Unbalanced Brawl

by yopox
Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.56
Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.38
Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.12
Theme★★★★★★★★★★2.72
Graphics★★★★★★★★★★4.09
Audio★★★★★★★★★★3.58
Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.78
Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.44

\[TW spiders\]



Unbalanced Brawl is an autochess with ever-changing rules in the shop!
The following two sections describe how to play the game.

During the shop, you have to build a board for the next fight.

Here's how it works:

1. Cards to buy: Buy one for 3 coins by dragging one to your board (2) or your hand (3). The cards to buy are refreshed each time a shop phase begins.
2. The board: These are your cards for the fights. Cards need to be dragged here or you will be defenseless during fights!
3. The hand: These cards are stored between turns. Having cards in your hand have no effects during fights.
4. The chest: Drag a card from your board or your hand here to sell it for one coin.
5. The timer: Shows time left. If you have finished your turn you can click on it to finish the shop phase.
6. The refresh button: Refresh the cards to buy for one coin.
7. The freeze button: Get the same cards to buy in the next shop phase. (free)
8. The upgrade button: Pay 4, 6, and then 8 coins to upgrade the shop level. It is important to get access to more powerful cards and more options. For instance, the shop level 2 makes it possible to buy level 2 cards and make one more card to buy available in the shop.

The fight is automatic: cards attack a random enemy card one after another. The card you put on the left will attack first, and the next one is always the card to its right.

There is one opponent for now, its entities are predefined (mushrooms or spiders). Can you defeat them? :muscle:

:spider: :mushroom:

We did not have a lot of time to balance the game. If you have any comments please share them with us! We will gladly work on a post-jam version :sunglasses: :v:

The list of cards is available here.

Show us your winning boards! :heart:

- Ary (twitter): Pixel Art
- Arthur (soundcloud): Music, Sound Effects, Game Design (merchants)
- Hadrien: Code, Game Design (Spiders)
- Louis (twitter): Code, Game Design (Mushrooms, Robots)

#### 06.10.2021

- Increase card speed during fights

#### jam – 05.10.2021

- Used a few extra hours to fix bugs and build for wasm32
- Implemented all abilities except Sadism and Multiplication

Known issues


- Two abilities are not implemented
- The sound can be a bit chaotic at the very start :(
Tools: Rust

Comments28

Emprime5 Oct 2021, 17:38
How can you play the game? I can't find how to execute it easily without digging trough the code.
yopox
yopoxauthor6 Oct 2021, 00:16
@emprime The web build is now available!
Teegan6 Oct 2021, 05:31
wow, its kinda insane that you were able to pull this off in just this the jam time! I'm not a of the huge autochess genre but this was really well done. Music and art fit really well, good job y'all!
Elazulus6 Oct 2021, 05:56
This was a really cool autobattler! Overall I really liked the card art, the music was catchy and non-intrusive, and the builds you could do were interesting.

I lost my first game because I mixed fungus with spiders, and the AI eventually just had a humongous fungus (heh) and I couldn't win.

2nd round I did a spider build and it felt satisfying to win with it!

Some issues though -
- The egg unit would not spawn low level spiders upon death. I wasn't sure if it was because I had a full board or not, so I went into a round with an open slot and it still didn't trigger. (I just now read that multiplication ability does not trigger in your changelog, so ignore this part!)

- Once the boards got large, the fights took quite a long time.

- I'm not sure it fits the theme entirely, I could justify unstable as in the shop itself was unstable but I never felt like the instability of the shop affected me much.

- Upon running the game for the first time, the music was ear-bleedingly distorted for some reason. It fixed itself after a few moments but something to think about I guess

Other than that, as an experience and as a fan of autochess games, I think this is a really cool submission and I'd be willing to play a full version of this if you chose to take it further.

Nice work!
ljol36 Oct 2021, 06:08
wow! This was great. I would want a fully realized game of this! the art and music were fantastic to match as well!
suisou6 Oct 2021, 07:36
I don't know why when I play it will automatically skip the battle stage and drive directly to the store. So I didn't see any performance in the battle stage. But still like the art of cards and music. Hope to see a full version of the game!
yopox
yopoxauthor6 Oct 2021, 09:21
@elazulus I have increased the speed of animations during fight so it should be better!

The sound issue is because of recent changes to prevent autoplay on web pages. If anyone has experience with `bevy_kira_audio` and `wasm` please advise me :)

@suisou Have you tried to drag cards to your board? (middle row in the shop)

Thank you all for the nice comments :heart:
T R E F E T H E N7 Oct 2021, 02:39
Super neat art style! Are you supposed to be able to fight things without any cards on the board, because I didn't understand the shop layout at first, and ended up accidentally farming coins for a while without using any cards. Would be super cool to see some environments (obviously super hard to pull off for a jam). Groovy music, would like some more tracks for different encounters, maybe based on difficulty?
yopox
yopoxauthor7 Oct 2021, 06:02
@t-r-e-f-e-t-h-e-n Thanks! I will try to make the description clearer about how to use the shop layout :)
Skyward4d
Skyward4d7 Oct 2021, 09:19
Really cool game!
I loved the art-style and audio.
It was a little unintuitive to me on my first attempt and I lost hard. But had a lot of fun once I figured it out and managed to win. It would be nice to have a mouse-over tooltip for the shop that tells you what it is and how to sell cards. (I know it's mentioned on this page, but I don't think it is in game). Otherwise great game, really nice work.
LeXian7 Oct 2021, 10:42
Very special game mode, nice art style, like your work!
Solah
Solah7 Oct 2021, 13:18
Interesting game, but it was a bit hard to understand at first. Then, the lack of interaction during the fights make them less interesting in my opinion.
Cool art and music, well done!
jonah
jonah7 Oct 2021, 13:55
awesome art!!!!

I really enjoyed the game. it's fun and deep. Sadly had some trouble really releasing the cards on the right place ( I had to click multiple times sometimes) making the time limit a bit stressful, ahaha!

Good job with this game!
LazySeal7 Oct 2021, 18:34
Nice game. But I could not figure it out what are the third (lower) stripe for and how and when I can pud cards here. Also do not understand how much each card costs until buy it. And why we can not throw out old non-usable card (change olt to new). Although like the idea :)
almost
almost8 Oct 2021, 19:26
Cool that you managed this within a jam!

There were a few UI inconveniences, but the game played well enough.
- When units damage each other, the health number changing is really subtle. Some floating text or flashy animation would help.
- I can't seem to move cards from board to hand
- I want to skip the shop announcement with left click
- Given that the game is single player, I think it would be ok to be totally untimed (to give more time to read cards and figure out the UI)

I upgraded the shop ASAP and ended up with a board alternating between Tujilus and Modular Bot, and it won pretty handily :)
I noticed that the spiders didn't have very high health so I figured it was best to try for high-health units to survive the spiders attacks, and Modular Bot seemed really good in general.
RobinDBois9 Oct 2021, 17:42
Great game but maybe not challenging enough
When I had mushroom at start then robot who help adjacente monster it was a obvious combo and the game play itself ^^
But great start and great art, I love the look of the cards.
GG!
jessefreeman
jessefreeman12 Oct 2021, 15:50
Great idea and like the art. Would love to see how this grows if you continue to work on it after the jam. Looks like the foundation of something really interesting.
Cr1stal
Cr1stal16 Oct 2021, 15:15
A good game with a good idea and music
timon
timon16 Oct 2021, 15:27
This art is absolutely beautiful! Love the interactions between different cards, had lots of fun playing :)
VarunDevs
VarunDevs17 Oct 2021, 02:16
pretty good one, art was really cool and it was really challenging btw...
Tygrak
Tygrak17 Oct 2021, 13:16
Nice game! Looks like it has a lot of potential. I really like most autobattlers, so I was happy to see a autobattler at LD. Both the art and the music were really good. The battle music especially, it might have also fit some epic boss fight, the mood of it reminded me of games like Undertale.

I got a buffing bot twice quite early that buffed everything adjacent by +1/+1 every turn which helped me roll over everything without any issue :).

Good job!
Wendel Scardua
Wendel Scardua17 Oct 2021, 15:10
Great game, if you all ever make a post jam version I'd suggest just making the hand and the battlefield more distinct, and making the current prices for buying/selling/etc more visible as well.
Barrier
Barrier17 Oct 2021, 15:18
Played this for a while, it's quite fun but after a while I wasn't sure if I can make my army much stronger. Would be nice to develop into a bigger game.
Aidan and seb
Aidan and seb17 Oct 2021, 15:52
Nice entry! It reminds me a little of Hearthstone Battlegrounds gamemode!
Love the consistency of the art style and the music, really gives me retro vibes!

In terms of feedback, everything I would say has already been mentioned above, so nice solid entry! :)
YouK18 Oct 2021, 06:56
Great arts, audio and gameplay! Very solid entry. I played for a while and if the AI could be more stronger, I would be willing to play more. Maybe it's because my English is not very good and I need to spend a lot of time reading the card, but the last few rounds always don't seem to have enough time. I wish to have a dynamic turn time, which be like short at the beginning and gradually becomes longer.
bloodycoin
bloodycoin21 Oct 2021, 19:46
Very enjoyable, good match of gameplay, music and art. It's amazing you managed to put all the different mechanics in play for each card. I like how each faction feels distinct from one another. Though I wouldn't mind some interplay between factions - like spiders getting weaker/stronger if you have a (specific) mushroom played. Or merchants generating extra gold, if you are keeping 2+ robots in hand.

Instability of the shop didn't really affect me. Had some cards in hand, or just froze the shop / upgraded. It influenced my decisions, but not to a degree, where it was challenging. Maybe more "unstable" interactions between field and hand would be nice, rather than just shop prices.

Would be great if attacking rules (if there are any) were explained somewhere. Like `Highest health first attacks lowest attack creatures` or `Merchants target insects first, then robots, then randomly`. It was sad to see my `22/35 cannibal spider` attack `3/2 poisonous spider` and get killed :cry:

At least partial preview of next fight's enemies would be nice and add some strategic depth.

From technical side - animations were not always playing during combat, so it was hard to track what was happening.

Great work anyways, looking up to future entries.

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