Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD48 → Aquanomicon
By ferricsbo, briibot and Cinsynate
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 840 | 3.55 | 47 | |
| Fun | 1314 | 3.07 | 47 | |
| Innovation | 174 | 3.96 | 47 | |
| Theme | 406 | 4.00 | 47 | |
| Graphics | 235 | 4.29 | 48 | |
| Audio | 747 | 3.40 | 47 | |
| Humor | 302 | 3.56 | 43 | |
| Mood | 826 | 3.56 | 44 |
I really love the art design and the amount of content is very impressive! The concept is fantastic and the writing is great! The game is a little bit hard to understand and there are a few bug when trying to make potions, I think the text is a little bit too hard to read and maybe the spell book cover up the screen a bit. But overall, very awesome game and I think it has so much potential. Great work!!
Wow this was so charming. I love the art style too. My only issue is that I had a hard time figuring some things out.
I really liked this game. It was a pretty different experience and i thank you for it.
I don't understand how to play :( Do you need to do something to collect resources or just wait? I tried 6 times and never got more than one plastic bag.
I totally agree with Finn_Tr's comment. The game is great. Great idea and great artwork. The text is sometimes hard to read in the book though and it took me a while to realise that the recipe slot was selected and I need to click an item in my inventory next. A highlight that a slot in the book is selected would be a big help. Also I didn't make it though all the way yet, but I plan to play it some more later. For now it is just too much reading (and too little coffee yet) for my taste :)
Love the atmosphere and humor here! It was a bold move to make the player try to figure out how to not drown right from the start and i loved that. After that I wasn't able to put any of the ingredients into potions for some reason, which is a shame but I love the music!
The art in this game is wonderful, although I couldn't see it in the WebGL, but it worked in the Windows build. I like the idea and the concept and the setting... but I can't figure out what on screen is what in the book fast enough, and I wasn't able to figure out any recipes past the first one. The text in the book is hard to read.
Very cool idea and art!! I think it's too much text and a drag and drop function for making potions would be nice.
Love the art style! really nice. And the aspect of having to pay attention to the background of what bubbles up. I struggled a bit with assigning the slots initially but then it worked once I got the hang of it. Cool achievement!
I love the art design, so beautifully crafted.
The idea was great, but it was a bit too much text for me and a bit hard to understand what ingredients to look for, but maybe this was intentional. After a few tries I managed to successfully complete some recepies :smiley:.
A very fun game after you understand it, good job.
Really nice art style! However I've tried it 8 times and never got the 3rd bag to continue :( I even deleted other things in the bubbles
The art and concept were great, but the game felt quite difficult. Changing the mouse cursor on something that could be picked up would help, as well as maybe a restart option and having the messages at the bottom persist for longer. Would also prefer dragging the ingredients to the recipe. Still enjoyed it none-the-less.
@finn-tr Thanks for getting back to us! We ended up working right down to the wire, so we didn't have a lot of time for bug fixing and polishing unfortunately, but I agree that the recipe construction could be refined. It's definitely the first thing we'd like to look at after getting it out the door!
@jes-draws Thank you so much for the kind review! To a certain extent, asking the player to take a couple of runs to figure out what they needed to do was an intended design choice, but I think we definitely missed the mark on overall difficulty on first release. We're looking at some possible ways to simplify/streamline it going forward!
@owinmowe Thanks so much!
@iorena You're supposed to be able to pick ingredients up by clicking on them with your cursor- As far as I can tell, it should be working, but we'll be sure to investigate for any potential issues!
@noskro Thank you for commenting! Yeah, I think we worried the game would be too straightforward without strewing the necessary information across multiple pages, but it could do with some playtesting. We'd also love to make the construction of recipes more straightforward as well.
@quite-good I'm glad you liked the concept! The requirements for the recipes are strict on the order you add things in, but I've also gone through and noticed a few are honestly not working as intended, so you may have run into one of those bugs. We're looking into fixing those as soon as possible!
@welby Thank you for taking the time to download it and check it out! I'm not sure at this point why the html wouldn't be working for some people but does for others, but we'll look into it. As for the game, the original design called for the player to fail a few runs while acquainting themselves with their spellbook and the recipes, but I don't think we struck the right balance on how difficult it is to complete.
@leon-regula I totally agree that drag-and-drop would work great! We only had the time to iterate on one mechanic for potion construction, but it's a very desirable alternative.
@heidelbert I'm so glad to hear you were able to get it working after sticking around! Thanks for giving it a shot.
@mololo Hey, you're right that we intended for there to be a bit of trial and error! I think some things, like the pacing of the descent, and the organization of the book could use some tweaking to be a bit more forgiving, but we definitely wanted to capture the feel of someone desperately flipping through a reference manual as though their life depended on it.
@realregi Thanks for trying it out! It's really strange that you were able to pick up other ingredients but not a third bag- I'm not able to replicate it at the moment, but we'll look into possible causes and see if there are any bugs we're missing.
@joe-z I've seen a lot of suggestions for streamlining the way you put ingredients in the book, and I think it's a good idea. There are definitely a couple ways we could make it easier and more intuitive, so I appreciate the feedback!
Where do I click to pick items up? The area around the spellbook is just black for me.
@iorena I'm sorry to hear you're having this issue - there should be a background and many ingredients floating in the water around you to be picked up as you descend. What platform/browser are you accessing it on? We'll do our best to get that sorted out!
I like this game, I like the mixture of magic and sea. It is quite difficult to read everything and play at the same time as english is not my native language. But I'll do it all over again until I finish it !
fun and adorable game!.
Really cool game! I love the artwork and the idea of it. The book seems really well written! I found it difficult to complete recipes; I couldn't figure out how to place fish in the recipe book, it seemed like if I got an ingredient wrong it would just disappear.
I love the style though; the music added some great atmosphere and the visuals are very nice.
@lilifull Thanks for your time playing and your comment! The spellbook is purposefully a little complicated, but we realized we definitely made it a bit rougher than intended - we've added a link to a guide to help out!
@eugenik Thanks for playing!
@noahj Thanks for playing - we're so glad you enjoyed! The recipes are order-sensitive, which may have been the complication you were experiencing - an ingredient will be consumed if it's not right for the slot. After the jam is complete, we'll look into making the recipe system a little more forgiving, as this is a known issue contributing to complication. I've added a note making it a little more clear how the crafting system works on the Aquanomicon page, and we've added a walkthrough to make completion a little easier!
Took me a while to figure out that the bubbles in the water were actually not bubbles they were bags xD
The art is good though - probably just me being dumb
I love how bold the concept is. I can count on 1 hand how many games throw you into a tutorial with time limit, and you had to scramble to read and process what to do. I wouldn't say it's a best practice, but it definitely fit the theme of this game - trying to quickly pop out all these potions under pressure juxtaposed against the whimsical text.
I didn't catch that recipes were order sensitive until I read the comments, that does explain a lot of the difficulty. I did enjoy collecting ingredients and trying different things, but I really only ended up with 3 recipes found by the end of it. I will say that when you DO finish a recipe, it is *very* satisfying since you felt like you discovered it yourself, rather than just follow a list that's given to you.
There is a lot to take in in a short amount of time. You're scrambling to get recipes to work, but at the same time there's interesting text to read, and cool things in the background like the goblin shark. Even though it feels like a lot, it mostly ended up immersing me more into the game. Great job on the concept and making something cool out of it!
Side note: I'm always interested in game design blogs, what kind of topics do you plan to talk about in yours?
Nice game! I like its narrative justification for the theme & mechanic. It'd be great if you could read the instructions before you start drowning, because in my first try I couldn't make the first potion. It would be nice to have sprites of the ingredients in the recipies to quickly spot the things you need too, and I think you shouln't lose an ingredient if it doesn't go in a recipe. I really enjoyed the game, great job!
I love the mood and art of this game -- also creative approach to the spellbook! Echoing what someone else said, the screen is black for me so unfortunately I had a lot of trouble picking up items. I'm using Chrome and playing on WebGL.
@ayced - Thanks for playing! No worries, we've realized there were definitely a few ways to clarify things that would have made approaching this game a bit easier, like icon previews in the recipe book so you knew what you were looking for
@peachtreeoath - Thanks so much for the thoughtful, in-depth comment! We really appreciate getting detailed feedback. Some limitations, such as the order-dependency in the spell book, were less intentional complications and more as a result of time limitations, but I absolutely agree that there should be more leniency to the recipes. We intended to make a difficult puzzle game with the intention of replaying required to reach a 'final' ending (using information you'd learned during the previous playthrough), but we realized pretty shortly after completion that we definitely did overshoot our intentions on the difficulty scale, especially with regards to making it evident what the player's goals are (to the point we decided to develop a walkthrough to help, lmao!) This taken into account, we're very glad to hear that you enjoyed the immersion!
As for a game development blog, we're still in the stages of making more of a devblog about current game development for MaricolouRs, but that's still in the works. As the artist on the team I currently have a blog [here](https://twitter.com/BriiLeaf) that I use to post current art projects, usually with relation to game development.
@iker-diaz - Thanks for playing, and we're glad you enjoyed the experience overall! Things like losing an ingredient when crafting and no pause during tutorial are absolutely things we have in mind with consideration to making the difficulty scaling less intense once the Jam is past.
@emily-pitcher - Thanks for playing! I'm glad to hear you enjoyed the aesthetic and the spellbook - we put a lot of thought into how it was going to be set up, and while it was intended to be a puzzle, we wanted the entries to be fun enough that people enjoyed the time looking through the book! I'm very sorry to hear that you were getting a blackscreen. We haven't been able to figure out what's causing it so far as it works on some chrome browsers, but thank you for giving playing it a shot as is! You may still be able to play it through the exe file or a different browser, but I understand those are definitely less accessible means.
You created such a nice atmosphere for the game and the music was lovely, the graphics were lovely and just everything about it was really lovely! :D
My only issue was that a lot of the game for me was spent just looking for things that I couldn't find, maybe having a list of things to make to start off would make the first part of the game more helpful as a longer tutorial almost!
The idea is really cleaver, racing against the clock to read how to keep from drowning, the first death is almost expected! I think the game could use more 'deaths' right away, so the player has to keep learning how to make more spells/ potions. It really got me pumped to think about this type of game for a roguelike/survive the day genre.
Great job overall, I'm sure this has a high chance of sucking in a lot of players.
A lot to take in at first, but it's a charming and interesting game to take your time with. A little polish to make things more clear and less overwhelming at first (a lot of information is given to you at once), and it can become an amazing and charming potion making game with a very unique twist!
Graphics are really great, love the pixelart and the character design! Also sweet to see another dev making a game with a witch as main character!
Great work!
I really love the idea here, it's unique and a great take on the theme. I think it would have been a little easier to read if you had bolded some of the words. I could also see maybe putting the names of the fish on the same page where you need them, although I could see that being an intentional choice to keep the player flipping back and forth. I was really impressed by how much content there was! I might need to come back to this one and see if I can finally finish it. Great work!
This was a really funny premise and just kind of a cool experience. I really enjoyed reading the lengthy tutorial as I was painfully aware of drowning to death. I really don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this. I also really appreciated the music, having that audio component really helps me stay engaged with a game.
The game is a bit confusing at the beginning but it gets better over time. Maybe it would be cool if the life wasn't sucked aways right at the first start. Maybe some tutorial first would be better. But other than that it was a very solid entry. Cool idea and the graphics are amazing and cute. I love those little fishies <3
Somehow this was a really intense experience. The art is gorgeous! Music stressful but fun. If I can suggest one thing: having text appear over the object when you hover over them would improve the experience (especially for non-native speakers).
Thank you for including a walkthrough that it help me find out this game is really deep and interesting!
Great job on setting the mood for this game!
I really like the art on this one. Although I was quite confused. The sound effects worked out quite nicely although the music seemed to have made my headset act weird. I was pretty lost at first and seems like a pretty complicated game but that being said, you do have a guide
Beautiful visuals and pretty cute music <3
Unfortunatelly it was a bit difficult to understand what i had to do at first.. :sweat_smile: I would suggest make the font a bit bigger bcs the handwritten style is a bit difficult to read. Also, I think a drag n drop mechanic would make the potion making more intuitive instead of using two clicks. Nice job, guys :)
I was a bit confused at first with what to do, then I found that you included a guide! After looking at the guide I realize that at list in the html5 version it does not look like in the guide I am missing all the background pictures so I could not see what I was clicking :( Still I managed to make one potion! Even though there was that issue the graphics are really nice and the music too! Also as a suggestion when uploading the web version to itch.io select the "Fullscreen Button" under the "Frame options". Let me know if you manage to fix the problem with the background, I will like to give it another try!
Very nice, although I had some trouble creating the water breathing potion - I had the plastic bags in my inventory, but could not click them into the book. It _sometimes_ worked, though. Apart from that, a pretty good game.
Amazing art and neat concept! It's really a shame that the game goes by too quickly to fully enjoy it. I kept getting stuck on the jelly recipe. I would put in the 2 jellyfish pieces, they would vanish, and I'd get nothing in return. Maybe I'm wrong on the ingredients, but then the first ingredient wouldn't have stayed to begin with, right?
It's such a charming game, but it's very frustrating in its current form. I would love to see an updated version of the game.
I liked the art and the fact that there were a lot of things to collect. The walkthrough helped alot to understand what to do. I didn't find a key to close/open the book to get a better view of the background and the things to collect. I missed something to track the recipe I've completed (even a simple green mark near the name). Overall a nice and relaxing game, well done.
Yeah, definitely a bit on the hard side lol. There's so much reading, it would be nice if there was a way to pause to read things, though I guess that kinda defeats the purpose of the game. Really nice aesthetics though.