Not sure how a specific thing works in the game? Check the one-page PDF manual!

You signed up for the biggest martial-arts challenge in history! In a gauntlet beyond example, contestants from all around the world face myriads of artificial monstrosities to find out who can deal with them performing the most stylish and efficient combos. There’s a twist though - you can only move in accordance with the hand of cards you’re holding. Ah, there’s nothing like the beautiful arbitrariness of game rules...

Features:

  • Exceptional replayability: No two playthroughs will be alike thanks to randomly generated arenas, monster spawns and a shuffled deck of movement cards!
  • Simple, but deep: The game is easy to play, but a considerable amount of complexity emerges from the dense interactions between all its elements!
  • Killing in style: Find creative ways to kill enemies by luring them into pits, smashing them into walls or other monsters, shoving them out of bounds or exposing them to the meditative power of your “spirit bomb” special move!
  • Ranked mode: Reach score goals to win matches and move up through the ranks, making the game progressively more difficult. Can you win on rank 24?
  • Endless mode: In case you like going for insane highscores, you totally can!

Fabian Fischer created the game to explore the possibilities of connecting a variety of contextual interactions to a simple core mechanism of card-based movement.

Website: https://ludokultur.de/
Twitter: @Ludokultur

(You can find the PICO-8 cartridge on the Lexaloffle BBS.)

Download

Download NowName your own price

Click download now to get access to the following files:

Martial Cards (Windows) 1 MB
Martial Cards (Linux) 704 kB
Martial Cards (Raspberry Pi) 1 MB
Martial Cards (OSX) 3 MB

Development log

Comments

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

How u export Pico-8 into .exe game?

You just put "export gamename.bin" into the console and it'll export binaries for Windows, Linux und Mac. See: https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/Export

This is very good news because it means that the console is getting "more serious", these games can now even be "sold".

Just give my dollar from russia!

Thank you very much! :)

this game is very cute and fun to play once i understood what I was doing, but initially it is very difficult to understand. The strayers don't look like enemies, and the cracked tiles are very complex. I know just how hard it is to explain a pico-8 game with such limited capacity for text so the PDF was helpful, but possibly some sprite changes and tile modifications would make this game easier to understand? overall very fun though! :)

(+1)

Hey, thank you very much for playing and for the kinds words! :)

I agree the game ended up pretty complex in terms of how dense the mechanics are. Everything is quite tightly connected around a, at heart, simple form of input. Maybe some kind of interactive tutorial would be ideal, but I also hope with the early ranks being pretty easy you can kind of "stumble into" how things work and figure it out (maybe with help of the manual for some specifics).

Also I'm sure there's tons of potential for visual improvements, but unfortunately I'm probably as far from a visual artist as it gets. Any ideas or if you can think of someone willing to cooperate, let me know! :D