Charming, albeit very short, "card-off" extravaganza | Dancing Duelists
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✨Overview
In Dancing Duelists, you step into the shoes of one of ten charming, cartoonish characters, each radiating a unique silly vibe. The goal is straightforward - win seven battles to claim the title of the ultimate Dance Duelist. However, be wary of accumulating three losses, as that spells your way out of the competition. It's also a roguelike in the truest sense, with every defeat resetting your progress.
The game was made in just three weeks, as part of the developers decision to consider switching to Godot Engine from Unity, in light of recent controversial events surrounding royalty payments with Unity developers.
🕺The Dance-Offs
The battles themselves are not something you control directly; instead, they play out automatically. The 'dance-off' theme is primarily aesthetic, with an energetic and jazzy soundtrack adding to the game's groove. Unfortunately, if you were expecting rhythm game elements, you might be disappointed, there are actually no real dance or rhythm game elements involved. The focus here is squarely on deckbuilding and strategic choices. Overall, the game is decent for an autobattler dance-off created in just three weeks.
🃏 Deckbuilding and Strategy
There is no real tangible gameplay aside from the deckbuilding, but the deck building is a bit limited too and requires an initial winning momentum to add cards to your deck and optimize it. You cannot change your initial deck of three cards, aside from choosing characters, each of which has its own starting set of cards. However, you can't view them outright while on the character selection screen and must choose blindly. You must learn each character's strengths and weaknesses through trial and error, or taking a screenshot of each and viewing them manually.
The cards themselves introduce variety to the gameplay. They come with different effects such as gaining HP, dealing damage, and inflicting status effects like Dizziness. Every other battle presents you with the opportunity to acquire trinkets, which grant unique abilities to further optimize your deck, such as gaining HP every X amount of turns, Playing 1 extra card on the first turn, or dealing damage whenever you get Dizzy.
⏰️Beatable within 10 minutes
When you play long enough, you’ll find that the game is not well balanced due to its reliance on randomness. You can either find yourself snowballing on a winning streak or facing defeat just as quickly. Understandably, for a project completed in just three weeks, I expect not much thought has been put into this game with regarding to balancing it. However, when you're winning, the game is undeniably fun. The game is really short, and you can beat it in just 10 minutes, even in your first playthrough.
⚖️Conclusion
Dancing Duelists is a decent mini-game as Mega Crit’s practice in using the Godot Engine. This deckbuilding autobattler dance-off, despite its brevity, manages to deliver an enjoyable experience with catchy music and silly character designs. While it may not offer an extensive gameplay experience, it's a worthy diversion available for everyone to check out. Dancing Duelists is available for free on itch.io.
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