oligue 2024-04-16 18:32
That was super interesting Took me a while to get how it works :)
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Arcane Dungeon
By corbak, astoeth, herryfabien, Krisy and Laurianna
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 466 | 3.67 | 22 | |
| Fun | 440 | 3.60 | 22 | |
| Innovation | 276 | 3.72 | 22 | |
| Theme | 93 | 4.32 | 22 | |
| Graphics | 479 | 3.87 | 22 | |
| Humor | 707 | 2.81 | 21 | |
| Mood | 532 | 3.60 | 21 |
That was super interesting Took me a while to get how it works :)
It wasn't very clear to me what I needed to do to summon the enemies. A bit more clear feedback and instructions would've helped
The game was quite fun, I liked the artwork and the idea of moving around this map of effects. I had to read the description again to understand that you also have to hold down the rune next to the flame after dragging something in.
You've definitely got something cooking here but it's held back by some unfortunate flaws that I'm pretty sure is the main thing you're going to hear about. Something that I think would really have helped is tooltips. The unfortunate fact is that I don't know what these icons mean and if a tiny bit of text that said 'Resistant to fire' appeared when it put my mouse over a tiny icon it would really have helped, especially because alot of the icons ended up really really small on my screen. It should also have said "Monster will now have +X Damage(??)" in a list near the next summon box when you had collected +X of the sword with ball icon. All of that said, I really really liked the concept of moving around the astral plane to determine what you summon. When I really tried, I found myself finding particularly powerful paths that I could call upon when needed to summon a monster, and I remember one particularly good moment when I worked out a path I could use with the pink ball icon to get a 2 hearts icon, a 2 and 4 sword balls icon, and a bow icon in one use of the pink ball item. The unfortunate fact as it stand though is, once you've worked out a good path, it takes forever to click and drag the individual icons, do the fire, over and over, once I've figure out a path and now I just have to execute it... again. I don't really know the solution to that, but overall I liked the vision behind it.
@jahwffrey We indeed bit WAY more than we could chew with a dual system game ^^ (Especially in the UI) A lot of the ground work to have saved up "recipe" have been made but the lack of time to do the proper UI behind it and was therefore not implemented
The graphics for were good. I think you had the basis of for good mechanics such as exploring different blobs you could spawn using incantations. However, I could never figure out how to consistently get better blobs or use the power ups. I just ended up blindly spawning blobs, without understanding how to get better blobs. You have the ideas for the right mechanics, but they need better execution.
I really like your art style. Idea is good and interesting, but as it was mentioned some tutorials in the game would be great!
MAN! I think you're on to something here. I love the take on Potion Craft-style mechanics with having to balance your mana and items to get the best possible summons without exhausting your supplies. And it didn't ever feel like I had infinite resources to just burn.
I've only got a couple minor criticisms:
1. it could've used better feedback to show you what's happening during the battles, I found it hard to tell which units were attacking and whether they were effective. And also some tooltips to clarify some of the icons would've been fantastic.
2. And were the different "character" summons meant to only work if you landed directly on their space? Summoning the different creatures was cool but I always felt like I was able to create a stronger slime instead of really depending on a knight or something.
I may have also ran into a bug with the final boss, he never seemed to wake up and just let me whale on him once all his minions were dead.
All in all this was a really cool idea and you absolutely NAILED the theme. Nice Job!
First, I thought the sound effects were funny and the mood was pretty good. As others have stated, there were a few confusing things (which you probably would have put in the tutorial if you had more time). I was able to figure out most parts as I played, like how I didn't have to move completely, or that I had to place the objects into the cup and not the fire (I had thought it was cuz there was a mana cost). I also couldn't figure out what the summon symbols really did though. I think the summoning map was really creative. It makes the player actually do some work to choose what to summon instead of simply pressing a number key so nice job implementing that! It kinda feels like how changing a summoning circle can totally change what is summoned. Post-LD, other than the tutorial, I think it would be cool to also have different types of summons with special attributes. This might also clear away some confusion with each of the icons, like maybe the bow icon summons a ranged summon that does pierce damage to armor?
Great concept of summoning monsters to collect more parts, and a spatial system that ties in with the summoning theme. There are a lot of different directions this game could go after the jam, pun intended. Someone else already mentioned adding tooltips for understanding the game better, yet for me I think continuing on the map system has a lot of possibilities, even without knowing what each element does.
- Allow rotating at what angle an ingredient points toward before pressing the '+' stone. - Add shortcuts for the arrows that cost mana symbols. - Allow finding or buying better arrows that cost mana, to add to the player's toolbox of choices. - Remember a history in case the player wants to re-cast when they have enough ingredients to exactly copy a previous summoning. - Allow the player to keep 1 monster from the previous battle, like having a familiar. - It would add more persistence between battles, because after making a cool monster it was disappointing to lose all of the hard work, and have no minion barrier between myself and potentially damaging enemies. - That could just be my skill issue though, I think the game gives enough tools to succeed with enough drive to explore and optimize spells. - Allow scrolling around the map to see if I missed anything. Having the map question marks revealed was fun, it made me want to explore and rewarded moving far to the right side of the screen. - A mode where the map's resources are randomly placed could be a fun challenge.
Some of the above suggestions may undermine some players' enjoyment of learning a spell that works every time though, so its mostly post-game-jam ideas. Do you all have any plans on making the Unity code open source?
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.
I think this was a neat concept and I liked navigating through the astral plane to gather skills for your slimes. The main points I feel could be improved are to have little pop-ups or tooltips to show what the skill icons do and then some more lateral movement animations from your slimes and wizard and the enemies to help players more clearly see who is attacking what in each turn. Loved the music and the combat grunts were funny. Great work!
This was, overall, an enjoyable game. As others have said, I wish there were tooltips of some kind to tell me more about what the various bonuses meant, how effective each summon was against the various monsters (and which summons were weak to them), etc. Also, I'm not sure if this is a bug or expected behaviour, but I wasn't able to "collect" different forms (the knight, the dude, etc) unless I validated at that point, and didn't keep going to get other bonuses. I wanted to summon a strong, beefy knight, dammnit!
The artwork was nice, though, and the way that I had to follow paths and work out patterns in order to summon the best creatures was creative and interesting, and trying to discover what was on each question mark really kept me engaged. I was even disappointed when I managed to beat the boss before unlocking everything!
Finally, and this is such a small thing, but: you offered the option to adjust the music and sound effects volumes. Something I've been struggling with when playing jam games is that I found the game's music to be so much quieter than the sound effects, and when I saw you let me control that, I was so excited. I know you opted out of audio ratings, but I had to mention this, because that sort of control made the game so much more enjoyable for me.