Defeat enemy ships by playing poker! Your winnings can be used to recharge your shields or attack your enemy. Standard Texas Holdem poker rules apply.
There is UI flaw that I didn't have time to fix: The slider will let you allocate more points to your shield than you need, those points get wasted. It's not a problem if you keep an eye on the numbers but ideally the slider would lock to prevent you wasting points. There's also no audio/visual feedback that the shields are being charged, just ran out of time.
Overall the visual style is a bit of a mix of pixel art, crisp UI and deliberately blurry game camera that doesn't quite come together like I'd hoped. If I ever expand this concept I'd probably constrain everything to a single style.
EDIT: There seems to be a bug where shields are sometimes displayed as being at zero when in fact there's just a little left. The next attack will knock them to zero.
Full disclosure, I started the project with an existing poker framework taken from another game I'm working on. This was still the most complex jam-game I've ever made, but I wouldn't have pulled this off in two days without the existing framework. I also borrowed the card graphics and some shaders, everything else was made this weekend.
What's good: Great graphics. Great audio. Controls and mechanics were polished and intuitive! The dialog was a nice touch as well, it added a lot of character to the game!
What could use work: Since you don't lose any progress when you lose, an easy strategy is to just go all-in on every hand until you win.
Overall a great entry! I haven't played poker in a while, so I had fun with this.
Thanks for the feedback! Good point about the all-in exploit, I originally took the permadeath approach and kicked the player back to the beginning when they lost. I decided fairly late that this was a little harsh so just let them replay the current stage, but I totally missed that this meant going all-in immediately no longer posed a risk. Kind of totally breaks the game, now that I think about it. :P Reducing the chips each time you die might fix that, would have to give it some thought...
I really like the pace of the game, and agree that it would be better to have something to lose when being defeated. Enjoyed the graphics, just keep going towards the second star to the right until tomorrow.
Very good presentation and good idea. Gameplay, controls and aesthetics feel very polished.
The only nitpick I have is that the two themes do not feel so integrated. It is a mystery to me how to damage is calculated. I lost chips in a hand and then I also get punished by getting damaged. I think there should be more clear connection between your chips and ship health.
Thanks for the feedback Nash - I was worried the link between chips and attack/defense points might be confusing. The points you get spend on either attacking or bolstering your shields are based on what you actually won from your opponent at the end of a hand (i.e. what your opponent put into the pot). I decided to separate shield points from chips because this makes it easier to recover from a few lost hands, but I'll admit it does divorce the poker from the ship combat a little.
The amount of chips seems too high for what little health ships have. Most fights finished in a single round for me. Apart from that, really cool concept, and an amazing amount of polish for the short amount of time. Shields up!
Nice mix of themes! Was fun to play some poker like that. I encountered a bug at the end though, I lost the last battle but it put me through to the end dialogue.
The villain is a massive calling station, to the point that you can even consider value betting with K-high on some boards. Bluffing - even in reasonably good spots - is not a winning strategy in this game:P Still, I don't have anything bad to say about Star Battle Poker. I'd imagine that making a good poker player AI is a tough cookie to crack, especially in the no-limit hold'em context where there are so many possible bet sizes.
Anyway, as you can probably tell I had some experience with poker and I really enjoyed your take. Oh, and the humor works + music is very good :)
Very interesting combination. The space parts seems more like a theme for the poker game more than its own genre. Nice gameplay and good sound effects.
The graphics are really good! Sometimes it's a bit weird as you can get destroyed / destroy your opponent in a single hit. (I'm bad at poker though!). The UI feels good and fits the sci-fi theme, the cards could use some extra details as they look a bit plain. Overall a good mix of themes. The theme reminds me of the Nintendo-3DS mii-plaza games!
Let me preface this with I am not a poker player. I loved the humor and the idea of the game in general. I found it difficult because I don't play poker, but that's okay. See my recording of it below.
I liked it it really much, especially because i play a lot of poker. One (little) downside is, that a computer can never replace a real opponent in poker. But using poker in a game really triggers my imaginations. Though i would go for a multiplyer thing. That coudl combine the fun of playing poker and the problem of "play money" poker. Finding a way to give "play money" poker a new kind of meta game, could really be a great success.
OMG! AWESOME GAME! :O It doesn't only look and sound good, it's also super fun and a combination i can totally see working in a bigger setting. I'd love for you guys to develop this game further in the future if y'all feel like it, cause this is a Poker variation that i'm totally digging.
Funny dialogue, familiar gameplay fitted to a pretty theme, it's certainly a fun game! Not necessarily incorporating the incompatibility of the two genres, but otherwise the setting is nice indeed. I played it through and enjoyed it, albeit the AI sometimes felt like it knew beforehand what was gonna happen, insta-folding for practically no apparent reason. Poker AI is very hard though. This would work really, really well as a multiplayer game if going forward!
I really liked it and see a lot of potential for it, so very well done!
EDIT: I don't necessarily like that you used pre-existing gameplay to create this, but it's nonetheless a good end result.
Never enjoyed poker more then in this game! Some star trek humor, some good looking graphics and effects! All in all, it's a very pleasant experience. Only nitpick is in the intro where to blue light from the space ship gets pretty danm bright!
Super strong entry you made there ! The combination of the 2 genres works super well. Neat aesthetics, I really digged the mood and the VFX. Had a lot of fun playing this, congrats !
Hahah man, this is so fun! The scaling of how much you get to do after you win seems a little bit high - almost any hand with betting could end up being overkill. The dialogue in between each battle was very funny! It also was very clear whose turn it is, and what your available actions are. Overall great job!
Really well done. I liked the poker-based strategy. After a few rounds I knew how to defend my ship by not betting weak hands, and winning big on a good hand. The between-rounds story elements weren't really essential, but they were funny.
What could use work: Since you don't lose any progress when you lose, an easy strategy is to just go all-in on every hand until you win.
Overall a great entry! I haven't played poker in a while, so I had fun with this.