Shady Cards

For our first Ludum Dare, we've been able to work on the fantastic theme "Combine 2 incompatible genres".
Shady Cards is a subtle combination of fast-paced action platformer and poker, set up in a retro shady environment inspired by The Adventures of Batman and Robin on Megadrive.

We've tried to reproduce a shady atmosphere where you'll play Fidji, a profesional poker player. He'll keep playing poker and will not hesitate to rob gangsters and thugs in order to refill its purse!

Our goal was to make it international so we obviously developed it in English, but we've decided to also add a French version to our build.

When you start, you are directly thrown in the city. You can discover the controls by yourself, or you can read the signs you encounter on your road. To progress through the next level, you have to reach the right edge of the map. Note that in the tutorial, your life regenerates automatically, so you can learn how to play the game in this map.

At the bottom left of the screen you can see your hand as well as the board, which constitutes the poker phase. At the bottom right you have information regarding Fidji such as his health, his current purse content, and any active bonus. 

You can go inside buildings where you see breaches. Be careful though, you may encounter ennemies inside!

You can also slide on the walls by jump from outside the building. If you want to pass the walls, just go by the ground floor. You can also go to the roof and then fall down on balconies.

When you kill ennemies, they drop a random amount of chips which have the standard poker chip values. Grab them before they disappear!

You can bet in order to reveal more cards; when all cards are shown, select cards and validate a combination. Beware the timer though: if you take too much time to bet, you'll get a penalty. A valid combination will provide different bonuses depending on the cards that compose the combination. Each card will give a bonus which will have a strength depending on the card's value. The effects you can get are: spikes increase attack (you can even throw multiple cards at some point!), hearts give life, clubs give money, diamonds give attack speed. 

The strongest combination is not always the best choice. For example, if you can validate a three of a kind or a pair of hearts, you may validate the pair if you need healing. The most suitable combination depends on the situation and on your priorities! You can cumulate bonuses by increasing your winning streak but be careful: your combo will be broken in case of wrong combination or if the timer expires. Note that folding do not break your combo. If you see there's no solution, quickly fold and try another round before your combo expires!

For now, the world is procedurally generated, which means you can play random maps endlessly! This choice was the best bet we could do!