Death's Door
Death's Door is a deckbuilder with progressive difficulty and procedurally generated cards.
Draft your starting deck to you liking, sell cards for gold and buy more powerful cards. How many enemies are you be able to slay?
Inspired by games like Slay the Spire, Dominion and Port Royale.
Controls: Mouse only
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Very good game, but I have some suggestions to make it better:
Effects: Mid/late game enemies could have some special stats that can make them more powerful and replace the exponential rise of health and attack. You could give them certain abilities, such as poison, which could temporarily remove one max hp for just that battle, forcing you to attack. You could also use procedurally generated stats that could scale the further you got.
Bosses: Perhaps every five or ten rounds, there could be a boss enemy. The boss enemy could have powerful abilities, and after you defeat it, you could get an ability yourself or trade it for coins.
More card stats: You could add more card types. Here are some examples. (The cost shows how expensive it could be to use this card or how much you could use it.
HAND SIZE- increases/decreases your hand size. Very expensive.
FREE REROLLS- allows you to reroll in the shop. Extremely expensive.
STARTING GOLD- increases/decreases your starting gold. Average.
SHIELD- gives you shield which could protect you before you use up hp. Cheap.
Gradual Strength: Every time you defeat a boss or something like that, you could get points or another currency to by starter abilities.
Please consider my ideas. I love this game, but it still needs some improvement.
Beat it! Started with a card that had both 'heal 2' and 'play: +1 gold on this card', and another healing card. This allowed me to stall out the first boss for arbitrary gold, but it took a long time so I picked 30. This let me buy better versions of the necessary cards over the next two bosses so that I got a card with heal 4, +3 gold on play and a card that gives you gold from a random other card in hand immediately, which I used to get 900+ gold which sadly did not matter since the shop prices cap out at ~23. At that point I transitioned to just selling the base card once for 200ish gold once each round and not worrying about the combo, and then buying every draw card in the shop, and two upgrading max hp up cards (one grants max hp on play, the other on sell. Oddly enough, even though they both upgrade by 3 per sale the on sell gain hp is significantly better since I don't wanna have to wait to get my card back to sell it when I am ready too win). The rounds quickly became a massive slog of drawing till my hand is full, deciding what to discard without effect, and then repeating, never allowing enemies to take any actions, but the probability of drawing a stalled hand and dying to the enemy's massive attack stat slowly approached zero. As long as I have the patience to grind max hp at this point forever, I am unkillable no matter how bad the luck I get is, because there are not enough basic cards in the deck to stall me out for long enough for the enemy to kill me, and there are enough heal-and-draw cards that I will always heal back all the damage I take, if ever I were to take any, before the discard is shuffled into the deck. Of course, I also no longer take damage at all in practice, since the odds of drawing a card with no draw effect each time I draw are so extremely low and I always have a backup draw 4. But the point is, if I were patient enough, I could obtain arbitrarily large current and max hp, and consequently can defeat any enemy the game can generate simply by ensuring I have enough hp presently to account for the worst possible draw odds I could encounter before clearing the previous enemy. In actuality I've only beaten wave 22, but that, in conjunction with a theoretically unbeatable deck, is enough for me.
Hi Xyncht, you are correct and definitely beat it! Congratulations! However, I think there is a "better" or let me say faster / more funny way of beating the game. At your knowledge I find it most fun to get damage / upgrade combo a faster way to one hit higher waves instead of over-healing and slowly chipping his health down.
Anyway, I had to rush the difficulty scaling and didn't have enought time to balance these "exploits". If I would continue on developing the game these are main points for a rework
Thank you for your feedback, hope you had fun playing!
Really realllllly cool game. Love feel of buying cards to sell them every round, and how you can't remove anything makes decisions early on feel meaningful. Difficulty reminds me of luck be a land llord
The late game like 18+ is getting pretty damn repetitive so I'm gonna quit to save myself some time, but I assume I'd keep winning until a boss could 1-2 hit me and I got some bad RNG on draw cards.
I'll be first in line for a paid full version of this if you're planning on that!
Really entertaining game! Reached the 12th boss, but couldn’t manage to kill it :( Here are my suggestions:
Great game and great work!
Gameplay video of your game.
Thanks so much for your feedback! You really started to get the hang of it :)
Very fun game. My best run was 10 kills. I have only two real suggestions:
1) In the shop, give the option to view the cards in your deck
2) Also while in the shop, give the option to pay coins to remove cards from your deck (so that you have better odds of drawing your good cards)
Other than the absence of those 2 ideas, this game is amazing
my Current run, thoughts: Some more stuff to do with money might be nice, maybe... randomly generated relics? It would probably be too hard but I like the idea, could really use a draw synergy relic right now, lol.
Thank you for playing my game. In my initial game design I was tinkering with an idea of procedurally generated passive upgrades but it never made it into the actual game. Definitely something to consider in the future.
Another idea is a possibility to re-roll the shop with excessive Gold although in the current game state it would definitely make overpowered strategies unbeatable.
Pretty pretty nice game ! You did a very good job, it's very entertaining and it's a good idea to make a double use for a card.
However, there is some changes you should make :
- allow more than 5 cards in hand ;
- reduce "coin" size ;
- for the card how say "gain random coin" : precise than is random cards from your hand (and not deck) ;
- explain what is upgrade (I didn't figure it out) ;
- and maybe remove text on card (display it on hover), and on the top of the card will be the "on play" effect, and on the bottom the "on sell" effect displayed thanks to only icons and numbers.
Overall it's an amazing game :) Thank you so much !
Hi Trapez,
Thank you for your extensive proposals. I agree that some effects are not clearly explained with upgrade being the most misunderstood effect in the game.
You are actually allowed to have 6 cards in hand!
By reducing the coin size, what exactly do you mean?
Merging sell / on play effects into one text or numeric icons is definitely something I was looking into but polishing the whole "random card generator" feature was something complex and very time consuming. Definitely the most important part of the game and number 1 priority to improve.
However the game actually have many flaws in game design which could be exploited.
Cheers!
About cards in hand, it's very strange because when I play a card that allow me to draw 4, I didn't go to 8 nor even 6 cards in hand.
By "reducing coin size" I mean : the yellow icon on the top right of each card. Because it kept our attention and it's not (in my opinion) so important.
Another thing, maybe you can add is an "play basic (cards)" button, because on most cases the order of theses cards doesn't matter so much.
And another cool stuff : adding attributes, skills, effects, on enemies (but for later in the development, icons on cards instead of text remains the 1st priority to have a fluid gameplay).
Tank you for listening to me :)
This is fun! I like having randomly generated cards: it means you have to keep making your own evaluations of what’s strong.
The constant possibility to sell good cards to hopefully improve the deck in the long run is interesting, and I’ve not seen that in a deck builder before.
I died often to my own greed: especially for those cards which increase in value when you play them!
I love the small sound effects here and there! The initial zoom-in is a little bit too far away for my taste, but thanks to browsers, doing a ctrl+ once made everything super clear
This sort of reminds me of Ascension (the deck builder game) a tiny bit. Maybe.
Oh, and dragging things is ok, but clicking them should be an option. Specially for trackpad users
Thank you for kind feedback. I'm not sure what you mean by the initial zoom-in, is it the auto fullscreen when you start the game? Since the game is not readable on smaller resolutions, I decided to go this way.
I have not heard of Ascension yet (it's not too widely available in my country) but looks sick, thank you!
I was playtesting on trackpad as well and I'm sort of used to it but it's a great idea to implement a click to play :) Might do it if I decide to udpate the game.
Hey,
After some tries I made it to a kill count of 7, which feels quite nice!
I think a way to thin the deck would be good to have a chance against later opponents.
Love the idea of randomly generated cards in a Dominion style deckbuilder and I feel that there is a lot here to build upon!
Hi krisekrise,
Thank you for you feedback, 7 is definitely a good kill count!
Thinning is something I was thinking about a lot and since there is an option to sell the cards it means you are thinning the deck for current enemy. But being able to permanently remove weak cards might help players to not waste time playing basic cards in higher levels.