# Overview

EDEN takes place in a hypothetical future where professional wrestling meets underground cage fighting, but with robots. As a starry eyed young runner, you can’t afford your own frame but a friendly hype woman is happy to lend you some rusty old junk she found for some decent ratings.

The game functions similar to a deck builder, but with mech building mechanics standing in for the card selection. However, your frame is maybe a bit outdated and can’t compete on even grounds with your opponents, so you’ll have to think outside the box a bit.

You can find the original Ludum Dare page here

# Design

The card limitation ended up being an interesting conceit, it replaces the usual “energy” mechanic, but also removes the ability to give cards “cost” beyond their own slot. This in turn means the part itself has the weight, and how it affects your hand and deck is a lot more important than the specific attack you may (or may not) choose.

I went with 3 frames, focusing on different play styles. This was maybe a bit over ambitious, as some play better than others, but I ended up making them bosses you fight as well, so you get to try your upgraded yet flawed setup against the AI that plays their whole hand every turn. I think it went pretty well.

# Visuals

Once again, Kiri knocked it out of the park on the artwork. I say this a lot so it maybe doesn’t come through very well, but his art brings a lot of the personality forward on these games, and without him they wouldn’t shine nearly as much. Treading cards as little cartridges is a lovely visual flair I wouldn’t have come up with on my own, and it’s all executed extremely well.

This also served as a good stress test of Cerastes’s timeline editor, as I had some time to plug in a lot of complex animations for the card activations. These were mostly to Kiri’s spec, and they mostly turned out really well I think. The animations do end up a bit tiring after a while, but there was no time to add a “speed” setting in the jam window.

# Scores

LD scoring is hard to truly gauge, there are a ton of participants, and you’re rated by your peers, so scores fluctuate a lot. I generally don’t dwell too much on how we do, but in this case we scored extremely well so it’s fun to brag now and then ya know?

# Play

The current web build can be found here.