Shrine of Cards
A downloadable game for Windows
Deep within a mystical forest, you work away on constructing a shrine in honor of your fallen loved one. Perhaps completing this task will grant them some sense of permanence within an impermanent world.
However, your task will not be easy. The forest and surrounding lands teem with marauders and evil spirits, and the elements themselves are against you. Fight back with your wits and spiritual abilities, and complete your shrine!
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Shine of Cards is a game I made in about 3-4 days total for the Pursuing Pixels Jam! Here's a basic overview of the gameplay/controls:
Controls: mouse for everything! Left click for confirmation, right click to end your turn. You can also press "F" to switch between fullscreen/windowed mode!
Gameplay Overview:
- Each turn, you draw 5 cards from your deck, and are able to play 3 each turn
- Your goal is to construct your shrine. When you collect 5 "supplies", a piece of the shrine is built. After building all pieces, you win the game!
- After your turn ends, a random event will occur. These can be positive (ex you find 3 supplies), but are typically negative (ex spawn 3 demons)
- Each round counts as a "day." After 7 days, you will be offered a new card to add to your deck
That's about it! I thought I had 1 more day than I did, so the gameplay is not very balanced, and the whole thing is rough around the edges. However, I had fun making it, especially since this is my first ever deck-builder style game.
Attribution:
-Music: Where From, by Mid Air Machine
-Fonts: Skullboy and Rise, both by ChevyRay
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Comments
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really a good game, but needs more cards or game modes... i already won this game lots of times and want more things :v
i beat it without knowing anything about how the game worked and i still dont know how it works
but it looks very nice
I want to know what the two indicators at the bottom do, and also, when I have to select a new card, sometimes there are no new cards, only cards that I already have
This is a deckbuilder so they are the number of cards left in your deck (on the left) and the number of cards you have already "used" on the right ("used" because it includes cards you played and cards you discarded at the end of a "day" - "day" being the three cards (upper left for how many you have played on this day) you can play per turn).
Note that the cards currently in front of you (your hand) are not counted in either pile.
Once you finish using your whole deck (the number on the left is zero) the deck is shuffled and you reuse your deck (the number on the right reset to zero and the number on the left becomes the size of your deck). You will notice a pause in your cards being dealt if this happens part way through dealing your cards for a day.
Knowing how far you are through your deck is useful (and becomes more useful as you get more cards) because if, for example, you used your sword on the first day then it is very unlikely to be dealt to you on the second day but equally if it wasn't dealt to you on your first day it must be dealt on the second day. This makes card counting a useful advanced strategy to making beating the game easier and makes beating the game in less than two weeks easier.
I hope this helps ;)
pretty good, i got screwed over by spirits pretty early into the run so i never got to explore the mana cards, but it was still a good game.
Fun game but is the game supposed to crash when you die?
There is a bug if you have nothing left when the enemies try to remove that thing from you, e.g. if you have no health and are hit for damage then it crashes. This means that it is possible to lose without a crash but very unlikely because usually it is overwhelming enemies that kills you are they rarely get you down to zero health exactly.
short, good, not hard
But also very replayable!
Oppening my chanel on youtube with your game.
This game feels so elegantly designed.
I love how the main goal is completely independent of the enemies; purely just about building the shrine. All the negative effects of 'enemies existing' suddenly turn into resources, like 'spending' health on a turn by not fighting in exchange for building supplies was such a great tactical decision.
I also love that you're gated not solely by mana like many other deckbuilders, but by # of cards per turn. It felt very "into the breach" if that makes sense.
The card-gating makes it a lot more accessible to plan a single turn, but also much more difficult/interesting to plan a deck. I can say "What are the exact 3 cards I want to play this turn" without needing to worry about optimizing or missing some insane 10 card combo, but I also don't get any "freebies" like in Slay the Spire with their 0 cost cards. This made basically every card addition a much more tactical choice for me.
It feels like each "unit" of content is so efficient. Like, I can imagine once you had the core mechanics in place, it probably felt like the content flowed from your fingertips when you spun up different enemies and cards!
I played the hell out of this game; I really love it. The fact that you made this for a game jam is a testament to how efficient the design is.
How did you come up with the idea for the core mechanics? Do you play a lot of deckbuilders? Is there another game/games with similar mechanics that provided some inspiration?
Anyway, awesome game!
My god. You stumped me at first, but I think I might have gotten the hang of this game. Absolutely amazing, will probably play again!
Really nice game! I can certainly see this get expanded into a full version :)
Honestly amazing I have hope you will continue to work on it.
Brilliant game, would definitely play more if you expanded on it. Great job either way!
this is a really fun game! if a longer version was released i would absolutely purchase it :)
Very good game!
This game was absolutely amazing!
I would absolutely purchase a longer version of this.
i was really interested in the setting (and art) for this game, i'd love to see more stuff in the same universe :)
I keep replaying this game over and over again. It's so much fun, even with the limited enemies, cards, and events. Please consider turning this into a full game!
very yes
got this originally from a groupees bundle (build a bundle 33 July 2017, only just got around to redeeming it five years later, lol
This was a really enjoyable little game! The art style was very cute, and I loved how simple it was to understand how to play!
super fun game! i love the artstyle and i'd say the balance isnt too bad at all. I love the artstyle, and the gameplay reminds me a bit of classic 1 player card games! super great, i hope that it becomes a full fledged game in the future.
Awesome game! The challenge is that it's easy at first but the longer you play, the harder it gets. Play too long and you're gonna have a bad time. Nice work on the game, though!
i wish i have the lore of this game
this is really great - really fun gameplay loop, great mechanics, great art, fun music, I could see if the game expanded it could be really popular on mobile. It's really good!
Honestly hope to see this as a full blown game one day it only felt like a level and if work keeps being put into this then id love to see more levels with maybe making it so you would need more supplies each level to beat it but keep the cards from the previous levels as well with the enemies being harder
<3
A lot of fun, its a great little game!
I love this little gem (I loved it so much to recommend it to multiple friends)! I hope for longer runs though, or even infinite runs :P
Really great game for something made in such a short time.
i had a lot of fun playing it and desperately trying to build my shrine and i hope you keep working on it and polishing it, Its a brilliant concept and one that i hope gets more content in the future
Thank you so much! I'm glad you had fun:) I'd like to expand on the concept, we'll see if I don't get distracted by other game ideas haha
This was a delightful and clever game! First run was very tough. We were barely holding on, as we had nine enemies on the board. Got lucky and was able to claim a card to destroy all enemies, and managed to accumulate enough mana for it. Second run went much smoother!
Thank you!:) nice job beating it! Yeah that card might be a little too strong lol but I'm glad you had fun anyway!
I had a lot of fun ! The sound design and the graphics work very well. Thanks a lot for this experience.
Thank you very much!:)
I am spechless , i love this game, i felt happy and hyped playing this game.
Great Work!!! Congratulations!
Aww thank you so much for the kind words I really appreciate it!!
Shrine Of Cards was a nice change of pace from the usually rogue-like card games that have popped up the past couple of months; while it follows the standard "do actions, get different cards per run" formula, the game has a different end-goal: instead of actively trying to defeat enemies to get to some special ending, the ending comes from building a shrine that you must also occasionally defend. As you use cards to get materials to build your shrine, each new turn adds either enemies or special events that can both hinder and help you. Neither of these two obstacles pose a huge threat unless you don't manage your cards right (or if you're just really unlucky with the special events), and as mentioned by the creator, some of the cards really aren't balanced.
While the enemies range from humans that steal your materials or do damage to you to spirits that can steal your life, MP, or materials, the cards completely overpower them in terms of sheer utility; you start off with one damage card, a few healing cards, and material cards. Every 7 days, you'll have a pick of 3 cards. The cards range from more materials and healing to really overpowered things like clear all spirits enemies and gain 3 materials at a time (you need 5 to build a piece of your shrine). Of course, these cards come with MP costs or health costs, but the game feels overly generous at times with how much you have to work with.
All in all, for a game made on a time-frame that was a day shorter than expected, it was done really well! An average playthrough would be around 10 minutes, and I'd highly recommend it if you're looking for a laid back, rogue-like card game
My playthrough:
Oh wow, thanks for the detailed review and the video! I'm glad that you had fun playing it!:)
Neat! Intuitive, good flow, new cards had a fun risk-reward balance.
Thank you:)
extremely cool little game, the vibe and mechanics of it work so well together. nice work!! (and i second everyone saying they'd love to see an expanded edition of the game someday! :D )
Thank you!:) haha at this point it looks like I might have to actually expand on this. Thanks again!
The game is really cool but it's very short, it took me 2min to beat it
You can play it while you brush your teeth!
I would be super helpful to have an end turn keyboard shortcut and not use right click. I've just got stuck on the first turn for a while trying to play (under wine, with a touchpad) because the input stack/game doesn't recognise two finger tap. Using numbers to play cards in hand would also be cool!
Two finger tap?? Are you playing on a touchscreen? It probably doesn't recognize two finger tap because it wasn't designed to be played that way lol but I think I actually did make it so that spacebar ends your turn, I forgot about that until just now!
Awesome stuff, I'm really impressed by how you've distilled the deckbuilder genre into something bite sized. Also the persistence of the shrine (as a goal) is a really nice innovation. Great job!
Thank you very much!:)
Made a video
Need some more balancing but the core of the game is solid. Lovely visuals as well.
Lol trust me, I know. Glad you like the core though!
This game is pretty phenomenoal. You get the hang of it very quickly and the card design is just so cool and unique. I would love if this would get updates, more cards, more types of gamemodes (like for example, a "survival mode", where you build as much of the shrine as possible until you die), more enemies. This game has so much potential to be something special.
Thank you!:) tbh that sounds kind of like the normal game mode haha but new game modes would be fun to work on and design!