Do Not Climb The Mountain
Summary
Do Not Climb the Mountain is a deck-based card game with mechanics similar to Slay The Spire. Many games make you climb a mountain - it is the obstacle to overcome. However, in this game you are playing the Mountain itself and controlling its powers to stop climbers from reaching the summit.
Winning & Losing
When five climbers have reached the summit, you lose the game.
When the total number of climbers (displayed in the top right corner) reaches zero, you win the game.
How to play
You can play the cards in your hand as long as you can pay the card's Energy cost. To play a card, drag it from your hand onto a Tile on the mountain.
Energy 
Tile
If you can't play any more cards (or you don't want to) then click the End Turn button in the bottom right corner.
Climbers
It is important for you - The Mountain - to know how these
pesky climbers work in order to get rid of them.
Hitpoints
Climbers die if their hitpoints reach 0.
Endurance
Climbers die if their endurance reaches 0.
They automatically lose 1 Endurance at the end of every turn.
Stamina (Min / Max)
Climbers have Minimum Stamina and Maximum Stamina.
Each turn, they will pick a random value between their
minimum and maximum Stamina and climb up (or down) that many tiles of the mountain.
You can inspect a climber's current stats at any time by hovering over them with your mouse! If the game is too slow for you, then you can also hold right mouse button to speed up climber movement!
Cards
You start the game with a random deck of 10 cards.
At the start of each turn, you draw 5 cards.
At the end of each turn, you discard all cards from your hand.
Whenever a climber dies, you are rewarded with one random card
that is automatically added to your deck.
There are three different types of cards:
Landmark Cards
Landmarks are placed onto a tile and remain there for their stated Duration.
Their effect is triggered at the end of every turn!
Trap Cards
Like Landmarks, Traps are placed onto a tile and they remain there for their Duration. However, their effect is triggered only whenever a climber lands on the tile with the trap. (Passing by does not count)
Spell Cards
Spells provide instant effects. Play them onto a tile with a climber and see immediate results!
Credits
This game was created by our team for the GMTK Game Jam 2023!
All assets are hand-crafted and were created during the 48 hours of the jam.
marri.go.arts
2D Art
Stickman (HombrePalo)
2D Art, Game Design, Writing
BubblegumBurrito
Sound Effects, Game Design
Jarred Ruiz
Music
oHoodie
Programming, Game Design, Team Lead
Sentrigal
Programming
Kai
Voice Acting
Development log
- Post Jam ImprovementsJul 23, 2023
Comments
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I like this game a lot! It's so well balanced - I was successful, but only by inches - a real thrill at the mountain!
Some feedback:
- When a Card finds no target, I wouldn't resolve it, but rather bring it back to the hand. Sometimes it is really not that abvious that a Card needs a target (there was this one expensive card in particular, a wind blow or something? I wasted lots of energy with this one, just because I made the same mistake many times)
- The "+1 Energy" card wasn't intuitive for me. I thought I just have to click it, or drag it out of the stack - it took me several attempts to understand that it has to be dragged to certain places.
- Usually I would recommend speeding up all card animations/transitions at least by 2x. But during the game play, the slow movement created a nice, calming vibe.
- The SoundFX are barely audible
I think that's it for my minor quality-of-life improvements.
All in all you did a fantastic job!
Fun gampleplay
Dang that was hard! Once I found a strategy mostly using flood cards and rock slides though, I managed to beat it. Great job! Plays well, sounds and looks great! Minimum bugs for 48 hrs work. Really overall a fantastic job.
dang this game is hard, have not succeeded in 5 tries. but me trying 5 times must tell you a lot already ^^ quite fun!
I really like the idea!
I think there are a few tweaks that could really push it to the next level.
- Some way of knowing the stats of the Climbers, how can I know the value of -1 hp if I don't know the HP of the climber? Maybe instead of a full display for each, they could have different sprites depending on their status. Healthy, hurt, about to die! Could help prioritize where we use our spells.
- Since the game is so long, maybe have the difficulty scale? Having the early climbers be a bit weaker would really help to not be overwhelmed early.
- Lastly, there is a pretty critical bug. When the stamina's reach negative values, the Climbers start climbing up! Maybe a fix / balance for this would be: a negative stamina value pushes the climber down 1, then their stamina resets to 1/1.
Overall I really like where its going!
Yup, we're aware of all of this. Unfortunately, we just flat out ran out of time for a stat display, we still hadn't quite finished the main game loop and were dealing with a pretty rough bug (which is, evidently, still around in some form, as you've noticed). It looks like we might actually do some polishing of this after all, so we'll see what we can do!