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kaliuresis

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Timestamp	Since previous	Game		kaliuresis's comment
Apr 15 18:00:50		Summoning Circle Specialist	♥ 2	This is an interesting idea, I finished the main 10 levels. Sadly the best strategy seemed to be spamming a bunch of lines until the numbers matched, it would have been cool if it actually forced you to make well thought out structured diagrams. After 3 or 4 levels it was a bit repetitive. Something like each demon having a different symmetry group you need to match or some other restrictions like only use circles might be neat.
Apr 16 00:14:24	6h 13m	Summoning Guidebook	♥ 1	I managed to summon pickles! I liked that you can sprint diagonally to move faster, it helped a lot when walking back and forth to the bat cave. I was a bit confused about how to use the knife, I was able to kill things by holding the view diagonally but it seemed like I was missing something to use it properly.
Apr 16 00:57:54	43m 30s	Imp Master	♥ 1	I don't think a darkness level works great for this type of puzzle game, it mostly meant I just had to blindly guess what looks like the intended solution is instead of actually knowing why I want to pull a specific lever. Other than that it was pretty good for a short puzzle game. I found the first two levels gave you more imps than necessary at the end since you can move the imps between levers from across the wall, but maybe that is intentional to make it easier.
Apr 16 01:55:36	57m 42s	Undead Survivor	♥ 4	I love the art style but the lack of color does make it a bit hard to see what's happening when things get chaotic. Overall very good game. Nice work!
Apr 21 21:50:26	139h 54m	Too Many Minions!	♥ 2	This is so much fun for such a simple concept! Everything is very well executed and the levels are all unique and interesting. Great job!
Apr 21 22:32:01	41m 35s	Purrfect Portal	♥ 1	The story seemed a bit convoluted, which I think added to the confusion of what I was supposed to do. Once I figured it out it worked well, although it didn't seem like there was much to do beyond just dragging things onto the portal. The ability to move/delete buildings would have helped make the factory optimization part more engaging, and would let you tune things so that optimization actually matters. This game had a lot going on but I think it could have benefited from being simpler and more focused.
Apr 21 22:47:42	15m 41s	Conjuring Critters	♥ 2	This game is infuriating but I think that's intentional. It could have worked better if it kept track of which line was currently being drawn so you can't cross over except at a vertex. That would also make it easier to implement continuous drawing instead of coloring entire segments when you hit a certain point. It felt weird that later levels get easier because the whole screen is covered with lines.
Apr 21 23:42:29	54m 47s	The Floppy Disk of Forbidden Creatures	♥ 1	Capture.PNG Oh no, what horrific monster have I summoned? I had a lot of fun figuring out how to prompt jailbreak this 😂. It's a pretty simple application of an LLM, but still very fun to play around with.
Apr 24 02:47:51	51h 05m	And Don't Open Your Mouth Again	♥ 1	Neat concept! The fact that it's so easy to try different juries made it a lot of fun to play around with and see how different people interact together. I managed to get 4 of the winning juries on my own but had to look up a hint for the last (the attorney general one, there's a bug(?) where logan and lynne brought her up as a non-sequitur without alice there, which confused me a bit). The decisions don't always seem to correspond perfectly with the discussion and there were a few parts where it seemed a bit unpredictable whether certain conversations would happen or not. Other than that the system was fairly logical and I was able to think through how to assemble a jury with a bit of trial and error. Great job!
Apr 24 03:16:29	28m 38s	Damn! Jury Summons?!	♥ 1	I was able to accidentally win my first time by spamming pander before I realized what you're supposed to do, but with some balance to force you to actually think about the different abilities and jurors it could be interesting.
Apr 24 03:45:05	28m 36s	Sorcerer	♥ 1	This is an interesting challenge. Character movement would feel a lot nicer with jump height being controllable based on how long you hold the button, and if there was a bit more sideways air control. That said it was kind of fun figuring out how to control jump height using coyote frames.
Apr 24 04:26:00	40m 55s	Gander and the Elemental Dungeon	♥ 1	Cool game and great music! I'm not sure exactly how the different combat mechanics were meant to interact, but there are definitely interesting directions you could go with it. The intro was intriguing and had me wanting more.
Apr 24 08:07:01	3h 41m	Throes of the Javelin	♥ 3	So much fun and incredibly polished in every aspect. I'm amazed you can make something this good in 3 days. I would definitely buy a longer version of this game. Amazing job to all of you! I managed to get a 1:56.24 any% on the speed run version, I might come back to try to crack top 9.
Apr 24 22:39:52	14h 32m	Three Realms TD	♥ 0	This was a cool game! I found an exploit where you can place multiple towers on top of each other if you flick your mouse from a valid spot before clicking. It's not really helpful and it blocks future upgrades but it was fun to do. I think the game could lean more into the core mechanic more and force more strategy around the realms. Right now the only difference was the road shape. More enemy variety and different tower types would naturally help with that. You could also have effects that cross between realms somehow, like a unit that can teleport enemies into a different realm. Overall great job for a first jam!
Apr 27 21:35:21	70h 55m	The Cherished Boulder	♥ 1	The core of the game is cute and fun, but the protector ai really needs some work. Even when I made enough of them to start lagging the game they would wander off to fight a distant enemy while ignoring the ones surrounding my base and killing my workers. The micromanagement ui was not good enough to compensate for the bad ai. I think turning off collisions between your units could also help with pathfinding. If not for those major technical issues I think the game would be pretty good, and I did enjoy the beginning part before enemies became a problem.
Apr 27 21:59:54	24m 33s	Summoning Arena	♥ 1	Controlling multiple factions and trying to balance them to destroy each other is a cool concept. There's definitely some interesting things you could do with the idea.
Apr 28 15:11:30	17h 11m	DURO	♥ 4	That was a cool puzzle game! I wish the positioning of the earth and nature wizards mattered more, since the positioning and direction are the only things you control and need to think about. I also think the earth and nature wizards were also a bit too similar, since controlling the walls vs. waiting for the timer never mattered. There are a lot of cool things that could be done if you let the wind wizard push other wizards or redirect the fire and ice wizards' projectiles, especially if you could have multiple wind wizards in some levels. Overall good job!
Apr 28 16:02:30	51m 00s	Super Pal Summoner!	♥ 1	I had to check the comments to make sure I wasn't crazy about the pigs being impossible. Also wish you could pop the bubbles when you click on them. Overall great entry. :)
Apr 28 21:27:14	5h 24m	9 Hours Till Chaos Comes	♥ 0	I loved this game! As others have said the game does not explain its mechanics clearly and the ui is not the most intuitive. Even with the itch page descriptions it took a while before I had any idea what was going on. I would have liked the exact math of combat to have been spelled out (for those wondering it's attacker's attack - defender's defense, with attack being doubled for opposing elements). Showing the math in the damage numbers or a combat log would be even better. Being able to see the propensities of enemies instead of having to memorize them all would also have helped a lot with learning. There's a bug where using propensity items increases the defense number but doesn't actually increase defense, which made things even more confusing (I played on the HTML version). Once I got past the learning phase it was very fun. There are some balance issues like training being way better than any other option, making runs heavily RNG dependent. Until the boss you mainly just need 1 or 2 strong minions to win fights, so summoning more than 5 minions wasn't very helpful. I found studying to be nearly useless, since even if you know the elements of the bosses attacks it's hard to get more than 5 strong units. The reason training is so good is based on the design of how defense works. Facing a team of 5/4 enemies, a 4/3 minion is useless while a 6/5 minion is invincible. This means the outcomes of fights swing rapidly with a small amount of training, and a single strong unit is sufficient to take on a team of 5 since weaker units do minimal to no chip damage. The description of training says that body minions only gain defense and soul minions only gain attack, but that would make spirit minions way stronger than the others, so I think the way it actually works in game is better. Balance is very hard to get right in a jam, so it is understandable that it's not perfect. The boss generally seemed janky/buggy. The timer ticking to 0 is very ominous and great for setting mood so it's sad it stays at 1. Room actions being available but useless during the boss fight was a bit confusing. I had to fight the boss a second time after bringing it down to 0 health. Maybe it was supposed to be a phase 2 but it's health stayed at 0 so it instantly died again. The boss sprite also stays on screen after starting a new run. Overall the mechanics are fun and deep and the music was great. I wrote a lot of nitpicks but that's only because I liked the game and thought a lot about its mechanics. Great job!
Apr 29 00:31:48	3h 04m	Arcane Dungeon	♥ 1	The idea of crafting monsters to fight for you is cool. The crafting ui would greatly benefit from any kind of text or tooltip description of what nodes do. It's unclear what effect a lot of them have, especially since most of the time the player is zoomed out figuring out where to go, and the graphical icons are very small. It was also confusing to tell which ones I had to stop in and which I would get passing through. Even just a name for each node would help, although a full description is much better. I would have preferred having a blank circle with a text label over an icon with no description. The fights also lacked any kind of visual feedback; it was not clear what was dealing damage to what. Even very simple attack and damage taken animations like wiggling their sprite would help a lot. Damage and health numbers would also be great. Another thing that could have been done to improve clarity here is to make all fights one on one. This would have made things much easier to follow and strategize around while keeping the core game mechanic and not increasing your workload. Overall nice concept but it's missing some crucial elements.
Apr 29 08:03:16	7h 31m	Unfamiliar	♥ 1	The summoning mechanics of this are very cool! We had similar ideas for summoning based auto-battlers. It was fun to discover what the different components do. I liked that it lets you customize things to the extent of making creatures that are detrimental to your team. I would have like to be able to separately control the target from the trigger, since that would add a lot of fun options for abilities. Damage buffs persisting between rounds was a bit strange and seemed too strong. It eventually reached the point where both sides just one shot each other, and as far as I could tell there's nothing I could do to prevent that. I found that the infinite loop soft-lock happens fairly often unless you use damage buffing effects, since there are a lot of damage reduction effects. I also had the game crash with this error message, which happens when trying to perform an invalid swap between a small and large item: ```xml ___________________________________________ ############################################################################################ ERROR in action number 1 of Step Event2 for object cSummoningIngredient_Draggable: Unable to find instance for object index 104393 at gml_Object_cSummoningIngredient_Draggable_Step_2 ############################################################################################ gml_Object_cSummoningIngredient_Draggable_Step_2 (line -1) ``` Overall great game. It has a nice magic-tinker and chill vibe that I really liked. Nice work!
May 2 05:17:13	69h 13m	the eye	♥ 1	I was able to barely finish on my second attempt. The first time it took me a few minutes to figure out what I was supposed to do, I thought the circle in the instructions was referring to the summoning circle. Having a bit more visual feedback like particles or a color change when you're inside the focus circle might have helped make that more clear. I actually found the difficulty of focusing to be about right for me. It's difficult enough that I was forced to actually focus to do it and it's almost meditative, especially with the mood set by the sound effects. I'm a (not very good) osu player which maybe helped me a bit with it. The sound design is impressive and I loved the ending. Nice work!
May 3 01:29:35	20h 12m	Cat and Box	♥ 1	It's neat that this is in pico 8, I was expecting it to be a puzzle script game based on the art style. My main complaints are that you don't have an undo button and restarting requires bringing up the menu, but that wasn't a big deal for any of the puzzles. The puzzle mechanic is interesting. While it's not the deepest mechanic I've seen in sokoban games, it's good enough for the length of the game and the level design explores it well. I didn't notice any issues with the order of difficulty that some other commenters mentioned.
May 3 01:57:32	27m 57s	Gerald the Blind Butler	♥ 1	It seems there are two level 7's, and the second level 7 relies on the simultaneous hearing mechanic that isn't explained until level 8. That issue aside I enjoyed the game. I agree with other commenters that you could get more levels out of this mechanic. One interesting interaction that I noticed was being able to ring the bell with a box, although I'm not sure if you could make an interesting level around that.
May 3 05:29:36	3h 32m	Fetch! with Molly	♥ 1	This is a cute golf game. Having some camera control would have been nice, since it was pretty hard to align things in certain spots and at one point Molly was completely behind the rotating wall. A manual reset button would also be good. Very good for your first game.
May 3 08:55:52	3h 26m	Endrun	♥ 1	Nice strategy game. The abilities were cool and there were potential synergies. It took a long time to get to the point where using the fancy abilities is better than just doing basic attacks, but I think that's just a numerical balance problem that's hard to get right in a jam. Resonate was very op, and as soon as I got it I was instantly killing every enemy by leaving a mana on the ground before the start of each level. Resonate also seemed to still apply even when I left all my units behind. I had a soft-lock where an enemy was jumping around forever on the edge of the map. Seems like the game is trying to push it out of an invalid location but never settling down. It initially teleported to the edge when another enemy walked into it. There were a few other bugs like not being able to pick up orbs from enemies that died mid suplex, the ability buttons not blocking movement, and some bugs with the pathfinding/walkable areas on slopes, but those weren't as game breaking. Capture.PNG
May 4 00:33:56	15h 38m	Mobius	♥ 1	Fun movement mechanics. I was able to climb vertical walls with wall jumping and double jump, which felt like it bypassed a lot of the game. I can see why you removed double jump for expert mode on the post-jam update. In the post-jam version I wanted to play on potato mode since I had frame rate issues, but the short draw distance doesn't work well with how large the level is so I had to settle for the lower frame rate.