Description

A puzzle game about winning a card battle in a single turn. Chain react your cards effects to empty your opponents health points before they even get a turn.

Each level presents you with a new monster to battle, and a set of cards which when played in the right order, can out-damage the monsters health total. Your cards will contain an element, a damage value, and a unique effect to interact with the cards around it. Monsters will only be vulnerable to certain damage elements, adding an extra challenge to finding a lethal combination.

Here are some example effects:

  • x4 to the next card’s damage.
  • Clone this card onto the next card.
  • If the next card is an Air element, this card’s damage changes to 20.
  • Make the next card element Water.
  • If this card is first in the chain, this card’s damage changes to 40.
  • Transfer the element from the previous card in the chain to the next card.

The game features a total of 8 levels, each with a unique monster and some levels with multiple solutions. It also features a dynamic soundtrack. My role in this project was as the programmer and co-designer. For design, I primarily handled the initial concepts and general direction, while refinements and level design were leaded by a teammate.

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Download

This was created for the 2021 GMTK Jam, and a free download can be found at it’s itch.io page, or directly here:

Download

Goals and Achievements

Time Constraint

This was made for a 48 hour game jam, and we had a successfully working version by the end of it. We kept working on it in our spare time for the following week to bring it to a point we were happy to release it as, which mostly consisted of polish and bug fixes.

Within this time constraint my main programming accomplishments were creating the card moving system, and the effect chaining system. The card moving system would not only allow the adding and removing of cards to the chain, but also rearranging card positions and automatic placing to the nearest available space. The effect chaining system would allow cards to modify every part of the cards around them as they were being run through, making no possible effects off limits.

Design

When the idea of an effect chaining card game was agreed on, the biggest priority was to minimise the components required to still make it feel like a card game. This was accomplished by removing the deck building, opponent AI, and deck of random cards. Removing these components formed the puzzle gameplay experience, and guiding the theming stronger into it’s card game aesthetic.

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Project Details

Role: Programmer and Designer

Group Size: 3

Game Engine: Unity

Code Language: C#

Project Purpose: Hobby