Cool game, but I think you should add some different kinds of enemies such as ones that take multiple hits to kill or are faster instead of simply spawning more basic enemies. i had a build where i could go [next shot bomb] - [freeze] - [freeze] - [freeze] - wait - [4x] which was pretty much undefeatable and boring. The freeze buys me enough time to build up x to 3 or 4 during the wait, and then 4x + bomb wipes out almost the entire screen. More basic enemies makes no difference to this build as bomb is aoe damage. If the enemies became faster, they could reach me faster than I could bomb them back, and if they were tougher killing them could take multiple rounds of bombing which would make this build defeatable eventually.
Got to level 34 before I got bored of my perpetual strat. The gist of it is that when you play a card from the same spot (like always play the card at spot 1/2/3/4 numbered left ot right) you will always draw cards in the same order with the order being the same as you played. The only way to reorder is to play a different spot since newly drawn ones always come fill spot 4. This changes the size of your "effective deck", if you always play spot 4 its smaller (and the cards unused are always in hand) and if you play spot 1 its at the max size. The other cards can be considered filler cards. I think for safety its best to play 3/4 unless you are reordering since on level up you need to swap a card, and swapping is potentially dangerous when you built a good effective deck so its good to have filler cards to sacrifice if need be. Note that you have to reorder them every time you level up.
Using this you can set up a number of effective decks based on not running out of energy. You need a way to clear the screen and to refill energy. My last run cleared screen with bounce + peirce since there are a lot of ways to set this up and its useful to have early game before you can do all the setup. Other ways could be to use love + peirce, and maybe bombs. For energy refill your best shot is just using an energy refill card and making sure you spend ~5-6 energy cycling through the effective deck, making sure to order the energy refill right as you run out. You can also possibly stall with enough freezes, just playing them at a rate of about 1 every 2 seconds. Ideally you use a mix of both. Other strats that might work would be getting really high power cards and the perk for all cards cast for 1, and maybe something with shuffling costs but those are more risky and harder to do.
All this sorta hinges on the fact that you get cards back in the same order as you play them, once you wrap your head around how to structure an effective deck with that in mind you can generally build an perpetual strat pretty easily. I think as long as you can reach level 10. My last run I cycled the effective deck with 2 freeze (though I only needed one) 2 energy (again only needed the one) 2 quad peirce (I needed both) and piercing shots bounce perk. Before that I got to ~30 with bouncing shots peirce perk, 1 energy, 1 shoot X times, 1 bounce and a couple free cards that I just used to buffer space. For both of these I generally tried to play from spot 3 so I could reorder on the fly, but for my most recent strat I found that playing from spot 4 is just easier to not accidentally misclick. I guess if you play keyboard you don't really need to worry about that.
And got another good combo: freeze, next shot love, bouncing, energy refill, bouncing, and bouncing pierces perk. Always play from 4 after the initial reordering and pause before playing freeze to wait for the screen to fill up to about half. The other cards are for swapping.
Great game, but I feel the energy costs are not really balanced at the moment. High-cost cards are almost never worth it, because just playing two 1-costs is usually stronger (because you just draw on play). And if you get a decent amount of 0-costers, you can just move all your higher cost cards to the left and spam R as fast as you draw cards. Because the amount of cards in the deck is fixed and not much larger than the hand, 3 0-costers + 2 1-costers is already enough. With 3 freezes, 1 0-cost shoot twice and a rotating 1-cost card, I was able to reach an infinite loop that just draws freezes faster than enemies can unfreeze (not gonna say that wasn't really funny though).
Maybe drawing on a timer (instead of on play) could make higher-cost cards more attractive, would probably require some rebalancing though.
I really like the game, however I feel it is a little too easy to break and it becomes boring once you do so.
Basically if you get 2 energy cards, congrats, there is no longer challenge in the game. I got to level 38 before I got bored and gave up.
It would be cool to see bosses of some sort, in order to fight them you have to give up one card without getting anything in return. End game victory being when you have no cards left.
If there were a 'Pay What You Want' option, I'd do that. Do you have a ko-fi or Patreon or some way to make a donation? I'd like to donate after that other dev stole your game.
Hey. I'm another gamedev, but also I sometimes represent an indie consulting group for indie game devs. We basically either coach on or handle a lot of non-implementation parts of gamedev. If you want some allies to calmly walk you through your next steps, shoot us an email at support-at-zemoredesign.com or pr-at-zemoredesign.com, or reply to this comment, or find me on discord.
I heard about this through a story about the scummy copying from some extremely gross individual for 'their' game that's getting a paid Steam release. and I just want to say THIS should be on Steam. I'd buy this. not just to support you, it and the idea of creative integrity, but because it's fun as a bunch of tennis balls. good stuff. keep this up!
General Steam exposure, legitimization as a dev/pub by padding release list, monetization via item drops, monetization via telemetry (if injected), monetization via cryptominer (if injected). There are many ways to gain from Steam by publishing a free game.
Please, get an attorney and have them file a DMCA (which proxies out your personal information from being communicated to the thief). People like this don't deserve to get away with their crimes.
Hey I thought you'd want to know, someone by the name of Terry Brash is committing content theft on your game and claiming ownership of it on Steam, link provided https://store.steampowered.com/app/2854060/Wildcard/
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very fun game
I'm obsessed with this
Just read the article, stay positive. Happy to donate if you set up a pay what you want.
Thank you SidAlpha for pointing me to this very fun game. I'll have to take a look at your other works.
Super neat idea, and a simple concise gameplay loop. Kudos
Cool game, but I think you should add some different kinds of enemies such as ones that take multiple hits to kill or are faster instead of simply spawning more basic enemies. i had a build where i could go [next shot bomb] - [freeze] - [freeze] - [freeze] - wait - [4x] which was pretty much undefeatable and boring. The freeze buys me enough time to build up x to 3 or 4 during the wait, and then 4x + bomb wipes out almost the entire screen. More basic enemies makes no difference to this build as bomb is aoe damage. If the enemies became faster, they could reach me faster than I could bomb them back, and if they were tougher killing them could take multiple rounds of bombing which would make this build defeatable eventually.
Got to level 34 before I got bored of my perpetual strat. The gist of it is that when you play a card from the same spot (like always play the card at spot 1/2/3/4 numbered left ot right) you will always draw cards in the same order with the order being the same as you played. The only way to reorder is to play a different spot since newly drawn ones always come fill spot 4. This changes the size of your "effective deck", if you always play spot 4 its smaller (and the cards unused are always in hand) and if you play spot 1 its at the max size. The other cards can be considered filler cards. I think for safety its best to play 3/4 unless you are reordering since on level up you need to swap a card, and swapping is potentially dangerous when you built a good effective deck so its good to have filler cards to sacrifice if need be. Note that you have to reorder them every time you level up.
Using this you can set up a number of effective decks based on not running out of energy. You need a way to clear the screen and to refill energy. My last run cleared screen with bounce + peirce since there are a lot of ways to set this up and its useful to have early game before you can do all the setup. Other ways could be to use love + peirce, and maybe bombs. For energy refill your best shot is just using an energy refill card and making sure you spend ~5-6 energy cycling through the effective deck, making sure to order the energy refill right as you run out. You can also possibly stall with enough freezes, just playing them at a rate of about 1 every 2 seconds. Ideally you use a mix of both. Other strats that might work would be getting really high power cards and the perk for all cards cast for 1, and maybe something with shuffling costs but those are more risky and harder to do.
All this sorta hinges on the fact that you get cards back in the same order as you play them, once you wrap your head around how to structure an effective deck with that in mind you can generally build an perpetual strat pretty easily. I think as long as you can reach level 10. My last run I cycled the effective deck with 2 freeze (though I only needed one) 2 energy (again only needed the one) 2 quad peirce (I needed both) and piercing shots bounce perk. Before that I got to ~30 with bouncing shots peirce perk, 1 energy, 1 shoot X times, 1 bounce and a couple free cards that I just used to buffer space. For both of these I generally tried to play from spot 3 so I could reorder on the fly, but for my most recent strat I found that playing from spot 4 is just easier to not accidentally misclick. I guess if you play keyboard you don't really need to worry about that.
And got another good combo: freeze, next shot love, bouncing, energy refill, bouncing, and bouncing pierces perk. Always play from 4 after the initial reordering and pause before playing freeze to wait for the screen to fill up to about half. The other cards are for swapping.
Great game, but I feel the energy costs are not really balanced at the moment. High-cost cards are almost never worth it, because just playing two 1-costs is usually stronger (because you just draw on play). And if you get a decent amount of 0-costers, you can just move all your higher cost cards to the left and spam R as fast as you draw cards. Because the amount of cards in the deck is fixed and not much larger than the hand, 3 0-costers + 2 1-costers is already enough. With 3 freezes, 1 0-cost shoot twice and a rotating 1-cost card, I was able to reach an infinite loop that just draws freezes faster than enemies can unfreeze (not gonna say that wasn't really funny though).
Maybe drawing on a timer (instead of on play) could make higher-cost cards more attractive, would probably require some rebalancing though.
I like it a lot
great game!
Cool game!
I really like the game, however I feel it is a little too easy to break and it becomes boring once you do so.
Basically if you get 2 energy cards, congrats, there is no longer challenge in the game. I got to level 38 before I got bored and gave up.
It would be cool to see bosses of some sort, in order to fight them you have to give up one card without getting anything in return. End game victory being when you have no cards left.
This is awesome!
I want this on my phone so bad! Or basically anything handheld :D
really cool idea!!! it's a shame that the other guy stole your work. don't worry too much about it, it will be fine. 1+ supporter
I am sorry to hear about your situation. As someone else who is also making an action deckbuilder, I love to see people adding to the genre!
If there were a 'Pay What You Want' option, I'd do that. Do you have a ko-fi or Patreon or some way to make a donation? I'd like to donate after that other dev stole your game.
love it
Love the idea, can't wait to see it develop further... and fuck this other guy who just copied it, I support you!
Hey. I'm another gamedev, but also I sometimes represent an indie consulting group for indie game devs. We basically either coach on or handle a lot of non-implementation parts of gamedev. If you want some allies to calmly walk you through your next steps, shoot us an email at support-at-zemoredesign.com or pr-at-zemoredesign.com, or reply to this comment, or find me on discord.
Fun game! I wish you had a place where I can donate to support your development :)
This is great, I’m sorry someone tried to steal this concept from you and not give you credit.
Happened to see this game somewhere, decided to try it.
If someone ever tried to steal it from you, I'm positive they'd fail miserably.
Great work, keep making cool stuff.
Good original title that stresses me out cause I keep picking cards with long cooldowns.
If anyone were to copy this game wholesale they'd be morally bankrupt. Fortunately I can't imagine someone would be petty enough to do that.
leve 46
I heard about this through a story about the scummy copying from some extremely gross individual for 'their' game that's getting a paid Steam release. and I just want to say THIS should be on Steam. I'd buy this. not just to support you, it and the idea of creative integrity, but because it's fun as a bunch of tennis balls. good stuff. keep this up!
While I agree with everything you've said, I had heard the game (the clone) was going to be free
Which just begs the question of "Why do this in the first place if it isn't for monetary gain?"
Though I could be wrong
General Steam exposure, legitimization as a dev/pub by padding release list, monetization via item drops, monetization via telemetry (if injected), monetization via cryptominer (if injected). There are many ways to gain from Steam by publishing a free game.
Please, get an attorney and have them file a DMCA (which proxies out your personal information from being communicated to the thief). People like this don't deserve to get away with their crimes.
proof that some press IS bad press cause the reviews on the rip-off are SAVAGE
No reviews on steam anymore…
Discovered your game from SidAlpha's video!
Got to LV 6. Not sure if Cooldowns are the same for all cards with the same number of pips. Got the Locked Card and unlocked it.
dots are amount of energy used. There's counter on the right that tells you how much you have at the moment
Great game! My high score is level 22.
Hey I thought you'd want to know, someone by the name of Terry Brash is committing content theft on your game and claiming ownership of it on Steam, link provided
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2854060/Wildcard/
OH he's aware there an article on PC gamer about this
Ah ok, atleast their aware of the BS
What a fantastic little game! So stoked to see where it goes!
lovely little game :3
Love this game!
really fun game!
so fun. 2 sec freezes may be a lil too good lol
Holy shit this is so fun :D
this would be a wonderful little time waster on mobile
really fun! can see it becoming an addictive browser game to play while ignoring all the work i've gotta do!
got basically infinite with the energy replenish and 1 cost spells, fun game :D
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very creative!