Mana Delve

the-lame-brain 2024-04-14 18:36

I almost quit. I did not understand how mana worked at first, because I was busy exploring and not watching the gauges. After running out of various mana types and restarting a dozen times, I finally understood that the key is to look at the gauges. After that, it is pretty fun! More of a management game than an exploration game, I nonetheless really appreciate that the white crystals are a finite resource that you have to go looking for! Good design!

My suggestion would be to color the gauges. Grey if they are static, green if they are increasing, red if they are draining. That would have made me pay attention to them way earlier and not get as frustrated.

jcmonkey 2024-04-15 14:15

i literly had no idea what i was doing. though it felt nice to dig stuff. i got confused the first couple games i played i got locked out of digging after a few block breaks, then this one game i broke the whole screen with one yellow bulb. so im so confused on what the heck is going on. ld55hmm.png

sigmoiddev 2024-04-15 14:23

The game definitely takes a bit of getting used to. I found it rather frustrating how many times I had to restart because I ran out of something. It felt like everything was just a race against the clock as at least one of my resources always seemed to be going down.

If it was made clearer what I was running out of/what I needed, or if there was a way to remove/pause some of the towers it would be a lot easier, but overall it was alright. I don't __really__ get what it had to do with summoning, but as a resource management game, it was relatively fun - just a rather steep learning curve.

theyflower 2024-04-15 14:27

I didn't see the gaugues mentioned by lamebrain. It would be good if I knew ahead of time if my towers could support the tower I'm about to build. It would have been a lot less frustrating if each tower showed what its costs were. Waiting for the win% to increase at the end was also uninteresting, I didn't have to interact anymore with the game. I think if the game communicated its mechanics better this could be a total banger.

sirjupitron 2024-04-15 15:30

Hi! really cool game with idle vibes, was good trying to understand how all work.

bloodyaugust 2024-04-15 16:47

A nice little idler game! I had to restart once, kept an eagle-eye on my mana count the second time around. I agree with others feedback: an extra indicator of the gain/loss per tick and color-coding the amounts would be great. I didn't understand what the orange tower was for, since there's no amount tracker for orange mana. I built one anyway before winning, not sure if it was necessary. :sweat_smile: Plenty of directions to continue with this concept, but overall, a solid entry. Well done! :tada:

m0zrat 2024-04-15 18:57

Seems good! It was a little too much process while trying to make it through a bunch of games, ngl

pres2300 2024-04-15 19:43

This was cool. I imagine it has some relatively complex logic to figure out how digging should work. I kept getting into situations where I would run out of some type of mana. I'm sure I could figure out a decent strategy if I played it some more. Some audio or visual cues (other than numbers getting smaller) when a certain mana type gets low could help a lot in warning the player they should focus on something. Nice game!

lyamgtt 2024-04-15 21:15

Super clever and interesting! I love how simple the mechanics are but yet really challenging! Loved it :)

camd67 2024-04-15 21:39

I got really confused at first and mined out the whole level only to run out of other mana. It would maybe be helpful to have a little info about what each tower generated? Like I know what a certain tower costs but I didn't know how much it generated so I would guess and place too many / too few and run out of many.

That said this feels like it could be a really fun little puzzler game! The concept of balancing a bunch of different resources is really solid and even though it was a little tough this was a quality entry!

ilari 2024-04-15 22:09

Fun little resource management game! I wasn't sure what the orange tower was for though.

owtuvammo 2024-04-16 01:55

I like it for what it is. Something I would have liked would be the ability to place towers and dig them back up for a cost to change your upkeep and deal with some of the complaints that people have about running out of mana types. You could do something with that and different maps, etc, I feel like.

alanbrook 2024-04-16 15:25

Is there a guide on what causes resources to drain? I understand that purple seems to be drained from all towers - but one time I had two yellows and a red tower and I couldn't get any new red gems. Do yellow towers drain red?

argensis 2024-04-16 15:39

It took a little bit to figure out at first but eventually I got the concept of it being a game of balancing the resource consumption. It wasn't clear to me that e.g. the portal didn't seem to start without purple mana, so placing enough purple to start it immediately drained all my red leaving me at 44% win progress but a game over.

It would be nice to maybe have a delete option, or a number associated with the rate of depletion.

goodwincek 2024-04-16 20:29

Agreed with the other comments on the difficulty to catch your gauges before running out of mana. In my case, I ran out of red mana and was disappointed I could not recover. The UI and interactions in the game are nice and polished. I like the bright colorful graphics. Everything was snappy and responsive, so no issues there. I had fun digging and uncovering the map too!

andreas-decker 2024-04-17 09:26

Okay, this hurt my brain a bit, but it was kind of addictive. I enjoyed it, but definitely haven't mastered it! It's tricky to plan out your mana right at the moment, but it's just super satisfying to play around with. The sound for clicking crystals is very rewarding :D adds to the addictiveness, I think. Well done!

rubikon 2024-04-17 13:19

Interesting concept, it's definitely great base to improve upon.

alex-mulkerrin 2024-04-17 18:46

@the-lame-brain @jcmonkey @sigmoiddev @theyflower @sirjupitron @bloodyaugust @m0zrat @pres2300 @lyamgtt @camd67 @ilari @owtuvammo @alanbrook @argensis @goodwincek @andreas-decker @rubikon

Thank you all for taking the time to play my game and take the effort to give me feedback. I feel a lot better for making it now than I did on submitting it when I was quite unhappy with the quality of it.

I'm impressed that people took the time to complete it when I was worried that it was far too opaque and difficult for anyone other than myself to understand. I completely agree with the feedback that more information needs to be shared with the player about what the different buildings do and the economy.

Originally the economy was going to be for a factory building game but I switched it to mana to better fit the theme. I think this got rid of a lot of intuitiveness eg. purple was electricity, red and green were metal and electronics. If I go back to this concept I'll probably return to the factory framing.

I'm glad people were able to enjoy playing this and am again thankful that you took the time to leave feedback :)

loveapplegames 2024-04-20 17:09

Nice game, very playable. Figuring out what make the mana counters tick is quite entertaining. It wasn't bad retrying a lot because it's a very fast game. I managed to complete it without fully understanding the mana mechanisms. At first I thought each tower gives and takes a certain amount of mana, but apparently there is more to it. Is tower position and adjacency also a factor? If so, it would help to guide the player a bit more in this area.

flightless 2024-04-29 19:29

I was not able to figure out the dependencies between the towers - but I liked the "shadow of war" for the unexplored areas - it added a lot of atmosphere.

zimny11 2024-05-01 13:34

Interesting game! After few tries I managed to win :) Some feedback: the cost of digging should be shown, as well as cost of upkeep of all towers. It is hard to guess which tower player will need without that information. Besides that, nice enrty!