Arcanum Fortuna
"Face the fate of the cards in this tarot-inspired roguelike deck-builder."
Guide the fool through their tumultuous journey by using 28 enchanting cards with 48 unique abilities to their fullest potential.
Do you have what it takes to prove yourself in various card-based combats and reach the end of your path?
This game was created in 10 weeks as a semester project.
Check out the official trailer here.
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The Hanged Man crashed my game.
I'm overall enjoying this, but if you're going to update this, could we have a way to speed up the karma point counting? It feels very slow compared to the rest of the experience.
(Also I'd like a warning to know if my karma is going to go negative or and how my combos should go before I end a turn, sometimes it's hard to tell what my cards will actually be doing.)
This is awesome! I just sunk two hours into this. I adore the art style so much. This is such an cool project, and I'm glad to hear y'all are planning on going further with it! Very excited to see where this goes. I can see a few different play archetypes emerging, and I'd love to see those fleshed out a bit more (ie, the sun and moon synergy). Visually the only complaint I have is the gold earned pop-up doesn't fit the aesthetic haha, and I'm sure that's a placeholder for an animation later. Incredible work, and good luck going forward!!
Also - the language for the "on play" cards (ie, the cards that give 1 hp to neighbouring cards when played), could use clarification. Does it give it to cards already on the board, or cards played in the same turn? Does the 1 attack to next card played apply to the next card placed that turn, or the next turn? Not a huge thing, just smthn I noticed I was getting confused by
Hi there! Apologies for the late reply.
Thank you so much for your thorough review and comment, my team and I appreciate it immensely. We're so happy you were able to invest this much time in playing the game and sharing your thoughts about it. We are indeed aware of some of the issues you mentioned, such as balancing and the general AI behavior, as well as some yet to be added elements like animations and missing assets. Unfortunately, everyone of us is very busy, but we do love the project a vast amount and are hoping to get back to it as soon as we can, we at least want to finish and add what our initial plans were. Until then, the game is available for wishlisting on Steam, with further plans being an early access build being publicly available ideally before the end of this year, so that we may gain further insights and helpful feedback like yours!
Again, thank you very much for taking the time to play and share your kind words - they do mean the world to us.
Love, Dead Pigeon Games.
So I have kind of commented on this like it was a early access game from steam and not like a 10 week project made by people who are learning to make games right now, so you are probably aware of most of the issues I present, and just ran out of time.
Wonderful art obviously, nothing I can say about that, you guys clearly know what you're doing.
I do like the idea of a deckbuilder where your cards don't have a cost to get into play, but a recurring resource cost, with health being deducted when the resource runs out. Deaths ascend ability plays really nicely into that, conceptually very smart. In deckbuilding Roguelikes it's often valuable to keep health high so you can use it as a resource in a difficult boss or elite encounter or one that your deck is not equipped to handle, so effects like that make it fairly easy to survive at low health, but put you in grave danger in the already dangerous fights. None of this comes to fruition right now due to the current balance, but (I hope) that changes in the future.
The overall gameplay is very unpolished though. It lacks any difficulty and every encounter is the exact same, no increase in difficulty, no rhyme or reason to opponent plays and opponents often just skipped turns. Handcrafting multiple opponents with different decks would go a long way. Maybe even give them some unique cards the player doesn't have access to? It also did not feel like my deck was progressing in any way, it was a mess of cards at the start and a mess of cards at the end (because i mixed up the make trade and leave shop buttons :/).
It is also unfortunate that the only things you can see at a glance from cards is their stats and maybe their abilities, but not their Karma (why Karma, does that have to do with Tarot btw), even though it is even more important than a cards stats.
The positive Karma cards also all felt the same. I just got rid of the ones with 3 and bought some with 5 at the first shop and never regretted missing out on any effect. Their only relevant aspect being cost. That made the above point of Karma not being visible all the more annoying.
Sun is a (conceptually) busted card, as you can just heal to full in one easy fight, even with the current difficulty, that is of no concern. Maybe make it 5hp on play or something or the card damages itself when the effect triggers or can only do it 5 times per fight.
I did not like how I could not see what ascending major arcana does beforehand. Some of them like Sun getting -1/ 2 even feel like downgrades 2/5 (or sth around that) seems better than 1/7
The audio went to just the left ear at some point, with the right ear only receiving an occasional and painful *thud* that sounded like someone took a swing directly at my eardrum. Turning my headphones to mono did fix the problem (for me).
Overall, I still really enjoyed my time with this game and would love to see it get updated in the future.
Let me lead by saying that the overall effect is fantastic. The art is terrific and the general feel and style of things is really engaging. I skipped the tutorial, which is probably a bad idea, but found almost everything intuitive enough, with helpful tooltips everywhere. (Should I have learned earlier that discarding a card grants you its karma? Yes. Should I have learned that before discarding a negative-karma card when I had zero karma? Absolutely yes. This is my fault.)
I did find the game balance to be a little off: maybe because the player starts with fourcards and the opponent starts with one or two, I didn't ever really feel any sense of threat or risk of losing. (And Strength is really powerful.) I think if you wanted to keep working on it, there's a lot of room to explore how to balance the combats.
On the other hand, if you decide that a semester's long enough to work on a project, you can absolutely leave it where it is and be proud of it while you move on to even better things!
Thank you so much for your thoughtful and detailed comment! Your feedback is invaluable to us and we're glad you were able to enjoy what we've created.
We are planning on further working on the game and improving it, as well as adding some features we unfortunately had to cut due to time constraints.
In fact, we are planning to even host our game on Steam later on.
Besides Strength being very powerful (yes, she was even stronger at some point, we were unfortunately fond of it :D ), do you have any other key feedback regarding the balancing and/or would you potentially even be interested in playtesting our game again as we work on it further in the near future?