Magic The Shattering is a deckbuilding/card game x danmaku/bullet-hell shooter where you equip weapons/passive abilities every turn, and steal cards from your opponent to build your deck to further get more abilities.
A basic rundown of how to play:
1. Choose a starter deck from the 4 given ones. Hover over cards to see details of each. 2. A round begins. You draw 5 cards the first round. Every successive round, you draw one card. 3. Click on a card to play/equip it for that round. Card effects only last for that specific round. All card effects are stacked. You can equip upto 8 cards 4. Once you've equipped your cards, start that round. 5. WASD/Arrows to move around + Z/J to shoot the boss. What you shoot depends on what you equipped (if you didn't equip a weapon, you can't shoot). 6. Round ends if timer runs out or you kill the boss. If you do not have a weapon card equipped, just survive till the end of round. 7. If you kill that round's boss, you get to choose from the boss' cards + a reward card. Select any one card to add to your hand. 8. Any card you equipped that round gets shuffled back into the deck. 9. Next round begins, you draw another card, and continue.
Created from scratch for Ludum Dare 41 by Diptoman Mukherjee (design, programming), Pranjal Bisht (art) and Joel Montpetit (audio).
Super cool game, very nice concept. I kept running out of cards though so when I only drew a support card it was game over. Would be nice if there was a simple basic gun you always got by default so you weren't forced to lose due to no weapon.
The game works very well and the fact that there are different card categories, different decks etc certainly encourages playing a couple of rounds. The game does have it's problems with RNG thought. Having a rather week attack, with slight buffs does very little against a foe with 3 attacks that just flood the screen. But if you die you can get quickly back into the game.
@brent: You're not forced to lose without a weapon! A round ends if the timer counts down to zero - so if you don't have a weapon equipped, just survive for the length of the timer, and you'll go to next round (with a new card draw). :) We thought it'd add some depth so players can now decide between which bosses to fight and which bosses to survive (eg. if they don't have a card you want). And def checking your game out. :)
@radow: Yeah, I'll do some balancing passes in a post-jam version. It's not the most balanced right now!
This idea is fantastic. Having to balance card attrition with bullet hell game-play is a blast. The presentation was nice and the music kept my feet tapping. Great work in all categories!
This is a really great game! There's some balance issues with the deck running out of cards (not sure if that's intentional) but I'd like to see what I think is some sort of re-shuffle of the deck when you finish. Maybe I missed something, but I'd get to round 5-6 and just have no cards. GG, very well done.
@david-greene: Any card you play gets shuffled back in next round so the deck should never run out of cards, unless there's a bug. :S Did you get to those rounds and not draw a card in the beginning of the round?
That's a awesome game! Gameplay is super-fun, you need to think ahead and keep weapons for later, but you still need to take enough weapons to kill the enemy. Music is insanely cool! Awesome game!
This was a great game with nice sound, graphics and concept. I liked the risk rewards with playing the cards and just the overall feel of the game. The homing weapons are awesome!
To be honest I am not very fond of card games, but this game is truly in a league of its own. I really enjoyed the gameplay along with the superb artwork and tracks. That kept me engaged for quite some time. One thing I'd like to point is the difficulty curve is uneven (I'm not a good gamer, don't take my word for it). Either I'm dying very quickly or I'm killing the boss very quickly. I really wish the game sessions were a bit longer.
This is a solid shooter by any measure. Introducing the cards adds an element of strategy, and makes it infinitely more interesting on multiple plays. Great entry, thanks for sharing!
The innovation is certainly good, combining card game and shoot em’ up is quite a good idea. The game plays smoothly except for one part where your cards constantly finish, other then that the game is pretty good.
It was really fun! The music is so good that even when I was having a hard time dodging bullets, I was still okay. Running out of weapons is kind of good and bad at the same time: good because you can experience just trying to survive and bad because you really have to try surviving all those bullets without any sort of offense.
The card system is also a definitely plus. It unlocks customization to some extent while also introducing possible strategy. Nice one!
This was a genuine fun one to play!! I was worried there'd be a lot to read with another card game, however the cards were super easy to digest and recognise, didn't really kill the flow of the game. The downside to that is the cards acted more like a load screen rather than really combining elements of a card game - however, I still feel you combined the two genres relatively well! I would play again
Amazing game! Fantastic graphics, great music, great mechanics. Everything was really well polished. The card system was simple, yet interesting enough that it encouraged strategy. That being said, I feel like the cards were a tad unbalanced. For example, I found that the homing weapons ended up being far superior to every other weapon, especially in the late game where moving around becomes more of a challenge. I think it could be more interesting if the enemy you fought had some sort of weakness that certain cards might take advantage of.
This is in my list of most favorite games so far. Very well done.
So good! Playing cards to power up your shooter is a great idea for this theme. I found it a little too easy, I thought, but I enjoyed beating the first 9 bosses in my first game. A little more variety with the bosses and deeper card strategy would make this a pro-quality release. I'd encourage you to keep developing this idea!
Looks like I wasn't the only one to horde all the homing weapons :)
Really good concept. I wish maybe it drew more than one card so I could play around with builds and decide what I want to save for harder bosses and such, but alas. The core gameplay is solid, and any bullet hell game will make me sit up in my seat and pay attention. Played til level 14 but it looked like the enemies couldn't get harder than that. Unfortunate!
Great game. Rarely do you see actually good bullet-hell games in LD and boy is this one of them. The pattern were cool, the controls felt good and the weapons were satisfying. The card game aspect though felt somewhat underdeveloped, some way to gain more cards would have been cool. I got to like 10.000 points before a weapon I selected wasn't granted to me and I died. Really good job
Pretty fun! Got to round 9 or so. Strategically there was an interesting element of trying to conserve your cards for the later levels, but as a player I really just wanted to keep upgrading my ship's weapons without feeling like I kept on losing resources every round.
FYI your itch.io page seems to work better than the gamejolt one -- the gamejolt one doesn't let you scroll down to see the entire game window (at least, with my current screen resolution), and also doesn't get around the Chrome 66 WebGL audio context issue where you need to click on the page before initializing the audio context (otherwise you get no audio at all in your game).
We made a bullet hell game too. Our second genre was turn based. Check it out!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/grid-gunner