luck, too) go it:
So it is actually winnable as it is. But it still needs a lot of work. Grinding on the discard pile is currently more an endurance job than something really fun...
(And what is "MB6 tools" that is referenced in the project's packages list? Loading the project fails because of this...)
Zooming in with RMB was useful but somewhat buggy when the card or pile one wanted to zoom in was near th border...
I am sorry the MB6Tools is a helper package I made to auto create file structure for beginning project. It is based off of a youtube video made by Jason Storey:
. You can remove it, as all it did was setup some folder and strip some packages I do not use from the project. I use Rider and not Visual Studio so I remove those packages. I will upload that package in a bit.I am super happy to see you got it and were able to Ascend! Yes the zoom was a quick hack, and requires the mouse pointer to stay over the target so the issue you experience was that as it zoomed in the Mouse Cursor left the card collider. If you move the mouse so it stays over the card it would not jitter. I put that zoom in very last minute. It could be much better. Thanks for the awesome feedback.
Ah right, that one. I had seen the video already before.
So if one makes use of custom packages like this, it can mess up your projects for other machines... which is good to know and something I hadn't realized until now (not that I had really made use of this way of doing things so far...).
It might be worthwhile to check out if Unity can add it with a relative path if the custom package resides in the project's root (so one abofe `Assets` or even one further up if one puts one more folder level from the git repo's root).
I just added the package to the files on this itch.io page as "MB6Tools Package.zip" you can either add that to the project or remove it from the packages list.
I need to play this more than once, I struggled to understand what to do on first play.
This is one of the games I really want to look at the source of, because I want to make something like this also.
Very happy to see this game in the jam, will try again.
Awesome, some of the code is well done the early parts. Some of the code was wedged in just to make it work. The rules system I want to make a Strategy, Command pattern I was not able to get implemented yet. I hope it helps. I would love to play a card game you make. I enjoyed your pinball game. Thanks for taking the time to play my game.
I think I would like to play a finished version of this. I think a lot of the mechanics are not explained, but from what I can figure out, this could be a very fun game.
Didnt understand the game, it be great if you submitted a tutorial or a video of the gameplay i really wanted to play, the game looks promising. Feel free to check out my game
I agree it need some more polish. Thank you for taking the time to play my game.
ehm, I can't read what's written on the cards :D but nice concept, loved the game! Even though I had to play randomly sometimes :P
Thank you for taking the time to play my game. I need to play around with the size of the cards a bit. I put in a zoom feature to help people be able to read the cards the Right Mouse Button while over a card will zoom in on the card. Thanks again, I value all the feedback I can get.
I can see where you were going with this. It's impressive you created what you did in the amount of time given - making a card game in general is hard. The art is great, and I like your take on the theme. I saw that on your main game page there is a much clearer break down of the mechanics. Incorporating this into the game itself would be helpful - but again, I realize we only had 10 days and it's hard to get this kind of stuff all figured out. I'd love to see how this builds out if you continue working on it.
I agree with you 100% their needs to be a nice card breakdown and rule break down. The current tutorial in the game is pants, but it was what I thought I could get in with about 30 mins to do it. I really do want to continue this game and I want to also make a physical version with actual cards, kind of a Bucket List thing, to produce a physical game would be awesome! Thank you for taking the time to play my game and give me feedback it is valued.
The basic mechanics seem interesting, but a lot of it is not very clear: how do you get different planets? What does the upgrade button do? Are burnt cards lost, or are they shuffled back in the player's deck? Also I spent most of the time discarding stuff because I didn't get anything playable, and that's not really fun - or maybe I'm just stupid and didn't really get the game! :)
Designing an interesting card game in 10 days is definitely a hard task, and balancing it would be almost impossible - I actually think you did a really good job getting down the basics and the theme! If you decide to keep working on this game after the jam it could be really interesting!
Thank you for all the good feedback. Yes, Burnt cards are gone forever. The discard deck shuffles back in to the player deck. The upgrade deck places new cards into your player deck discard pile, that will then be shuffled back into the player deck. I absolutely agree that you get a ton of cards that do nothing and are forced to discard that was because I ran out of time. There is a drawing mechanic that I was unable to get to on how a hand is supposed to be played out. I do want to continue this game so at some point that will all be working properly. This is what I would call a very anemic version. I appreciate you being able to see what I was going for. Thank you for taking the time to try it out.
I totally understand the rushed parts, sorry for your loss. You made a really good game in the time you had, I liked the UI and the cards looked great. It took me a while to get used to the mechanics, the detailed description really helped. It's a nice change of pace to see a card game in the submissions.
Sometimes I would get dry spells without either feeding or planet cards, but I think that can be balanced out when you add more cards. So if you end up coming back to this and finishing it up, I'll definitely play it
Thank you for the feedback. Ya, there is a severe lack of card types and I had to just put a lot of the same type of cards into and hope it was even possible to beat the game. I have several ideas on card to add to the game and everyone has been great at suggesting tips for making it easy to play and understand. I thank you for taking the time to play my game.
Nice game!
Very interesting take on the theme.
I didn't understand if the deck was infinite, burnt a lot of cards and got to a point in which no more "feed" cards appeared and I couldn't keep playing (no more dust...).
I think that you if have the time, you'll end up with a great game! Congrats!
Ya, Burning can catch up to you. Cosmic Dust supply issues, the space truckers are on strike, lol... I appreciate you taking the time to try it out. There are some issues with the verity of cards. I hope to get this polished and made it a much better game. Thank you for your feedback, it is much appreciated.
First of all, I would like to commend you for completing the game despite what happened. My condolences. I hope that you and your family are doing okay.
I think the game has a very interesting theme and art. I absolutely love the cards, especially the VFX behind the stars. I can tell that you put a lot of effort into it. I like the anthropomorphism of the stars. The idea that there's an entity that is devouring the stars is just so cool, especially when there's a Lovecraftian cosmic horror vibe to it.
As for the core mechanics, I think they are sound. But I think the tutorials didn't adequately explain the game, so maybe I just misunderstood the game. I like the event cards. I think it adds variety to the game. I think the difference between the different civs is not obvious. I would expect some different properties other than the play prerequisite.
There are a few bugs, and the UI needs some polishing, but I understand the time limit.
Overall, a very ambitious game. Though hindered by the unfortunate situation, I hope you can bounce back and continue improving the game! Nice attempt.
Thank you for all the kind sentiment and feedback. I am doing okay, I have lots of wonderful memories of my aunt to fall on. I was shooting for the Lovecraftian vibe, nice to see you felt that. There should be a lot of differences behind the Civilizations I wish I had been able to get more than just two added. To be honest the Mechinoid civ was just a throw and not well thought out. I have ideas for them to be able to cause issues for you as a god, after all they don't like being fed on, right? I plan to get that in, and I cut a lot of corners to just get it at least a little playable. I definitely over scoped.
Really interesting idea for the game jam theme. I like cards design and aesthetics!I don't think I fully understood how the game was played. I would suggest a small tutorial/rules explanation for the beginning :D
The tutorial doesn't show up for me anymore after the first try. I read the entire thing carefully, thought it was a bit much with the terminology I hadn't seen before. Started my game, aaaand still did not have much of a clue what I was doing. :D
Gave it another 3 tries, still don't quite understand what I'm doing. I end up finding myself clicking all the buttons that are on the screen - I understand I can discard what I have in my hand. I understand I can draw new cards from the bottom right and I understand that I can draw an event from the top right.
What I can't figure out is what I'm supposed to do with the cards I have in my hand, which ones I can place on the board and how I'm supposed to interact with them with the cards I have on hand once I have managed to put something on board.
So all that added up, I think it'd be good to have some sort of visual indicator on the board as to which card can go where, potentially with color, potentially with a placeholder frame, potentially just with text. Also it'd be nice to look back on the instructions/tutorial if needed.
Our game is complex as well and with less of a tutorial (only in writing on the itch page) so I've really tried my best, more than once. But I couldn't quite progress any further to a point where I'm not randomly clicking everything that's on the screen hoping for something to happen.
Loved the music, loved the menu with the sliders for the sound right from the getgo and loved to zoom mechanic, because my poor eyes definitely need it in pretty much every game.
Thanks for your submission!
Thank you for taking the time to give so much feedback. I agree with what you are saying, I do need visual indicators I think it would add a ton to the game. The rules were definitely not very apparent. I ended up having like 30 mins to put in the bad wall of text version of my tutorial. I saved to player prefs the checkbox to not show the tutorial, and did not have time to put in the menu the ability to bring it back. That was definitely something I would have loved to had time to fix, cause as is if you check that you have no way to undo it. The cards ya were not balanced or enough of a variety. I appreciate you taking the effort to try and play it. I do hope to work on it and make it better.
Hell yeah! A card game. Some really nice things going on here. The zoom mechanic. The music choice was very good. Impressive game. I'd definitely put this in your list of games to flesh out more with time. Nicely done.
Thank you for the kind words. I do plan on fleshing this one out.
I love a good card game and I wish you'd had the time to get this more finished/polished. Sorry for your loss.
Just little things would make the game more intuitive/playable. I gave it my best shot but didn't really get anywhere with it. On my first hand, I had no planets and I was still a little confused from the tutorial - its a lot of text to take in. I tried again and was able to make progress but it seemed I never got cards that matched up. Other than microbes on a terran planet with a red star, very few combos seemed to work.
More feedback to the player would be helpful - eg. you can't afford to play that card, or that planet requires a different star etc.
Also making it clear you can discard cards. Pressing upgrade deck seemed to change the cards in the discard pile? It wasn't clear how/when to upgrade.
Also, for me the cards and the text need to be bigger, the zoom did not work well for me, it jittered in and out at the maximum zoom so I couldn't really read.
Events need to be bigger and more obvious. eg. when an event is triggered that card should zoom to the middle of the screen and be all big so the player understands something happened and what it was.
I do hope you'll continue working on it when you're feeling up to it. Card games like this can be super addicting and very fun!
I am sorry about that. I ran out of time and just threw cards in the different decks. I know the verity was not that great. There needed to be way more planet types. I was only able to get 2 of the 6 planet types I had planed. I only got 2 action cards out of a ton I have envisioned. The upgrade deck should really only be triggered by cards ie... "Creative Boost" which played to a Civilization, and it puts the card in the discard deck. I left upgrade deck drawable so that you could get cards to actually play with. The discard deck shuffle back into the player deck once you draw out the player deck. It is missing so much feedback, I absolutely agree with you on every point. The Event card flying to the center when going off would be an awesome touch. Thank you for giving such valuable feedback.
I do hope you'll continue on with it because it has a lot of potential and once you have your basic systems in place, adding new cards and visual polish shouldn't be too hard.
It's complex and deep, but it's well-made. I know some other comments here have told you that card games aren't their first choice of genre for this game jam, but I honestly think there's still a big audience for this game, including me :) I think the game needs more visual flair to make it interesting to look at and help the player understand what's going on, but I'm aware of the 10 day limitation we all had. Good job on this game, keep improving it :)
Thank you, I definitely have plans to keep improving it. I agree it needs a lot more polish to make people connect their actions to what is going on in the game. I agree card games can be very addicting, I love them.
I tried to play this game but card games are not my type. I wish you good luck and I know that someone who understands these sorts of games way better than me would give positive feedback.