Summoner's Apprentice

antisage 2024-04-15 00:47

A post-mortem rant - fair warning.

**Music**: Surprisingly easy to create a disconcerting soundtrack using Beepbox. I made use of the double harmonic minor scale for most of this, occasionally contrasting with parts of major scales to increase the dissonance.

**Sounds**: While I recognise that sound is a large part of game feel, I was struggling to find ways to attach it to this game. Some description of sound generator beyond my own voice and Audacity would be well worth looking into.

**Programming**: I wasted slightly more time than I should have on making the programming as modular as possible. However, this did allow me to construct all the levels within half an hour, so in the absence of another team member waiting on me this was a suitable compromise.

**Art**: I'm a programmer. It's not great, but most of it is passable. I'm mainly annoyed that I was exporting with high compression for some of the sprites - this shows in the blurriness.

**Godot**: Reconciling the pixel art look with crisp text is something that I would like to do, but didn't have time to implement. As someone with very limited experience with game engines, I would recommend that anyone else looking to create a pixel art game look into their preferred options for this before the game (I think in my case, the answer lies with subviewports).

In all, a fun experience. I went in knowing nothing, and came out still knowing nothing, but there was a window in the middle where I was in the flow state with Godot, and that's good enough for me.

caz-creates-games 2024-04-15 07:41

Interesting idea here! I really like the concept of an apprentice magician trying to summon random entities by adding any old items to a ritual.

My initial expectation was that I would get to see visually what I had managed to summon after adding the correct 'ingredient', so I was a little bit let down without that visual feedback.

I like the 'figure it out for yourself' mentality because it gives the player an opportunity to explore the game system.

Suggestions: - allow the player to summon any entity in any order (perhaps giving an option for a cryptic clue when they are stuck) - perhaps reduce the initial number of different ingredients available to choose from (otherwise the gameplay pretty much consisted of clicking one item on a dropdown menu and being told 'wrong answer').

Bug: - when dismissing the 'wrong answer - you have been killed' screen, the hitbox for summoning passes through the text. Therefore, if you click in the middle of the screen to dismiss then you will immediately fail again and 'lose' screen stays up.

Overall: - The music is nice and atmospheric 👍 - The game concept is cool and interesting - Well done ❤️

vidim888 2024-04-15 12:50

As Caz mentioned beginning of game can definitely get some polishing since gameplay consists of choosing options from a drop-down menu and clicking "try that" until it succeeds like it's an exam test with unlimited tries. Also I missed at first that the things I'm summoning are changing, because random 3 letters at the corner didn't convey that info well enough.

I think I missed the message of actual summon as well at first because you just turn on the grinding mode of trying everything in a row without thinking and when something else appears you just continue going without paying attention...

Overall, I think concept of figuring out the rules is a good one, but brute force aspect in the beginning would be better to polish a bit imo.

alfredo-cossetin-neto 2024-04-16 02:05

Maybe i did not get the idea. I was expecting to combine different items and ritual circles. But is cool see someone using godot.

adam-gould 2024-04-18 08:35

Interesting concept - I like a game where you have to do some discovery. My main issue is that, from what I could find, there was no info given back from your attempts other than "it worked" or "it didn't work" - trial and error can only carry you so far. I like the idea though, well done!

ellaris 2024-04-19 23:59

Interesting, but a little confusing rules. I thought they would all apply the same, not that only the first would need to contain the letters.