Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Alchimia
By deseteral
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 294 | 3.30 | 20 | |
| Fun | 325 | 3.08 | 20 | |
| Innovation | 178 | 3.47 | 20 | |
| Theme | 467 | 2.55 | 20 | |
| Graphics | 81 | 3.97 | 20 | |
| Audio | 234 | 3.16 | 20 | |
| Humor | 198 | 2.77 | 20 | |
| Mood | 84 | 3.72 | 20 |
I love the idea behind this game and the graphics look great. I do think the minigames were too hard, though. The Stardew fishing-style minigame where you have to keep the bar lined up was almost impossible for me. Other than that I really liked it!
I really liked the game, the mini games are very fun. Some better controls would have been nice though.
Super cool idea, the minigames are really great. Nice job!
There's some good variety in this game, and it feels frantic trying to look up the ingredients and mix them properly, although it seemed that even though new orders came in every 10 seconds, I didn't run out of time at the end of the day. It was a bit galling to see how much money I still owed on my loan :)
The monochrome graphics are good, they give the game a certain mood/style while also saving development time!
Great minigame collection, I especially liked the mortar one where you have to spin the mouse, reminded me of the DS Pokémon games ;P
Too bad that the 10 second mechanic is only used to spawn new clients, it would've been nice to have some pressure on the potion brewing!
really good idea, i liked the mini games, and navigating in my potion shop. the art looks very nice. maybe the only issue i found was the lack of balance between (for example the mortar is a super fast task while the rhythm game takes way longer) but apart from that, i've had a good time playing it. but i must confess i stopped before paying back my debt.
(and the names of the potions were super fun)
Really liked the throwback art. Reminded me of my old Atari St. Liked the mini-games. I do think you should include a proper UI for clicking on your spellbook and going to your orders.
For a moment I was worried that the orders will keep coming every ten seconds. I was relieved that there is an end of the day and that the customers were patient enough to wait. Graphics are nice and no complaints regarding the sound. There are quite a few mini games, which is a pretty nice achievement for the short jam time.
- Knife and spell mini games felt too long. - Boiling mini game was usually fine, but if the target jump was about half range you ended up loosing progress. - Grinding minigame was good, tho a bit strange that it was the only place I needed to use my mouse.
- some of the recipes are very long and require the a bunch of the longer mini games, which felt like a big investment compared to the rather small return - my smooth brain was struggling to remember the more involved ones and I had to abort and double check multiple times, since I didn't want to screw up and loos my hard earned components - Finding the right ingredients from the list was hard since I sometimes had leftovers from previous potions. I ended up clearing the entire stock with a botched "jungle juice potion" and only making exactly what I needed for the recipe
For some reason I sometimes get multiple products for one operation, which would have been nice if not for the point I made earlier. I looked at the debugging logs that you do and noticed that they seem to be on purpose. I would love to know what is going on there?
Thank you all for your feedback - I really appreciate it! I also think that the minigames are too difficult and some are too long. The game also lacks general UX polish. This is unfortunately due to lack of time and small amount of playtesting.
@voidsay as for the multiple products from a single minigame - this was done on purpose. The idea was that you as the player would get simpler recipes first and more complicated later. By that time you would build a collection of prepared products and focus more on mixing them and consulting the recipe book. But this was also done clumsy because of the lack of time.
Nice Game!
I'm a sucker for both alchemy/potion mixing games and store management games, and I really enjoyed this one for that reason. The story intro was nice, the mini-games were fun, looking up recipes made me feel like a real apothecary, and the art style was fitting. I'm not sure it entirely fit the theme as the customers appearing every 10 seconds didn't really have an effect on the actual gameplay. They never got tired and left or anything. I'm glad they didn't though. I feel like this game works better as a relaxing, thoughtful game rather than a frantic, mini-game blitz.
However, while this game is very charming, it really needs a UX makeover. At the beginning, I was just pressing all the different arrow keys and was always surprised at what the screen did. I had read to press down to open the recipe book in the tutorial, but I had no idea there was even a cauldron until coming back and looking at the screenshots. The relationship between the shop screen, mini-game screen, cauldron screen, and recipe book screen was just not clear. Even something as small as adding arrows at the sides or maybe transitions would have helped immensely.
Regardless, once I figured out how the UI worked, I really enjoyed the game.
The big thing missing from this game is a good inventory UI, so I know what resources I already have. This kind of thing would be real nice to see when I'm deciding which ingredients to prepare. Checking the brew screen just to see what kind of ingredients I have is kinda frustrating
I don't really see how the 10 second theme affects my life in this game. I just prepare ingredients and prepare potions as fast as I can, especially since you have time to serve everybody after the day ends. The mechanic gives no pressure or essence to the game. It's just there, although it is cool to have a little bit of time to prepare random ingredients at the beginning of the day.
I like the idea of slowly rembering recipes better and having more and more of the game in your working memory. The game currently doesn't incentivize this, especially because customers wait for you. I think coins from orders scale downwards the longer someone has to wait, but it was hard to tell. That said the minimum is clearly 1, and I have infinite time at the end of the day so what stops me from preparing all the ingredients I'll ever need at the end of a day.
I really like the style and graphics of this game. I also have a special fondness for alchemy themes. The minigames are neat but they get boring quick.
Had a lot of fun with this game! It feels like a papa's pizzaria game in the style of Obra Dinn lmao. Some of the minigames were a little challenging, but as other people have said I think that the customers waiting forever at the end of the day does lessen the pressure somewhat.