In Umblight, you play as someone travelling through the dark forests, where the only way to defend yourself from the creatures from the dark is to fight with your cards.
As you adventure deeper, the fights get harder, but you'll become stronger as well...
You can combine the stats of any card you collect along your journey to build your own powerful special deck.
Play defensively, or become a glass cannon!
You will get an amulet after every fight, but keep your strength in mind, as you might not want to enter every battle along your journey.
Use your special deck and card skills carefully!
Battles are based around resource mangement, knowing when to push for extra damage and when to play defensively.
Most actions cost shadow coins, which you get more of at the start of your turn. You can use those coins to draw more cards, and to combine ones already in your hand!
A unique experience every time you start a run
Basically infinite amount of card combinations
20+ Unique card skills
15+ Amulets
30+ Explorable rooms
A bunch of cool fights and bosses
A weird, unsettling storyline with potential 4th wall breaks
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45148585/4e02d6b7cc14fa2067b094dfffcc9ab64f6b220f.png\"][/img]
Umblight Gameplay Guide / Rule book
A detailed guide about what cards are, how card battles and combining cards work in Umblight. \nThanks to @DD23_32 in our discord server for helping out with the initial draft!
Players
Both players have a deck of cards they draw from and shadow coins that they spend to do most actions during gameplay. When drawing a card from the deck, that card will be exhausted from the deck, meaning that it will not be added back after it has been played.
Modifications and the death of cards dont influence the players deck after a battle. Once the battle is over, everything is reverted to its original state.
Both players also have a player card, which shows their HP, Max HP values and any additional abilities that they might have.
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45148585/73c4bf9c0c25aa65643468a7313d512de10a22d7.png\"][/img]
Board
The board consists of 3 lanes, where both sides have only one row. Players can only interact with cards on their side of the board.
Turn order
1. Both players get the same amount of shadow coins. This starts at 5 and increases after every 2nd turn by 1.
2. The enemy AI draws cards, places them down etc.
3. The player reacts to the enemy\'s actions.
4. The player ends the turn and the cards fight eachother.
This turn order repeats until one of the players run out of health (shown on their player card).
Cards
At the top left is the polarity of the card. Cards can eithe be shadow cards or ight cards, and they are easily distinguished by the drastic color change. The number in the bottom left is the power of the card (attack and health). When a card takes damage, its power is reduced by the opposing cards power.
The number in the bottom right is the cost of the card, which is the amount of shadow coins needed to play that card from your hand. In the middle, right below the art, are the cards skills, which give a card unique abilities that trigger when certain conditions are met. Beneath that is the tribe of the card, which is used to categorize cards for synergies.
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45148585/dfe620951284268381cc8fade92009bb548490cf.png\"][/img]
Polarity
A card can either be a Light card or a Shadow card, with each having their differences:
[olist]Shadow cards deal overkill damage to the owner of the opposing card. This means that if a 3 power shadow card were to face a card with only 1 power - alongside killing that card - 2 damage would be dealt to the opponent player.,
[/*][/olist][olist]Light cards gain +1 shield when placed down onto an empty tile, or when they are combined with another card. This shield blocks all overkill damage that comes from shadow cards, while also reducing the incoming damage taken by the value of the shield.
[/*][/olist][table equalcells=\"1\" colwidth=\"331,\"][img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45148585/8c786a80bb2f62d52e0bffd8dff04ea862f68d00.gif\"][/img]
[/td]Light cards gaining shield when placed down.
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45148585/5a2c7eb8b63f79c3917c05901ae07c32ac50ca91.gif\"][/img]
[/td]The wild bear on the left dealing 2 overkill damage to the opponent since 5 - 3 power = 2 damage.
On the right, two shielded light cards attack eachother. The enemy card loses its shield but doesn\'t get damaged, while the player\'s card gets destroyed since power 2 is enough to go through its shield + power.
Combining cards,
When placing a card on the board, you may place it on an empty tile or place it on top of an already placed card on your side of the board, which combines the two cards.
Combining cards will sum up their power, cost and their skills.
When combining two cards, its polarity will be defined by the card you just placed on top of the other, so combining a shadow card onto a light card will create a shadow card and vice versa. Combining two cards of the same polarity will not change the polarity.
When a card turns into a shadow card through combining, that cards shield will disappear.
[table equalcells=\"1\" colwidth=\",\"][img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45148585/0a22b26b725a98dd4580f394c01f01527c8f9c3b.gif\"][/img]
Light card gets combined onto a shadow card, the resulting card gains +1 shield and becomes a light card
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45148585/fb2703483de4f38598055e46388a81d06dcb3799.gif\"][/img]
Light card gets combined with another light card, so the card on the bottom gains +1 shield and stays a light card
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45148585/8147f8b72e72d3891734911e891d467280181139.gif\"][/img]
Shadow card gets combined with a light card, which erases the shield completely and changes the polarity to a shadow card
Ending the turn
Upon ending the turn, cards on both sides will clash, with the cards subtracting each others power by their own values. There are three variations here:
[olist]When there are no cards placed in the lane, nothing happens.,
[/*][/olist][olist]When only one side has a card, that card attacks the opponent and deals damage equal to its power. The card perishes after dealing damage.,
[/*][/olist][olist]When both cards are present, the cards attack and subtract power from each other. If one or both cards have less or equal to 0 power after this, the card perishes.,
[/*][/olist]Coin cards
(player exclusive, separate from the main deck)
Coin cards are supporting free of cost cards the player can draw from their piggy bank. These coins are used to buy cards at shops, but during battles you can take one every turn to combine with other cards. They have 1 power and 0 cost, and the player can have both shadow and light variants of it.
The coin skill prevents it from being placed down, it can only combine with other cards. Once combined with a card, it gets permanently removed from your coins. The coin skill does not transfer over to other cards when combined with.
If you draw a coin card, but don\'t end up using it, the card will not be removed from your deck.
These coin cards will be upgradable later in the game through special events or via abilities on the player card.
If you have any questions about the game, please join the discord and ask them there!
Hi there!
Hope you\'re having a great day/night and thanks for checking out the game!
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/45148585/11e4724fb15eb6dbabdf3cb711e4b48c4d036f2d.gif\"][/img]
Hi there!
Update beta 1.4a released recently to my playtesters and now I'm looking for new players! This version isn't good enough for public playtesting yet (although that might be the next version )
1.5 will focus around (finally) building the story of the game and making the room structure more interesting mainly with the addition of sub-areas.
Apply for playtesting here!
https://forms.gle/Um8MVLQVRRV9Bpio7Join the Discord server!
https://discord.com/invite/fBSrYde2qySo what changed?
Firstly, most of the deckbuilding system was reworked.
The main change came from the removal of the shadow deck which used to give a shadow card with a power between 1-2 and a cost of 0-1.
In this new version, you get a 1/0 card at the start of every turn and you can only draw from your special deck afterwards. This does mean you can run out of cards but so can the enemy. If that happens the fight will end in a draw.
The other huge change was done to the cost of cards. Before 1.4, this number represented how many shadow coins it cost to combine two cards. This was relatively confusing to new players and it was very easy to exploit because you could build insane cards for your special deck and just ignore the cost altogether.
To fix this, cost on cards now represents how many shadow coins it takes to place down a card. This is much more common in card games and I can see why. It's a lot easier to balance and a lot harder to exploit. To compensate for this, I added a new room called the "campfire room".
The campfire allows the player to reduce any of their card's cost to 0. It also cuts the card's power in half as a sacrifice. (I tested it without the power reduction and it was insanely overpowered)
Other than this, I also added 3 new amulets, all of which are related to shadow cards. Since you don't have the shadow deck anymore, most of your cards are light cards by default. For this reason I made shadow cards have special abilities in the form of amulets.
Something a lot of people has been asking for is a way to see the "mystery cards" you find throughout your journey. So I finally added that to the game! I did have to increase the screen resolution to make the text readable, but it's there now, and I really like it.
Thanks for reading this, apply for playtesting if you're interested in the game!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3151840/Umblight/
Something that has been bothering me for a while is how boring the deckbuilding felt in Umblight.
It doesn't really have much depth to it and it's quite one-sided.
The problems with the current deckbuilding system:
- The 5 special card limit doesn't feel great and limits strategies.
- Random/shadow cards are hard to understand for new players.
- The best strategies revolve around maxing random card power, then skill chance, then special cards. This system isn't as dynamic as I would like it to be.
- Cost does not matter for special cards at all.
- Random/shadow cards are boring and cannot be upgraded further, going against the "endless scaling" that I'm trying to achieve.
- In the later parts of the game (after ~12 fights) the player receives too many cards that they cannot use, since the cost of their special deck is limited by the highest power card. This was a great way to balance the older versions to avoid one-shots, but it's kind of irrelevant now.
- You can farm an infinite amount of light coins as you can draw an infinite amount of cards.
That's quite a lot of problems, but I have some potential solutions for them.
Change how card cost works
Currently, card cost defines how much shadow coins cost to combine two cards together. From playtesting with other people, I've noticed that this value gets ignored when they first start playing the game.My solution to this is to move the cost from combining cards, to placing cards down. This is how most other card games do it anyway (mana in Hearthstone, blood in Inscryption etc.)
This does a few things for the game:
- Special card cost would actually matter, as placing down a cost 7 card would be really hard.
- Fights would be slowed down (good) and players would need to think more on what they place down.
- The room where you can remove the cost of your card would be actually good (this room doesn't exist yet).
I actually tried this out as it's not that hard to implement with the way I structured the board system. I think it's definitely an improvement, but it brings up a few more issues.
Both drawing, and placing down cards cost shadow coins, which makes it slightly harder to calculate what you can or cannot do, and an old RNG issue returned, where the first turn can have unavoidable damage.
To solve this, I need to update the deckbuilding system as well. (This part is completely theoretical, I haven't tested any of this yet)
New deckbuilding system
The current deckbuilding system is kind of hard to understand and hard to visualize. Random cards are almost completely RNG based, which isn't fun as it can lead to many undeserved deaths, and special cards are limiting.
My idea for this is to merge the two decks together.
The player would start with 10 or so cards that are 1 damage and have 0-1 cost, similar to how Slay the Spire starts with a bunch of attack and defense cards.
Your special cards would be added to the same deck, and you could combine your starting cards at the card totem. This way you can increase the power of your cards infinitely, and every card you obtain could be used.
The cost to draw cards would be removed, instead you would draw an X amount of cards at the start of each turn. (needs testing to figure out what number is the most fun)
I think if I would implement both of these new systems, Umblight would have a lot more depth on the deckbuilding side, which is honestly much needed currently.
Thanks for reading this!
If you haven't already, hit the wishlist button!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3151840/Umblight/
September came and went, and I've been doing a lot of work on Umblight, even with school slowing down progress drastically.
Unfortunately the plans for joining the October Next Fest failed, but this is probably for the better, as I didn't feel like the game would have been ready for a public demo release this early in development.
Ok but what did I work on?
New Steam Page
The biggest thing that you can also see, is the brand new overhauled Steam page!
The previous one was mostly based on slightly updated screenshots from the game jam version, but I've done enough progress on the game to finally be able to change them out to something cooler.
As suggested from feedback by other developers, I tried explaining the gameplay ideas a bit more, and I focused less on the relatively "boring" part of just travelling around the world.
(old gif used in the "travelling" section of the steam page)
Instead, I replaced it with the brand new skill tree, that's going to increase the depth and replayability of the game by a lot.
Speaking of which, I should probably explain what amulets are...
Amulets / Skill tree
You get to choose an amulet after every fight, somewhat inspired by Vampire Survivors.
(Level up screen in Vampire Survivors)
There are amulets for increasing the base damage, card skill chance of your cards from your random deck, increasing your max health, gaining light coins after entering a new room etc.
I'm going to be adding a lot more amulets in the coming weeks, but currently the game has 5 of them, and I can already tell it was a good idea to add these, as each fight feels more rewarding, rather than just getting another random card, or card skill.
Shop
The shop is something I wanted to add in the game jam version of the game, but unfortunately I didn't have enough time back then. No worries, I still added it, and now you can buy some special cards, and card skills (not implemented into the shop yet) for your light coins, giving more use to them then in previous versions.
(image of the shop, and the shopkeeper; the eyes follow your cursor and it looks really funny)
I did a lot more polishing and stuff, but I'm not gonna mention them for no reason.
If you read all of this, thank you, it means a lot to me, and have a good day!
Minimum Setup
- OS: Any Steam-compatible Linux Distro
- Processor: Intel Core i3Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL ES 3.0 compatible GPU
- Storage: 1 GB available space
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